On slavery’s trail: Louisiana’s African-American heritage

The African-American Heritage Trail is a meandering history lesson stretching from Shreveport, La., to New Orleans, said Ron Stodghill in The New York Times. As the trail wends its way through 26 museums, marketplaces, and cemeteries, its “heaping gumbo-style portions” of history are not always easy to digest. “But if you can hang in there,” you will learn that the African-American culture that developed in spite of slavery was even more tenacious than that abominable institution.

New Orleans is the trail’s logical starting point because “one of the oldest, richest strains of African-American culture” finds its roots in the northern fringe of the French Quarter. Tremé is “the nation’s oldest surviving black community.” Many light-skinned people of color lived here, ascending the social ladder through quadroon balls. Its centerpiece, St. Augustine Catholic Church, was among the first Southern churches to be integrated.

St. John the Baptist Parish, northwest of New Orleans, is “an antebellum gem” full of fine furniture and art. Your stop, however, is the dozen “sun-bleached” shacks behind it, where the plantations’ 250 slaves once lived. In Donaldsonville, the River Road African-American Museum features shackles, plantation tools, antebellum maps, and slave-auction records. But not all stops are so bleak. Towering magnolias guard the entrance to Melrose Plantation in Natchitoches, once the home of a woman named Marie-Therese. Also known as Coincoin, she was raised a slave, married a military commander, and bore him 10 children who eventually “became wealthy landowners in their own right.”

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Contact: Louisianatravel.com