Robert W. Kates, geographer, sustainability scientist, beloved husband, father, grandfather and great-grandfather, died in Trenton, ME, April 21, 2018. He was 89 years old.
He was a professor of Geography at Clark University, Director of the Alan Shawn Feinstein World Hunger Program at Brown University, Senior Research Associate at Harvard University, and most recently Presidential Professor of Sustainability Science at the University of Maine.
He was born in Brooklyn, New York on January 31, 1929. Following high school, he studied at NYU. He married Eleanor (Hackman) Kates when he was 19, a marriage that would last 68 years. They moved to Gary, Indiana, where Bob worked in a steel mill for twelve years, and where their three children, Katherine, Jon, and Barbara were born.
Thinking it would be nice to have a job with summers off so he could take his family camping, Bob enrolled in night courses with an eye to becoming a schoolteacher. An instructor who noted his apparent academic aptitude introduced him to University of Chicago geography department chairman Gilbert White, who would become Bob’s life-long friend and academic mentor. Dr. White facilitated Bob’s admission to the University’s post-graduate geography program, despite his lacking an undergraduate degree.
It would be an understatement to say that Bob thrived in this academic environment. Thirteen years following receipt of his PhD in 1962, Kates was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences in recognition of his groundbreaking work in a variety of geography-related fields. He was a recipient in the first annual MacArthur Fellowship in 1981.
Over his multi-faceted career, Bob Kates received multiple awards and honors including the U.S. National Medal of Science in 1991, Honorary Doctorates from Clark University and the University of Maine, the American Geographical Society’s Charles P. Daley medal, the Stanley Brun Award for Creativity from the American Association of Geographers (AAG), and most recently a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Human Dimensions of Global Change section of the AAG.
He served as the president of the AAG, and was proud to be a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.
Bob’s academic career was prolific and spanned several interrelated areas. His earliest work was in natural hazards and human perception of environmental risk. His research took him worldwide, from studying reconstruction efforts following the Alaska earthquake in 1964 to helping create what is now the Institute of Resource Assessment in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. Later his work broadened to how, in his words, “hazards, nature, technology and society interact to generate both vulnerability and resilience.” This led to work in population studies, hunger reduction, natural resource management, climate change, and foundational contributions to the emerging field of sustainability science.
A geographer by training, Bob’s curiosity and creativity were not constrained by traditional academic disciplines. He loved to ask big questions: “Why does hunger persist amid a world of plenty, and what can be done to end it?”; “How has humankind transformed the earth; indeed, can life be sustained?”; “Can there be a transition to sustainability that over the next two generations would meet human needs, while maintaining the essential life support systems of the planet?”
To help answer such questions, Bob enlisted hundreds of people from the world of academics, policy-makers, and international organizations to work on answers and solutions. His ability to combine ideas that at first glance do not seem to belong together was matched by his ability to engage and recruit wide circles of people from diverse fields to work together. His work style was collaborative: He helped author several books and hundreds of papers, many of which were in conjunction with others.
Confronted with the daunting scope of the problems he studied, Bob’s mode was to fuse academic rigor with a commitment to find achievable goals that could, in his words, “in some small way help change the world.” The question he often shared with his family, underlying all the rest, was “How does one do good in the world?” His lifelong concern with social justice and human rights made him unwilling to divorce practice from theory, to dismiss incremental improvements in people’s lives, or to lose hope.
For example, during his time directing the Alan Shawn Feinstein World Hunger Program, Kates helped develop a program not only to define the scope of global hunger, but also to develop an international multi-component plan to address it. The typical “Kates question” that shaped the program was not how to end world hunger. Instead, it was “What could be done to cut world hunger in half, in the following decade?” What concrete measures were possible, what resources were required, what it would cost, who could pay for it, then how to advocate for action? Bob’s prodigious energy, organizing talent, and inveterate optimism made such undertakings possible.
Bob was predeceased by his wife Eleanor in 2016. He leaves his children: Katherine Kates and her husband Dennis Chinoy, Jonathan Kates, Barbara Kates and her husband Sol Goldman. He leaves six grandchildren: Sam Kates-Goldman, Miriam Kates-Goldman, Shanyu Wang Kates, Sara Kates-Chinoy and her husband, Eric Nelson, Jesse Kates-Chinoy and his wife Mariemm Pleitez, Hannah Shepard and her husband Wade Shepard. He also leaves four great grandchildren: Petra Shepard, Rivka Shepard, Jack Nelson and Ezra Nelson.
Bob loved his family dearly as his life’s bedrock, and welcomed each new member, by birth or by marriage, into the family circle. He was gratified to live long enough to see his grandchildren launched on their various life adventures.
His health declined over the last several years. When his energy and capacity waned, he reluctantly relinquished his engagement with long-time friends and colleagues, and took comfort in the love and care of his family. He continued to relish a tasty grilled steak, a good mystery novel, Patriots football games, and the view from his deck overlooking Trenton Narrows. He died suddenly and painlessly the day before Earth Day.
To foster continuing work regarding his quest, “What is, and ought to be, the human use of the earth?”, gifts in Bob’s memory may be made online to the Robert W. Kates Fund for Creative Graduate Studies at umainefoundation.org/memorial to benefit the Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions at the University of Maine. Or donations can be mailed to the University of Maine Foundation, Two Alumni Place, Orono, ME 04469 with a note that it is for the Mitchell Center Robert Kates Fund.
A memorial service will be held sometime this summer.
Every month the AAG compiles a list of newly-published books in geography and related areas. Some are selected for review in the AAG Review of Books.
Publishers are welcome to send new volumes to the Editor-in-Chief (Kent Mathewson, Editor-in-Chief, AAG Review of Books, Department of Geography and Anthropology, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803).
Anyone interested in reviewing these or other titles should also contact the Editor-in-Chief.
