A Black Family Now Owns the Site of America’s Largest Slave Revolt – Capital B

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ST. JOHN THE BAPTIST PARISH, La. — Growing up, Dayna James never thought she’d willingly step foot on a plantation, let alone thank God for one.
On an early Saturday morning last month, she joined about 80 other people to commemorate America’s largest slave revolt at the Woodland plantation in LaPlace, Louisiana, where nearly 500 enslaved men and women fought for freedom in January 1811. On that same land where some of their ancestors had been enslaved, James and other visitors danced, sang, worshiped, and laughed over plates of red beans and rice.
Throughout the years, James, who runs a tourism transportation company, watched the two dozen former plantations in her county turn into major destinations. Owned by corporations or wealthy white families, they brought in people who did not look like her from all over the country and world. A weird feeling came along with it.
“It blew me away,” she said, because all she knew of her county was hatred and the long, dark shadow it cast over her life. “I used to wonder why it was so racist.”
For many, Woodland now offers even more complicated feelings. Today it’s owned by twin Black sisters, Jo and Joy Banner. The sisters, who run the Descendants Project, a community organization focused on supporting formerly enslaved communities across the Gulf Coast, are on a mission.
The sisters, whose family roots trace back to those enslaved on local plantations, are reclaiming that narrative power behind their ancestors’ story. They want to ensure that the courage of those past revolutionaries is used to illuminate not only the horrors of racism but also serve as a guiding force of strength in the face of modern-day challenges. But first it will require community buy-in to turn a place brimming with tears of pain into a space of celebration. For many visitors, it will require them to confront the traumas and shame that has long been associated with American slavery.
“We’re very glad that we can facilitate stewardship of this land,” Joy Banner said, but the sisters also understand that, given the entangled history of plantations, “we don’t need the physical site to uplift the history.”
Yet, for residents like James, who grew up in Louisiana’s plantation row, the new Black ownership fosters a sense of pride and fills in some holes in her history — even if it is difficult.
As a child in Laplace, Louisiana, in the 1970s and ’80s, she remembers the Ku Klux Klan rallies that would stretch down her grandma’s street, and the dogs sicced on her family when they tried to go to the movies. But beneath those same streets lied a strategically kept secret: the revolt that spread from plantation to plantation across the parish.
It wasn’t until she was 40 years old that she discovered that those same roads paraded by the Klan had been the site of the revolt. Now at 53, it all makes sense now, she said, that her home’s history of racism grew in response to a show of Black force.
Last year, the Banners purchased the plantation for $750,000, placing it in Black ownership for the first time in its 230-year history. The January celebration marking the opening of Woodland under the sisters’ ownership was crafted to make sure no one grows up without knowing that history in southern Louisiana again.
In recent years, industrial companies have snapped up much of the land around the plantation, and the sisters were afraid that the site was in “danger of being overtaken” and the history being lost with it. They were compelled to buy the plantation so they “could forever protect not only this place but also the descendant community still surrounding the Woodland plantation,” Banner explained.
For James, “this space is an answer to [her] prayers.”
“I think about the ones who don’t know and our kids who are in the school and don’t even know this exists,” she said. It’s a reality that feels even more stark as the right-wing agenda to bury the country’s history of slavery spreads. There are at least dozens of state laws nationwide governing and restricting the teaching of slavery.
Banner said it feels like those writing history have conveniently sidelined the 1811 revolt to overlook how it was deeply tied to the revolutionary spirit of other enslaved people like Haitians, and even the way slavery scarred the South’s environment.
The insurrection of January 1811 was carried out by house servants and field hands. Some were enslaved in Louisiana for generations, while others had just arrived from Africa and the Caribbean. Forced to work on the sugar and cotton plantations of St. Charles and St. John the Baptist Parishes, they banded together across the fields of dozens of plantations to build an army and fight. They made it through miles of plantations, liberating dozens, before state troops stifled the revolt. In the end, nearly 100 revolters were caught and executed, and their heads were displayed on pikes as a warning to other enslaved people.
In recent years, industrial companies have snapped up much of the land around the plantation, and the sisters were afraid that the site was in “danger of being overtaken” and the history being lost with it. They were compelled to buy the plantation so they “could forever protect not only this place but also the descendant community still surrounding the Woodland plantation,” Banner explained.
For James, “this space is an answer to [her] prayers.”
“I think about the ones who don’t know and our kids who are in the school and don’t even know this exists,” she said. It’s a reality that feels even more stark as the right-wing agenda to bury the country’s history of slavery spreads. There are at least dozens of state laws nationwide governing and restricting the teaching of slavery.
The sisters are in the process of refurbishing the plantation home and turning it into a museum and community space where visitors can learn about the revolt’s history, its connection to present day activism, and a hub for residents to learn how to respond to air pollution threats and prepare for hurricanes.
