New exhibit connects chattel slavery to mass incarceration in Louisiana
29th July 2024 · 0 Comments
By Arielle Robinson
Contributing Writer
(Veritenews.org) — An image at the Historic New Orleans Collection depicts four enslaved people standing in chains and cleaning the streets of what is now New Orleans’ Central Business District. One of them, a woman wearing a pink, striped dress, has a collar wrapped around her neck.
Back then, enslaved people like the ones in the image were incarcerated in the “police jail,” which was specifically set up to punish slaves for offenses such as trying to run away. While locked up, they were made to do hard labor, similar to today’s state criminal justice system, where people convicted of felonies are sentenced to serve time “at hard labor.”
The 1821 lithograph is just one of dozens of items on display at “Captive State,” the newest exhibit at the Historic New Orleans Collection (HNOC), which chronicles the connection between chattel slavery and mass incarceration in Louisiana. New Orleans had the largest slave market in the United States before the Civil War, according to Smithsonian Magazine. More than 150 years after the abolition of slavery, Louisiana is a world leader in mass incarceration, and the overwhelming majority of the state’s prisoners are Black.
Eric Seiferth, the curator and historian for the exhibit, wanted to illuminate the state’s relationship to both slavery and imprisonment, which opened on Friday (July 19) and runs through January 19, 2025. He said he hopes it will inspire visitors to reflect on how Louisiana became widely known as the “world’s prison capital.”
One of the goals of the exhibit is “connecting people to the carceral system so that we can all take ownership in it and see it and acknowledge it for what it is rather than trying to close our eyes to it,” Seiferth said.
A racialized slave society
Historical artifacts, photography, quilts and short videos tell the stories of enslaved and incarcerated people in New Orleans and Louisiana on the second and third floors of the HNOC.
One part of the exhibit tells the stories of enslaved people in the state, using historical artifacts, photographs and short documentaries. Another features photography of the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola’s hospice ward photographed by Philadelphia-based artist Lori Waselchuk.
The third floor exhibit is divided into two sections. One side shows Louisiana’s history of slavery and convict leasing, a system where state governments leased prisoners to private companies to do forced labor. The other shows artifacts and documents that trace the roots of mass incarceration to the modern day.
Seiferth said that the exhibit shows how New Orleans in particular has been a national leader in incarceration, whether through enslavement or imprisonment, for hundreds of years.
To understand how Louisiana’s incarceration rates have become so high, you have to look back to its central role during chattel slavery, Seiferth said.
“New Orleans was founded as … a racialized slave society, with laws in place designed to maintain the white supremacy of the society,” Seiferth said.
Seiferth said that New Orleans’ system of prisons, jails and police mostly developed during the early 1800s as a way to control slaves and protect the wealth they created for slave owners.
The Jim Crow constitution
Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, assistant professor of geography and African-American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky, studies on mass incarceration in Louisiana. In an interview, she said that white supremacy was foundational to the colonial governments that ruled Louisiana – French, Spanish and British.
After slavery was abolished, numerous Black politicians were elected to hold office in Louisiana and represent the state in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives during Reconstruction.
Seiferth said that in the years immediately after the Civil War, early civil rights pioneers did a lot of work to make Louisiana more equitable. But state leaders eroded many of those gains over the years. And when Reconstruction ended in 1877, Blackness became criminalized through the passage and enforcement of discriminatory laws, Pelot-Hobbs said.
In the decade and a half after the Civil War, Louisiana passed two different state constitutions, one in 1868 that eliminated the 1865 Black Codes, laws that limited Black people’s right to public assembly, own property and work for non-White people, among other restrictions, and another in 1879 that curbed Black civil rights.
But it was the 1898 state constitution, written explicitly to “establish the supremacy of the white race,” that all but eliminated the rights of citizenship for Black Louisianians. The 1898 Louisiana Constitution is part of the exhibit, on loan from the Louisiana State Archives in Baton Rouge.
“This constitution is commonly referred to as the ‘Jim Crow constitution,’” Seiferth said.
One of the most notorious parts of that document was a provision that allowed for people to be convicted of felonies – and sent to prison for the rest of their lives – by a non-unanimous jury vote. The law made it easier for prosecutors to convict defendants by neutralizing dissenting votes, particularly the votes of Black jurors, who had only recently been allowed to serve on juries. The 1898 constitution allowed for as many as three out of 12 jurors to dissent without affecting the verdict.
A later version of the law – written into the 1974 constitution – adjusted that to two.
Louisiana did not eliminate non-unanimous jury decisions altogether until 2019, following an overwhelming statewide vote in favor of changing the law. In 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that non-unanimous verdicts are unconstitutional.
From slavery to mass incarceration
Pelot-Hobbs said the throughline from slavery to mass incarceration can be roughly broken down into four periods: slavery, Reconstruction, the Jim Crow era (which encompassed convict leasing and the opening of the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola on the site of a former plantation) and the rise of mass incarceration in the 1970s.
During slavery, enslaved Africans were considered the property of their masters and situated mostly outside of the criminal court system.
She said that white politicians’ attempts to take away the freedom of enslaved Africans and their descendants during slavery and the Jim Crow era created the groundwork for the state-sanctioned violence directed at Black Louisianians during the rise of mass incarceration.
Politicians wanted to “create an environment that was fundamentally built up on white supremacy as part of the institutional structure of the state government,” Pelot-Hobbs said.
Then, in the decade after the passage of landmark pieces of federal legislation such as the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, imprisonment rates began to grow dramatically, ushering in the era of mass incarceration. Louisiana’s incarceration rates skyrocketed, far surpassing those of most of the rest of the country.
“It is 1000 percent a crisis. It is a crisis for the people who are locked up. It is a crisis for their loved ones,” Pelot-Hobbs said.
“Part of the kind of legacy of slavery and mass incarceration is family separation. People getting split up and their family units, their communities not having the ability to stay together. That’s really profound. It’s a crisis for the state.”
It never really went away
The final room in the “Captive State” exhibit is reserved for visitors to reflect on how to change the state’s criminal justice system.
“As they leave, we ask them, if they would like to answer the question, ‘If you could change one thing about Louisiana’s carceral system, where would you begin?’” Seiferth said.
Katie Hunter-Lowrey, a violence survivor advocate who was on the advisory board for the exhibit, said now is an especially important time for people to see the exhibit and understand the connection between slavery and incarceration.
“That period of chattel slavery in America was not really that long ago, and it never really went away,” Hunter-Lowrey said. “If incarceration made us safer, Louisiana would be the safest place in the world. So now it feels especially crucial for people to understand what’s happened in the past and what’s happening in the present because a lot of harmful policies are being passed that impact all of us.”
This article originally published in the July 29, 2024 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