PLEASE NOTE: Due to current public health policies which have prompted the closing of most offices, we are unable to access incoming books at this time. We are working on a solution during this transition and will continue our new books processing as soon as we can. In the meantime, please feel free to peruse previous books from our archived lists.
April 2018
After Extinction by Richard Grusin (ed.) (University of Minnesota Press 2018)
The Epochs of Nature by Georges-Louis Leclerc (trans. & eds. Jan Zalasiewicz, Anne-Sophie Milon, and Mateusz Zalasiewicz) (Univeristy of Chicago Press 2018)
Rivers of the Anthropocene by Jason M. Kelly, Philip Scarpino, Helen Berry, James Syvitski, and Michel Meybeck (eds.) (University of California Press 2018)
Every month the AAG compiles a list of newly-published books in geography and related areas. Some are selected for review in the AAG Review of Books.
Publishers are welcome to send new volumes to the Editor-in-Chief (Kent Mathewson, Editor-in-Chief, AAG Review of Books, Department of Geography and Anthropology, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803).
Anyone interested in reviewing these or other titles should also contact the Editor-in-Chief.
PLEASE NOTE: Due to current public health policies which have prompted the closing of most offices, we are unable to access incoming books at this time. We are working on a solution during this transition and will continue our new books processing as soon as we can. In the meantime, please feel free to peruse previous books from our archived lists.
Alfred W. Crosby died peacefully at Nantucket Cottage Hospital among friends and family on March 14, 2018, after residing for two and a half years at Our Island Home. He was 87 and had lived with Parkinson’s Disease for two decades.
Born in Boston in 1931, he graduated from Harvard College in 1952 and served in the U. S. Army 1952—1955. He then earned an M.A.T. from the Harvard School of Education and a Ph.D. in history from Boston University in 1961. His first book, America, Russia, Hemp, and Napoleon, is about relations between Russia and the U.S.A. from the American Revolution through the War of 1812. He taught at Albion College, the Ohio State University, Washington State University, and the University of Texas at Austin, retiring in 1999 as Professor Emeritus of Geography, History, and American Studies. He was the recipient of many awards including three Fulbright Fellowships and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Academy of Finland and was a fellow of the John Carter Brown Library.
He was involved in the Civil Rights movement, taught Black Studies and the history of American jazz, helped to build a medical center for the United Farm Workers’ Union, and took a leadership role in anti-war demonstrations.
His interest in demography and the role of infectious disease in human history led him to write The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492; America’s Forgotten Pandemic (originally Epidemic and Peace 1918); and Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900. His fascination with intellectual and technological history produced The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250-1600; Throwing Fire: Projectile Technology Through History; and Children of the Sun: A History of Humanity’s Unappeasable Appetite for Energy. His books have been published in Chinese, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Slovene, Swedish, and Turkish translations. His work as a historian, he said, turned him from facing the past to facing the future. He lived by the maxim: What can I do today to make tomorrow better?
He was predeceased by his sister Ruth and by Anna Bienemann Crosby and Barbara Stevens Crosby. He is survived by Frances Karttunen, his wife of thirty-five years; his son Kevin and Kevin‘s wife Pamela Mieth; his daughter Carolyn and his grandchildren Allegra and Xander Crosby-Laramie; and by his stepdaughters Jaana Karttunen and Suvi Aika and their families.
There will be a memorial service and celebration of life in May. Donations in his memory can be made to the Friends of Our Island Home, Box 39, Nantucket, MA 02554; Palliative and Supportive Care of Nantucket; or Doctors Without Borders.
Part 2: Rhythms, Blues, and the Infinite Potential of Congo Square
What comes after jazz? How does a city reprise its collective creation of the Americas’ most original and distinctive art form? Part 2 of this essay surveys happenings in New Orleans music since the emergence of jazz around the turn of the twentieth century. For a take on earlier developments, check out Part 1 before working your way back here. Each of these essays, it is important to note, are highly personal accounts, framed and embellished by my own encounters and experiences in the Crescent City and points south. In this second part, I work to demonstrate how New Orleans drew from its fundamental links with the African Diaspora and Atlantic Worlds to influence many of the major shifts in American popular music over the twentieth century. I hope these brief discussions help set the mood for geographers attending the 2018 AAG Annual Meeting held in New Orleans as the city fêtes its tricentennial. These accounts also provide context for many of the musical acts and styles on display at the French Quarter Fest, the city’s gratis outdoor music festival that coincides with the AAG meeting.
Jazz is not an only child. On the contrary, the birth of jazz as a musical and economic form and force was but one flare-up in a long and gradual process of musical innovation and exchange in New Orleans. As myriad musical forms collected under a broad jazz umbrella, those various styles steadily evolved and expanded in a never-ending flow of accumulation and origination. Sustaining its status as a globally eminent cultural hearth, New Orleans continues to avail its strategic situation at the confluence of the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico to churn out innovative and influential music.[i]
As the jazz sound bubbled up from the streets around the turn of the century, the city’s (in)famous red-light district, Storyville, provided steady gigs for the growing class of New Orleans musicians. And it was during the district’s twenty-year existence (1897-1917) that two of the city’s stalwart musical institutions assumed their distinctive styles. Brass bands typically played rowdy gin mills, restaurants, and saloons, while solo piano players worked the parlor houses of the district’s many brothels and cabarets. Beginning with legendary forebears Tony Jackson and Jelly Roll Morton, piano “professors” remain an iconic leitmotif in the city’s musical culture. Moreover, a sampling of the city’s more prominent pianists helps trace a particular evolution of New Orleans’ musical innovations over the twentieth century, from Jelly Roll Morton to Tuts Washington to Fats Domino to Allen Toussaint; and from Professor Longhair to Art Neville to James Booker to Dr. John.[ii]
As jazz became an international phenomenon in the early twentieth century, New Orleans maintained its outsized influence by simultaneously nurturing its jazz scene and fomenting new innovative expressions. Emanating from Congo Square in the centuries prior, the syncopated rhythms that became essential in early jazz remained the city’s backbeat, and toward the mid-twentieth century provided the foundation for New Orleans rhythm and blues, and in turn, rock and roll. The diasporic habanera rhythms underlying jazz, what Jelly Roll called “the Spanish tinge,” along with the derivatives rumba and mambo, went on to become key elements in the forerunning rhythm and blues of Professor Longhair. First showcased in his 1949 debut, “Blues Rhumba,” the Fess’s rollicking two-hand piano style melded many of the musical innovations that had traveled down the river or across the Gulf to New Orleans. An admirer of both Hank Williams and the Cuban “Mambo King” Pérez Prado, Longhair kept time with Afro-Cuban clave polyrhythms on his left hand, while riffing barrelhouse blues from the upland South on his right. The Fess thus integrated and indeed embodied the far-flung musical traditions that coalesced in New Orleans, uniting the call-and-response blues of the Mississippi Delta with the Afro-Caribbean rhythms circulating in the broader Atlantic World.[iii]
Figure 1: Fats Domino’s home and office on Caffin Avenue in the Lower Ninth Ward (Credit: Kent Kanouse, 2009).
