Save Our Souls
In 2018, in an address on her first 100 days as mayor of New Orleans, LaToya Cantrell said she’d appointed “a task force that is targeting the Municipal Auditorium.” The building, in Armstrong Park on land that was once part of Congo Square, had been shuttered since being damaged in Hurricane Katrina and the levee failures 13 years earlier. Cantrell proposed renovating it as a new City Hall, noting with a faint grin that the current, dilapidated one sat on “prime real estate” that could then generate revenue for the City.
Cantrell said the new facility would “reactivate” Congo Square, where enslaved people once gathered on Sundays, practicing sacred traditions of music and dance that proved foundational to the birth of jazz. Her choice of words was telling. Armstrong Park—a faux-European pastiche of lagoons and bridges where eight blocks of a Black neighborhood used to be—may be sleepy, but Congo Square was already active.
A community of Black artists held drum circles there every Sunday, as they had since reviving the tradition in the late 1980s. The Congo Square Preservation Society erected a historical marker on the site, where visitors could connect with the legacy of slavery. Funeral rites for Black culture bearers were held there, sometimes with the body of the deceased. It was the starting and ending point for all manner of parades. These activities, apparently, didn’t register with the mayor.
Neither did her proposal’s implications for Treme, the area around the park, regarded as the oldest Black neighborhood in the country. It’d been nearly all African American when Katrina hit but the mass displacement that followed and the unchecked spread of short-term rentals more recently gutted that community. Adding a $120 million office building would surely price out even more longtime residents.
As Treme and other Black neighborhoods gentrified in the years after the flood, Congo Square went untouched, sustaining contact with a past that, elsewhere, seemed to be slipping away. If it felt like New Orleans was repossessed after Katrina and sold off in lots, the square was still a piece of earth rather than a parcel of real estate. That threatened to change In January, when the City revealed it was moving forward with the mayor’s plan for the auditorium.
Ausettua AmorAmenkum at Congo Square in Armstrong Park. Photo by Avery Leigh White
Ausettua AmorAmenkum, co-founder of the Kumbuka African Drum and Dance Collective and Big Queen of Washitaw Nation Black Masking Indians, heard the news and thought, “Okay, now we draw a line in the sand. You’re coming for our culture now, and we’re not letting that happen.” She and other advocates and organizations banded together in a coalition called Save Our Souls to oppose the project (she’s now its Co-chair, with Glade Bilby).
After the mayor refused to meet with SOS they planned a rally and march complete with brass bands, among the first permitted by the City to take the street since it shut down second lines at the start of the pandemic 15 months earlier. Second lines, descendants of the Sunday gatherings in Congo Square, evolved under Jim Crow, when the City denied Black people access to public space. Second liners reclaimed it by parading; they refused to be dispossessed.
SOS Coalition collaborators Sean Roberts and Sue Press of speaking at Congo Square during June 17th March. Photo by Avery White
The evening before the march, Sue Press, president of the Ole and Nu Style Fellas Social Aid and Pleasure Club, and Sean Martin, president of the Treme Sidewalk Steppers Social Aid and Pleasure Club, put together what they called a “pop-up second line” around the Sixth Ward. Even with COVID, and so many of their old neighbors gone, the best way to promote an event was to talk about it at a second line.
The next day in Congo Square, AmorAmenkum, in a white eyelet dress and a red head wrap, welcomed the crowd with a prayer. “As we come to this sacred place,” she said, “we lift up the energy of the ancestors.” Drummers around her beat a steady pulse, a priestess sang in Yoruba, and AmorAmenkum called names of historical figures who stood for Black liberation in New Orleans, pouring libations from a wooden chalice for each one.
After a succession of speeches from the portico of the boarded-up auditorium, the Jackson Square and Big 6 brass bands struck up, and led everyone through the park gates to Rampart Street. Elders, including some veterans of the Freedom Rides of 1961, rode up front in pedicabs. Behind them people carried banners and waved placards. As the procession gathered momentum up Basin Street, AmorAmenkum stepped out of line to take in the scene. The crowd stretched for blocks, and dancers bucked and dipped like they had in Treme for hundreds of years.
The day after the march Cantrell said for the first time that she was “open to other options” besides converting the auditorium to City Hall. AmorAmenkum recalled, “I had to tell people who were calling and congratulating us as if we had won, ‘Oh no, baby, it’s not over.’” She was right: even though the demonstration helped win support from the city council, and despite the mayor’s statement, the administration is still pursuing the City Hall project.
Meanwhile, SOS has been crafting an alternate vision for Armstrong Park with input from community meetings and surveys. AmorAmenkum says Cantrell’s misdirection “didn’t deter us. We’re still forging straight ahead with our plans.”
The Jackson Square All Star Brass Band marching to City Hall. Photo by Avery Leigh White.
Protesters marching to City Hall on June 17th. Photo by Avery Leigh White.
Linda Lewis left with a portrait of her mother Doretha Roman who was born and raised in Treme. Photo by Avery Leigh White.
Protest outside City Hall. Photo by Avery Leigh White.
