Emmy-award winning documentary places spotlight on Fazendeville
18th December 2023 · 0 Comments
By Trinity Johnson
Contributing Writer
For nearly a century, Fazendeville was a thriving African-American community in St. Bernard Parish. That was until the area was expropriated to become part of the U.S. National Park Service and make way for the expansion of the Chalmette National Battlefield to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans.
Most of the residents of Fazendeville relocated to the Lower Ninth Ward, earning less than half the value of their homes and land. What remains is a simple historical marker at the Chalmette National Battlefield entrance reminding visitors that free people of color forged a community there.
This forgotten historical injustice that took place in the 1960s is the subject of a documentary that earned a 2023 Suncoast Emmy on Dec. 3, 2023. “Battlegrounds: The Lost Community of Fazendeville” premiered in October 2022 on WLAE-TV Channel 32, and gives voice to many of the residents still living today with the memory of this community and the tumultuous time of racial tension in the 60s and how this played out in the South.
“From the very beginning, I was clear that I wanted to help tell this story with dignity, and with no glossing over the injustice of how a self-sustaining community was erased,” said Emmy-award winning broadcaster Monica Pierre, who executive produced the documentary along with Ron Yager, Jim Dotson and Woody Keim, a descendent of Fazendeville’s founder and developer.
“The challenge was also how to visually tell the story. So many of the relocated Fazendeville families’ precious photographs and documents were destroyed in Hurricanes Betsy and Katrina. How do you tell a television documentary with limited photographs, mementos, or documents?” Monica Pierre said of the importance of leaving a record of the lives of residents of this community.
The documentary retraces the history of Fazendeville, located in the same land that the Battle of New Orleans was fought on. The community was established in 1867 by Jean Pierre Fazende, a free Black man who had inherited the land from his father, and sold pieces of it to other free people of color and newly emancipated enslaved people following the end of the Civil War.
Also known as “The Village,” the community was small, yet robust; filled with life and traditions from the people of Fazendeville getting baptized in the Mississippi River to picking pecans from the bountiful pecan trees in the area. The area comprised 33 homes, a church, general stores, recreation facilities, meeting halls and bars. In 1963, however, President John F. Kennedy signed an order authorizing the seizure of the area by the park service, which was then bulldozed in 1966.
In addition to historians and park service officials, the one-hour documentary is narrated by those Black residents who were displaced when the government seized their land.
“I always say jokingly, if I ever won the Powerball, I would bring back Fazendeville the way it used to be, but I would be daydreaming,” said Peter Pierre Jr., a military veteran and one of the former residents of Fazendeville.
“It’s something that was there, but you don’t lose any sleep over it now, you know? What happened, happened. And you got to go from there, live your life,” Pierre Jr. said.
That injustice meant that residents were uprooted from their homes for a one-time re-enactment of the Battle of New Orleans. They were given little compensation for the land or sufficient time to relocate their families and livelihood. The land remains unused today.
“The documentary sheds light on a story that was in danger of fading away with each passing decade. In various ways, there are still Fazendevilles that exist today – marginalized communities, squeezed out or threatened with neglect,” Monica Pierre said. “Viewers, policymakers, and communities have a shared responsibility to be the gatekeepers and guardians of these important narratives. We must be intentional about keeping the stories alive and valued,” she said.
“Battlegrounds: The Lost Community of Fazendeville” can be watched online at www.youtube.com/watch?v=L40iFVA3Rqs.
This article originally published in the December 18, 2023 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