Those rhythms and blues later became fundamental in the early development of yet another popular musical form: rock and roll. In retrospect, writers continue to disagree on the exact origins of what became rock music; however, New Orleans looms large in nearly every interpretation. For his part, Elvis Presley famously insisted in 1956 that New Orleans’ ownFats Domino was “the real king of rock and roll” (see Figure 1). Many writers now look back on Domino’s “The Fat Man,” recorded in 1949, along with Roy Brown’s “Good Rocking Tonight” (1947) and Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” (1955), as preeminent contenders for the first unequivocally rock and roll track. Amazingly, each of those records were among the many milestone works recorded and engineered at Cosimo Matassa’slegendary J&M Recording Studio (see Figure 2). Backed by versatile bandleader Dave Bartholomew and drummer Earl Palmer—an early and prolific progenitor of rock and roll’s signature backbeat, the likes of Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Dr. John, Jerry Lee Lewis, Professor Longhair, Irma Thomas, and Allen Toussaint all cut sides with Matassa at J&M. Housed in his father’s appliance store at the corner of Rampart and Dumaine Streets, J&M sat just one block down from the site now commemorating Congo Square. In 2010, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame designated the studio one of just eleven nationwide Historic Rock and Roll Landmarks.[iv]
Before co-founding the influential groups the Meters and the Neville Brothers, Art Neville began his recording career at J&M, laying down “Mardi Gras Mambo” with the Hawketts in 1954. The Carnival classic celebrates New Orleans’ enduring camaraderie with the Caribbean and remains a popular seasonal standard. A decade later Neville helped form The Meters, a powerhouse electric rhythm section that drew on syncopated second line rhythms and call-and-response Mardi Gras Indian chants to become an early architect of the style later known as funk (see Figure 2). The Meters became a sturdy foundation of the mid-century New Orleans sound, serving as the house band for Allen Toussaint’s Sansu label and backing renowned New Orleans soul and R&B artists Lee Dorsey, Irma Thomas, and Dr. John, among many others. As independent recording artists the band released several hits that remain New Orleans classics, including Hey Pocky Way, based on Mardi Gras Indian chants, and Cissy Strut, a gritty funk standard now considered an early milestone in the genre.[v]
Figure 2: The original location of Cosimo Matassa’s J&M Recording Studio at the corner of Rampart and Dumaine Streets in New Orleans (Credit: Jason Riedy, 2012).
The street culture of Mardi Gras Indians came of age with the city’s popular music, from second line to jazz to R&B to funk. Jelly Roll Morton discussed Indian culture with Alan Lomax at the Library of Congress in 1938, even rapping the traditional patois chant “T’ouwais, bas q’ouwais [tu es pas coller or two way pocky way]” on which the Meters based their mid-century hit. Later groups of Mardi Gras Indians combined their oral traditions with syncopated electric funk to create a popular and enduring sub-genre. A group led by big chiefs Bo Dollis and Monk Boudreaux joined bandleader Willie Tee and blues guitarist Snooks Eaglin to record as the Wild Magnolias in 1970 (see Figure 3). Now an acclaimed New Orleans institution, the Wild Mags continue to perform both as a traditional Indian gang and a funk band on the streets and in venues throughout the city.[vi]
Figure 3: Big Chief Monk Boudreaux of the Golden Eagles Mardi Gras Indians leads his gang through Central City near A.L. Davis Park on “Super Sunday.” (Credit: Mike Connor, 2015).
As New Orleans rhythm and blues morphed into rock and roll and later funk, other influential offshoots were materializing in the city, elevating two queens to global eminence. “New Orleans Soul Queen” Irma Thomas recorded many of her early soul classics at J&M, and continues to perform as a leading figure in the genre. Civil Rights activist and iconMahalia Jackson got her start singing in the full gospel congregations of Plymouth Rock and Mount Moriah Baptist Churches in Uptown New Orleans (see Figure 4). From there she went on to inspire millions as the “Queen of Gospel,” combining the soulful Black spirituals of the plantation South with syncopated rhythms she learned to tap out on the wood floors of her New Orleans churches.[viii]
In both the background and the forefront of the rich diversity and complexity of twentieth century New Orleans music, piano players remained iconic. There is perhaps no better single example of the multiplicity and centrality of piano players in the city than the irrepressible Mac Rebennack, known worldwide as Dr. John. A celebrated composer and performer from the 1950s to the present, Dr. John remains distinguished as a standard bearer and keeper of the flame for the storied New Orleans piano professor tradition. As a teenager Dr. John drew early inspiration from Fats Domino, Little Richard, and especially Professor Longhair in the clubs and studios around town. His range as a player, however, transcends R&B to traverse a wide array of styles including rock, jazz, funk, and the haunting voodoo-inspired psychedelia for which he became most distinctive.[ix]
Figure 4: Mt. Moriah Missionary Baptist Church where Mahalia Jackson sang in the choir, 147 Millaudon Street, New Orleans (Google Street View, 2016).
