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Preservation Hall Brass Band, by Alan Flattmann (www.alanflattmann.com)
In 1857, in a decree that flouted Louisiana case law that allowed white men to free their enslaved children, paramours and common-law wives, the Louisiana legislature voted that slavery could no longer be reversed. It was one more tightening of the screws by plantation interests against Blacks as the legislature grew more polarized over the slave economy.
In 1858, New Orleans closed an African Methodist Episcopal church after police raids for “unlawful assembly” of enslaved and free Blacks. The city of 116,000, the nation’s largest market in the sale of human beings, had nearly 10,000 free people of color
Fatima Shaik Considers Her Search Through Economie Journals
March 15, 2021
In the 1950s, my father discovered a pile of wet ledgers on the back of a dump truck in our neighborhood. He brought them to our house, dried them on our sunny porch, and put them into the closet. In 1997, I opened and read them. What I found was a treasure trove, one that could contribute significantly to our understanding of Black history and literature.
Approximately 3,000 pages of French handwriting distributed throughout 24 journals described the lives of Black men in their own words. The journals, containing the minutes of meetings from 1836-1935 of the Société d’Economie et d’Assistance Mutuelle in New Orleans, contained the names of soldiers, activists, lovers, and builders of a community that nurtured my family and spoke to America, but were silenced.