In addition to the growing erasure of Black history, the Banners are concerned with the ways that climate change continues to destroy Black livelihoods and landmarks across the South. The last major hurricane to hit Louisiana in 2021 destroyed dozens of Black history sites, many of which haven’t been rebuilt.
While the insurrection didn’t transform the nation’s landscape of slavery, it may have ignited a legacy of defiance.
Charles Deslondes, who is largely seen as the leader of revolt, was born in Haiti and trusted by a plantation owner to be an overseer of people enslaved on his land. Writings from the time allege that he was inspired by the Haitian Revolution, which had succeeded less than a decade before. This connection underscores a broader pattern of resistance against oppressive systems, Banner said.
“What Charles and the other revolutionaries strove for that night, in liberation and their freedom, I hope that, in some part, they feel that this is a chapter and another step towards that liberation,” she said. “We know we need to fight to protect our community and our quality of life, especially as it’s impacted by environmental injustice.”
Read More: A New Tool Mapped Out Climate Risks for Every Community Nationwide. Check Yours.
St. John the Baptist is ranked as the county most threatened by climate change and extreme weather, and is home to one of the highest concentrations of cancer diagnoses connected to air pollution.
The slave trade and the rise of plantations across the American South essentially set off a chain reaction — intensive land use through deforestation, soil damage, and overextraction of resources — that eventually evolved into the fossil fuel industry we know today as a major polluter in Black communities.
Nationwide, studies show that Black people are already much more likely to learn Black history from their friends and family compared to the traditional school system. It’s why Timeless, a poet and artist living in New Orleans, thought it was important to bring his teenage daughter, Yaya, down the Mississippi River to St. John the Baptist Parish. The stories shared at the event were a cache of information that is nearly impossible to find elsewhere.
A part of his responsibility to his family, he explained, “is to share with them the best of what I understand and what I know, and it’s much better for your family and children to witness action in the flesh than just to be told things.”
With his daughter consuming an intense barrage of news on social media from places like Palestine and the Democratic Republic of Congo — and a growing number of crises at home — the conversations and lessons learned from the revolt offered a potential path forward, Timeless said, even if it was at times uncomfortable to be celebrating at a site that held so much harm and pain for Black people.
Events like these, he said, offer us an “invaluable resource” because they allow people to “experience a narrative that otherwise is hard to put your hands on, to touch.” When young people see that other people also care and are moved by these issues, “it makes it easier to make meaning of the world and to try to move humanity forward and to make things better.”
Inside the home, the Descendants Project used the commemoration event to preview elements of their upcoming exhibit and allowed people to connect with Black cultural and environmental groups. Attendees learned disturbing history like the story of Marie, a 10-year-old enslaved child who was forced to walk 1,000 miles from Baltimore to New Orleans, after she was sold. But they were also connected with the different groups’ teaching skills around things like community farming and how to prepare one’s roof before a hurricane.
The space offered a place to learn history in a rare way, said Alisha Gaines, an African-American literature professor at Florida State University.
“I can’t name the plantation where my folks were from, right? Or where my ancestors were even buried,” explained Gaines. “There’s still so much power in the fact that we as a greater kin can think about how we are connected through these plantation spaces, how Black America is born from the plantation — I think is really important to understand.”
Gaines made the six-hour drive from Tallahassee, Florida, to Laplace for the celebration and has spent several years researching the history of plantations in the South spurred by her “reverse migration to the South.”
Read More: Moving South, Black Americans Are Weathering Climate Change
“I’ve got colleagues who are like, ‘What are you doing? Why are you spending so much time on plantations?’” Gaines relayed. For her, it offers “a different origin story.”
“There’s an immediate history that I think we ignore with plantations because there is shame around it or a purposeful strategic forgetting, like this revolt,” she said. “But I think if we understood that deeply, it would change things.”
It’s also a privilege and experience that she understands is fleeting. “We could not do this work in Florida [because of the attack on Black history] and that’s a shame. These kinds of spaces and events are a way to think about and preserve Black Studies and education outside of the traditional academy.”
The teachings and connections being made at Woodland from slavery to modern environmental health issues are embodied by all the descendants of formerly enslaved communities in the area, said Dianne “Gumbo Marie” Honoré, whose family can trace its lineage back to slavery in St. Charles Parish.
Gumbo Marie is the Big Queen of the Yellow Pocahontas Hunters Black Masking Indian Tribe that performed at the commemoration. Her suit, standing tall behind the tribe as they celebrated, was flanked with breast cancer ribbons.
The ribbons marked the third type of cancer she’s battled in 38 years. “It is another reason why this space and this place is just so utterly important to me,” she said. “It’s part of a personal journey and a personal fight that you all have taken on on our behalf,” by elevating the history of the area.
The motto for descendants of slavery across the region is “resistance and resilience,” she said, “and we have to constantly live up to that, especially today.”
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Adam Mahoney is the climate and environment reporter at Capital B. Twitter @AdamLMahoney More by Adam Mahoney
Capital B is a Black-led, nonprofit local and national news organization reporting for Black communities across the country.