After trouble found him in New Orleans, Mac fled to Los Angeles where the libertine spirit of late-60s California gave him license to experiment with New Orleans music in new and profound ways. There Mac serendipitously came under the wing of New Orleans patriarch Harold Battiste who managed to finagle some free studio time between Sonny and Cher takes in 1967. The duo put together a group of veteran New Orleans musicians to explore a visionary musical concept and stage persona based on nineteenth-century voodoo conjurer and man about town, Dr. John Montaigne (or Jean Montanet). A formerly enslaved native of Senegal, Dr. John the elder regained his freedom in Cuba before rising to prominence as a trusted root doctor in antebellum New Orleans. His 1885 obituary in Harper’s Weekly deemed him “the last of the Voudoos,” that is “the last really important figure of a long line of wizards or witches whose African titles were recognized,” and “the most extraordinary African character that ever obtained celebrity” in New Orleans. Studying the legend of Dr. John, Mac discovered a reference to one Pauline Rebennack, arrested along with Montaigne in the 1840s for her involvement in voodoo and other illicit acts. Realizing a likely familial connection, Mac assumed the stage persona Dr. John the Night Tripper, and with fellow New Orleans musicians in exile cut the classic LP Gris-Gris. That album amounted to a profoundly New Orleanian tribute to the Black Atlantic, melding the syncopated rhythms and bamboula dances of Congo Square with the power and grace of Afro-Caribbean spirituality and the lavish costumes, chants, and performance art of the Mardi Gras Indians. The result was a fantastic if somewhat cryptic masterpiece that conjured a range of New Orleans traditions to stake out the eeriest edges of the psychedelic zeitgeist of the 1960s.[x]
After beginning his career as a guitar player and session musician for J&M, a gunshot to the finger forced Dr. John to switch to the piano. His teacher was the brilliant and irrepressible James Booker, whom Mac later called “the best black, gay, one-eyed junkie piano genius New Orleans has ever produced.” Judging from the testimonies of his peers and scattered live recordingsBooker left behind, it is clear that he was among the most talented and original piano players the city ever gave us, notwithstanding Dr. John’s tongue-in-cheek qualifiers. Booker was an undisputed piano genius who brought classical heft to New Orleans rhythm and blues while sacrificing none of its soul. Booker could play it all: R&B, jazz, rock, classical, soul, gospel—often in a single performance, while making it feel deliberate and cohesive. In a town distinguished by a long and storied history of world-class piano players, Booker may have been its most versatile and proficient. Tormented by addiction and inner turmoil, the tragic genius and epicure died in the waiting room of Charity Hospital in 1983, far before his time.[xi]
Note: Click at your own risk! The links in the following section contain content some may consider not safe for work (NSFW).
Bounce and related forms of New Orleans hip hop arose from roots in the city’s public housing developments, especially the (former) Calliope and Magnolia projects. No Limit brothers Master P, Silkk the Shocker, and C Murder grew up in the former, while Juvenile, Soulja Slim, and “the queen of bounce” Magnolia Shorty, all hail from the latter. Before its demolition and redevelopment in 2014, the Magnolia projects were an important cultural crossroads in the city. Its A.L. Davis Park (formerly known as Shakespeare Park) has served as a historic training ground for second lines and brass bands, and remains an important gathering site for Mardi Gras Indians on Super Sunday. Just across LaSalle Street sits the Dew Drop Inn, a legendary lounge, barbershop, restaurant, hotel, and 24-hour performance venue that hosted a who’s who of soul and R&B acts, including Roy Brown, Dave Bartholomew, Fats Domino, Ray Charles, James Brown, Otis Redding, Little Richard, and so many others in the 1950s and 60s (see Figure 5). The club was a cornerstone of African American society in mid-century New Orleans, serving as a laboratory where late night sonic experiments led to early advances in rhythm and blues and rock and roll.[xiii]
Figure 5: The Dew Drop Inn, at 2836 LaSalle Street, in New Orleans, 1953 (Credit: Ralston Crawford Collection of Jazz Photography, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University.)
In the twenty-first century, as New Orleans continues to innovate new musical forms and styles, the city remains devoted to jazz—its first born. The Preservation Hall Jazz Band and other acts based in traditional jazz sounds continue to pack venues in New Orleans and worldwide. So, too, have the Blues continued to travel down the Mississippi River to New Orleans, at times in the form of legendary artists such as Little Freddie King or turning up in distinctive local interpretations like the mystical Acadiana blues of the late Coco Robicheaux. New Orleans R&B Emperor Ernie K-Doe kept the mid-century sound alive with regular performances (musical and otherwise) in his storied Tremé nightclub, The Mother-in-Law Lounge, until his death in 2001. Shuttered in 2010, the New Orleans institution reopened a year later thanks to the efforts of beloved New Orleans trumpeter and bon vivantKermit Ruffins.
New Orleans royal families such as the Andrews, the Battistes, and the Marsalises continue to rear and train world-class musicians in the jazz and rhythm and blues traditions. Harold Battiste founded the collective A.F.O. (All For One) Records in 1961, the city’s first label owned and operated by African-American musicians. Before his death in 2015, he had educated hundreds of New Orleans musicians in New Orleans as a public school teacher and later on the faculty in the jazz studies program at the University of New Orleans. There he mentored an impressive list of twenty-first-century jazz luminaries, including Wynton and Branford Marsalis, saxophonist Donald Harrison Jr., trumpeters Nicholas Payton and Terence Blanchard, and pianist Jesse McBride. Hailing from the storied Tremé neighborhood, the Andrews familyblurs the boundaries that would otherwise delineate styles of New Orleans music. Cousins James, Glen David, and Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews carry on the traditional sounds of the city from second line to jazz to funk.
In the activist spirit of Mahalia Jackson, Harrison’s nephew Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah “stretches” traditional jazz with hip hop samples and second line rhythms designed to highlight contemporary anti-racist social movements. Local jazz aficionado Irvin Mayfield leads a renowned Latin Jazz group with percussionist Bill Summers. Their Grammy-winning Los Hombres Calientes reaffirms New Orleans’ enduring musical connections to Latin America and the Caribbean. The emerging Tank and the Bangas are among the most exciting groups in New Orleans today. Combing New Orleans jazz, funk, and hip hop with a charismatic slam poetry sensibility, Tank demonstrates, once again, the limitless potential and broad appeal of New Orleans music.
While jazz continues to diversify in infinite directions, brass bands remain essential cultural and economic institutions in the city. Groups such as the Dirty Dozen, the Hot 8, Rebirth, the Soul Rebels, Tremé, and Soul Brass Band perpetually update the tradition with new styles and sounds while maintaining their fundamental connections to the earliest forms of jazz. On any given day in New Orleans, countless brass bands second line through the city’s streets, animating onlookers with a “big noise” that recalls Buddy Bolden at the turn of the twentieth century.
Figure 6: Big Freedia performs at the Congo Square Stage during the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, 2017 (Credit: William Widmer, Billboard)
In the twelve or so decades following the birth of jazz, a delightful multiplicity of styles and sounds emerged in New Orleans. Despite the ever-expanding diversity and complexity of the city’s music, each of its magnificent innovations emerges from roots in the bedrock of syncopated rhythms and call-and-response lyrical forms given life at Congo Square. Fortunately for us, the essence of Congo Square beats on in two important commemorative spaces: its somber historic landmark in Louis Armstrong Park and as a dedicated stage at the annual New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival (see Figure 6). On that stage, when Donald Harrison, Jr., masks in Indian regalia to lead his swinging jazz band over syncopated rhythms, and when Big Freedia directs her twerk team with call-and-response lyrics, they all stir a heaping pot of gumbo that first felt the flame in Place Congo, at the back of town, in New Orleans.
To prepare for your trip to the Crescent City, keep the Guardians of the Groove, New Orleans community radio WWOZ streaming in the background at all times. Take an open online course on New Orleans music from Dr. Matt Sakakeeny, Assistant Professor of Music at Tulane University. Listen to an archive of Mardi Gras Indian performances from 1985 and a more recent writeup hosted by Smithsonian Folkways Magazine. Watch a YouTube playlist of recordings of Mardi Gras Indians compiled by the Alan Lomax archive and a mishmash YouTube playlist curated by the author. Once again, I cannot recommend enough A Closer Walk, an interactive website, map, and series of guided tours of the geographies of New Orleans music, sponsored by WWOZ and others. In the city, visit the Louisiana Music Factory to purchase hard-to-find vinyl, CDs, films, etc. Check out the WWOZ Live Wire page for the most comprehensive listings for live music in the city, and then go find some.
[i] Grace Lichtenstein and Laura Dankner, Musical Gumbo: The Music of New Orleans (New York: W.W. Norton, 1993); Jason Berry, Jonathan Foose, and Tad Jones. Up from the Cradle of Jazz: New Orleans Music Since World War II, revised ed. (Lafayette: University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press, 2009).
[ii] Al Rose, Storyville, New Orleans: Being an Authentic, Illustrated Account of the Notorious Red-Light District (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1974); Lichtenstein and Dankner, Musical Gumbo. See also Part 1 of this essay for more on Storyville and the emergence of Jazz.
[iii] Quotes in Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton, Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings by Alan Lomax, Music CD (Cambridge, MA: Rounder Records, 2005): Disc 6, Tracks 8 and 9. Lichtenstein and Dankner, Musical Gumbo; Robert Palmer, “Folk, Popular, Jazz, and Classical Elements in New Orleans,” in Folk Music and Modern Sound, ed. William Ferris and Mary L. Hart (Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), 194-201.
[iv] John Broven, Rhythm and Blues in New Orleans (Gretna, LA: Pelican, 1988); Rick Coleman, Blue Monday: Fats Domino and the Lost Dawn of Rock “n” Roll (Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2006: p. 246); Jim Cogan and William Clark, Temples of Sound: Inside the Great Recording Studios (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2003)
[v] John Storm Roberts, The Latin Tínge: The Impact of Latin American Music on the United States (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); Alexander Stewart, “New Orleans, James Brown and the Rhythmic Transformation of American Popular Music,” Popular Music 19, no. 3 (2000): 293-318; Ned Sublette, The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2008). Ned Sublette, Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2004).
[vi] Alan Lomax. Mister Jelly Roll (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1950); Berry et al. Up from the Cradle of Jazz.
[vii] Lomax. Mister Jelly Roll; Berry et al. Up from the Cradle of Jazz; David Ritz, Charles Neville, Aaron Neville, and Cyril Neville. The Brothers: An Autobiography (New York: Da Capo Press, 2001).
[viii] Berry et al. Up from the Cradle of Jazz; Jules Victor Schwerin. Got to Tell It: Mahalia Jackson, Queen of Gospel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
[ix] Dr. John (Mac Rebennack) with Jack Rummel. Under a Hoodoo Moon: The Life of the Night Tripper (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1995).
[x] Quotes in Lafcadio Hearn. “The Last of the Voodoos,” Harper’s Weekly 29 (Nov. 7, 1885): 726–27, reprinted in S. Frederick Starr, ed. Inventing New Orleans: Writings of Lafcadio Hearn (Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, 2001): 77-82; Dr. John, Under a Hoodoo Moon.
[xi] Quote aired in Lily Keber, Bayou Maharajah: The Tragic Genius of James Booker (Film: Mairzy Doats Productions, 2016), available on Netflix. Trailer available on Vimeo.
[xii] Matt Miller, Bounce: Rap Music and Local Identity in New Orleans (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012); Afropop Worldwide, “Shake It Fo Ya Hood: Bounce, New Orleans Hip-Hop,” (podcast, 2017).
[xiii] Berry et al. Up from the Cradle of Jazz; Coleman, Blue Monday. An illuminative and disturbing documentary (NSFW) of C Murder and the Calliope projects is available here. Super Sunday is a gathering of Indians typically held on the Sunday nearest St. Joseph’s Day. The Calliope and Magnolia are two of the four public housing developments that city and federal authorities demolished and redeveloped following Katrina.
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New Books for Geographers
New Books: February 2018
Every month the AAG compiles a list of newly-published books in geography and related areas. Some are selected for review in the AAG Review of Books.
Publishers are welcome to send new volumes to the Editor-in-Chief (Kent Mathewson, Editor-in-Chief, AAG Review of Books, Department of Geography and Anthropology, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803).
Anyone interested in reviewing these or other titles should also contact the Editor-in-Chief.
PLEASE NOTE: Due to current public health policies which have prompted the closing of most offices, we are unable to access incoming books at this time. We are working on a solution during this transition and will continue our new books processing as soon as we can. In the meantime, please feel free to peruse previous books from our archived lists.
Atlas of the 2016 Elections by Robert H. Watrel, Ryan Weichelt, Fiona M. Davidson, John Heppen, Erin H. Fouberg, J. Clark Archer, Richard L. Morrill, Fred M. Shelley, and Kenneth C. Martis (eds.) (Rowman and Littlefield 2017)
Every month the AAG compiles a list of newly-published books in geography and related fields. Some are selected for review in the AAG Review of Books. Anyone interested in reviewing these or other titles should contact the Editor-in-Chief, Kent Mathewson (kentm [at] lsu [dot] edu). Listed below are the books received from publishers in the last month.
Louisiana’s Turn to Mass Incarceration: The Building of a Carceral State
Louisiana’s prison and jail incarceration rates from 1978 to 2015 showing the number of people incarcerated in state prisons and local jails per 100,000 people; https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/jailsovertime.html#methodology
The history of the Louisiana penal system is marked through crisis. For the majority of the 20th century such crises revolved around the state’s singular prison, the Louisiana State Penitentiary, commonly referred to as Angola. Having long been known as the “bloodiest prison in the nation,” the prison entered into an unmatched crisis of legitimacy in the 1970s. Conditions were wretched and stabbings and escapes were monthly affairs.[1] Within this climate, scores of incarcerated people filed lawsuits against the penitentiary. In 1975, U.S. Magistrate Frank Polozola found in favor of four Black prisoners at Angola, Arthur Mitchell Jr., Hayes Williams, Lee E. Stevenson, and Lazarus D. Joseph, who had filed a lawsuit against Angola in 1971 for numerous constitutional issues including medical neglect, unsafe facilities, religious discrimination, racial segregation, and overcrowding. Polozola declared the penitentiary to be in a state of “extreme public emergency.”[2] Massive changes were ordered in the name of restoring incarcerated people’s constitutional rights.[3] For the next several years, the Louisiana penal system, including parish jails, were under the jurisdiction of federal court orders.
Map of Louisiana State Penitentiary-Angola, Creative Commons
While many issues were brought to the forefront through this legal ruling, overcrowding became the central issue for the Department of Corrections (DOC) and the broader state. The federal courts ordered that Angola’s prison population be reduced from over 4,000 prisoners to 2,641 prisoners within a few months time.[4] In response, the DOC advocated for the “decentralization” of Angola through creating small rehabilitation focused prisons and the potential for shuttering Angola altogether. With time at a premium, the DOC scrambled to find and convert a wide range of surplus state property from schools, to hospitals, to even a decommissioned navy ship into new prisons.[5] Recent infusions of federal funds in the form of Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) grants and the exponential increase in state revenues do to the global jump in oil prices following the 1973 OPEC price hike meant that funding such conversions was of little concern to the state. However, the DOC had extreme difficulty in attaining the support of local residents who routinely protested new prison plans.[6] Mobilized via fears of “dangerous criminals” that they believed would not only make their communities unsafe but would also lower their property taxes, communities from Caddo Parish to Bossier City to New Orleans East were successful in keeping out new satellite prisons.[7] At the same time, parish jails throughout Louisiana entered into their own state of emergency as they were forced to accommodate the hundreds of prisoners prohibited from being transferred to Angola inciting anger in local sheriffs statewide.[8] In response to these challenges, DOC Secretary Elayn Hunt and Angola Warden C. Paul Phelps, who had long been concerned with the rise of “lifers” at Angola, joined the call led by Angola’s incarcerated activists for a different solution to the overcrowding crisis: the early release of prisoners.[9]
Harry Connick Campaign Ad 1973, The Times-Picayune
However, the New Orleans D.A. Harry Connick was adamantly against such proposals. At the time, Connick was in the process of building his career upon the racialized tough on crime politics sweeping the nation. He routinely attacked DOC officials in the press for advocating early release and alternatives to incarceration.[10] In fact, in the same months the federal court orders were coming down, he successfully pushed for more punitive policies and practices through working with the NOPD to attain LEAA grants to expand policing powers.[11] In addition, he personally drafted dozens of draconian crime bills that instituted mandatory sentencing and reduced good time and parole eligibility, which the increasingly law and order state legislature was more than happy to pass.[12] With arrest rates going up,[13] sentencing becoming harsher and the number of people being paroled steadily dropping, overcrowding pressure intensified across the state.[14] Thus, Louisiana was confronted with a range of different pushes and pulls, from federal court rulings, to parish level politics, to active disagreement among state and city officials, to global political economic realignments and new federal monies, as state leaders attempted to figure out the future direction of the penal system.
By the decade’s end, it was clear that Louisiana’s politicians were attempting to build their way out of the overcrowding crisis. Three new prisons had been built with more on the way and thousands of new beds were added to Angola more than doubling the state’s prison population from 3,550 people in 1975 to 8,661 people in 1980.[15] This unprecedented carceral state building project was emboldened and buttressed by the 1980 election of David Treen to governor who had explicitly campaigned on a tough on crime platform and by Polozola, now a federal judge, who began to mandate that Louisiana deal with its continual overcrowding crisis through expanding the prison system.[16] Yet, as incarcerated activists with The Angolite and the Lifers Association as well as free world prison reformers argued at the time, growing the state’s carceral apparatus did not solve the crisis but propelled further overcrowding.[17] The ongoing overcrowding at the prisons further increased pressure on dozens of parish jails as they were yet again, relied on to house thousands of state prisoners, leading to overflowing jails from New Orleans to Lafayette.[18] In the case of New Orleans, the situation became so dire that in the summer of 1983 then Sheriff Foti erected a tent jail in the face of overcrowding at the city jail, Orleans Parish Prison (OPP).[19]
Editorial cartoon; Sept. 24, 1989, from the Times-Picayune
While sheriffs everywhere were frustrated by this situation, their response to such overcrowding was markedly different in the early 1980s than it had been in the mid-1970s. When parish jails had filled to capacity in response to the 1975 court orders, sheriffs lobbied to get state prisoners out of their jails.[20] But only a few years later, while sheriffs collectively petitioned the state to get so-called “violent offenders” out of their jails they also pushed for funds to renovate and expand the parish jails to make space for both folks awaiting trial as well as state prisoners.[21] We can understand this shift from a number of vantage points. While in 1975 the overcrowding crisis appeared to be temporary, by the early 1980s there was no sign of incarceration rates letting up as Governor Treen and the state legislature continued to press for the passage punitive crime bills. In addition, when parish officials had been compelled to release people to stay within the population limits set by Judge Polozola, the media attacked them for letting “criminals” loose into the streets.[22] With both politicians and the media employing such fear-mongering tactics, political will was on the side of jail expansion versus early release or alternatives to incarceration as a solution to the overcrowding. In fact, Governor Treen’s decision to prioritize jail construction over education, healthcare, and levees in the state budget was “not out of a desire to make life easier for these convicts but to make sure that no judge feels compelled to release somebody back into society who should not be there just because prisons are overcrowded.”[23] And indeed, as the Louisiana Coalition on Jails and Prisons would highlight in their decarceration campaigns throughout the 1980s, the atrocious conditions within jails persisted alongside their shiny new renovations.[24]
Sheriffs’ desires to build up their parish jails aligned not only with the dominant law and order politics of racial neoliberal governance, but also with the economic conditions confronted by the state. When sheriffs were first required to take in state prisoners in 1975 it was a financial burden since the DOC was paying sheriff departments a per diem rate of only $4.50/day per prisoner.[25] But as the overcrowding crisis wore on, local parish officials, including sheriffs, successfully petitioned the state to increase the per diem to $18.25 by 1980.[26] The higher per diem rate made sheriffs much more amenable to housing state prisoners as they were able to use the funds to build out their departments’ carceral infrastructure. Sheriffs throughout the state leveraged such jail growth to expand their political power both within their own parishes and through the Louisiana Sheriffs’ Association.
What’s more is this per diem system met the financial needs of the broader state as well. Since the Jim Crow regime, the state had been loathe to finance the penal system.[27] To meet mandates of the federal courts, the state was required to increase funding to the Department of Corrections on an unmatched scale. The DOC budget during this time shot up from $20 million in 1974 to $135 million by 1982 with tens of millions of dollars spent on new prison construction which, as previously mentioned, was easily funded for the first several years through unexpected oil revenues.[28] Yet as oil dependent economies are notoriously precarious, Louisiana entered into a fiscal crisis in the early 1980s in response to the global oil slump.[29] With the state’s fiscal crisis and accompanied economic recession deepening throughout the 1980s, state officials sought new solutions for maintaining carceral growth. While state officials turned to debt-financing for new carceral construction, the state’s inability to cover prison operating costs with such debt schemes put the state in a conundrum. Although prisoners and decarceration activists offered the solution of the state curtailing law and order politics and instituting mass parole as other states had in similar situations, Louisiana turned to upping its reliance on the parish jail system as a more politically and financially viable option. [30] As the per diem rate was much lower than the costs of keeping prisoners incarcerated in state prisons, the state forged ahead with creating multi-decade cooperation endeavor agreements between the Department of Corrections and a slew of primarily rural parishes to house the lion’s share of state prisoners. What had started out as a temporary spatial fix had become the long-term geographic solution to prison overcrowding.
By the time Louisiana gained the title of having the highest incarceration rate in the nation in the late 1990s, almost half of the state’s prisoners were behind bars in parish jails with New Orleans’ OPP at 7,000 plus beds, the largest carceral facility in the state.[31] Although when the jail was first enlarged to this mammoth size, its jail population had stabilized to around 5,000. Yet only five years later, the jail was at capacity. Three thousand of those locked away were state prisoners while a combination of people awaiting trial who could not afford to pay exorbitant bail bonds, individuals serving municipal offenses, a growing number of juveniles, and INS immigrant prisoners held through federal contracts filled the remaining 4,000 beds. Many of those held behind OPP’s walls at Tulane and Broad avenues were targets of intensified policing crackdowns during the 1990s. Although officially most crime was in decline during the 1990s in New Orleans, the escalation of fear-based, racially-coded news media made controlling the city’s supposed lawlessness a priority for city leaders who were concerned about the negative impacts of such reporting on the tourist economy.[32] Under the administration of Mayor Marc Morial and his Police Superintendent Richard Pennington, the NOPD implemented a form of “community policing” to saturate the city’s housing projects, the French Quarter, and Downtown Development District with law enforcement.[33] This spatial strategy for law enforcement illuminated the interlaced primacy of “sanitizing” the city’s tourist epicenters of the homeless, youth, queer and trans people, and sex workers as well as containing and controlling Black working class spaces. Such policing tactics served to fill OPP to the brim by the time Hurricane Katrina made landfall in the Crescent City on August 29, 2005 and prisoners were abandoned by the state to flooded cells.[34]
In the dozen years since the levee breaks, attention has finally begun to be given to the crisis of mass incarceration in Louisiana. The sustained community organizing of the Orleans Parish Prison Reform Coalition (OPPRC) successfully campaigned for OPP to be rebuilt on the much smaller scale of 1438 beds in 2010 while the creation of the Independent Police Monitor’s Office and the Department of Justice’s implementation of a consent decree on the NOPD has tempered police misconduct.[35] This past summer organizations such as VOTE (Voice of the Experienced) were successful in getting the state legislature to pass ban the box legislation and raising the age that juveniles can be tried as adults.[36]
French Quarter Security Task Force vehicle; photo by Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, 2017
However, these local gains have never been final victories. Public defenders in Louisiana continue to be woefully underfunded. The current New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu has been pushing a law and order surveillance plan for the city while the New Orleans city council is bending towards the will of Sheriff Marlin Gusman that the city needs to raise the jail cap for a “Phase Three” of construction at OPP.[37] Several front-runners in the upcoming mayoral and city council elections are following old tough on crime scripts in making expanding the NOPD the number one piece of their political platform. The current Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry recently sent his own rogue band of state troopers to police New Orleans and has been working with AG Jeff Sessions to repeal the consent decree governing the NOPD.[38] AAG attendees are likely to catch a glimpse of the French Quarter Management District’s private security vehicles that work in alliance with the NOPD and state troopers. Their explicit mandate from the French Quarter business leaders is to crack down on perceived sex workers, transgender individuals, street musicians, and others they deem “undesirable” to the imperatives of racial capital.
While the future of the Louisiana carceral state remains uncertain, it is clear that understanding the multiscalar factors that have produced the current crisis of mass incarceration is a critical starting point to undoing this systematic violence and striving towards the still unrealized project of abolition democracy.
[1] “State Prison Inmate Slain in Stabbing,” State Times (Baton Rouge, LA), July 18, 1974, 9-A.
[2] Williams v. McKeithan C.A 71-98 (M.D.La, 1975), US Magistrate Special Report; Gibbs Adams, “Federal Court Orders State Prison Changes,” The Advocate (Baton Rouge, LA), April 29, 1975. Judge West backed up Polozola in ordering sweeping changes. However, it is worth noting that Polozola had nothing to say about one of the plaintiffs main complaints: solitary confinement. “4 Inmates Ask Changes in Pen Safety Reform Plan,” State Times (Baton Rouge, LA), May 6, 1975.
[3] Williams v. McKeithan C.A 71-98 (M.D.La, 1975), Judgement and Order.
[4]Louisiana Prison System Study, 29, Governor’s Office Long Range Prison Study Files, 1972-1980, Box 1, Louisiana State Archives.
[5] C.M. Hargroder, “7 Prison Sites Proposed,” The Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), September 16, 1975; “World War II Troopship May Be Used As Floating Louisiana Prison,” Monroe Morning World (Monroe, LA), October 26, 1975.
[6]“Executive Budget 1974-1975, Vol. 1,” Box 1: Executive Budget 1975-1980, State Budget Reports 1970-1989, Louisiana State Archives (LSA); “State of Louisiana Budget Fiscal Year 1974-1975,” Box 3, State Budget Reports 1970-1989, LSA; “State of Louisiana Budget Fiscal Year 1975-1976,” Box 3, State Budget Reports 1970-1989, LSA.
[7] Bonnie Davis, “Residents Will Protest Use of Carver School as Prison,” Shreveport Times (Shreveport, LA), July 24, 1975; Lynn Stewart, “State May Seize Site in Caddo for Prison,” Shreveport Times (Shreveport, LA), August 19, 1975; “Bossier Prison Site Reported Ruled Out,” Morning Advocate (Baton Rouge, LA), March 19, 1976; Richard Boyd, “Council Vows to Fight East N.O. Prison Facility” States Item (New Orleans, LA), April 23, 1976; Patricia Gorman, “Homes Closed to Inmates” States Item (New Orleans, LA), April 30, 1976.
[8] Roy Reed, “Louisiana’s Jails Are Being Packed,” New York Times (New York, New York), September 18, 1975; Pierre V. DeGruy, “ ‘State of Emergency’ at Parish Jail—Foti, “The Times Picayune (New Orleans, LA), October 16, 1975.
[9] “Two Year Time Limit Termed Impossible for Angola Changes,” State Times (Baton Rouge, LA), June 17, 1975; Tommy Mason, “Lifer’s,” The Angolite, August 1975, 23; John McCormick, “Legal Action: Our Goodtime Law May Be Changed,” The Angolite, September 1975, 1-2.
[10] Associated Press, “Inmate Release Policy Blasted,” Morning Advocate (Baton Rouge, LA), June 9, 197; Ed Anderson, “Connick Attacks Parole Board Plan,” The Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), October 28, 1975.
[11] “ ‘Career Criminal’ Bureau for N.O.” The Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), March 19, 1975.
[12] Jack Wardlaw, “Connick Wins Anti-‘Good Time’ Battle in House,” State Item (Baton Rouge, LA), July 2, 1975; 12-a; Pierre V. DeGruy, “Connick Endeavors in Legislature Pay Off: Entire Package is Passed” The Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), July 31, 1975.
[13] “Jail Overload Credited to Police Work,” The Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), April 17, 1980.
[14] “Criminals Face Harsher Penalties as New Law Takes Effect,” State Item (Baton Rouge, LA), September 17, 1975.
[15]Louisiana Prison System Study, 4, Governor’s Office Long Range Prison Study Files, 1972-1980, Box 1, LSA; Louisiana Commission on Law Enforcement, “The Data: Prison Crowding in Louisiana, 1988,” Folder 9: Prison Reform Reports, Remarks, Statements 1987-1988, Box 3, Rev. James Stovall Papers, Louisiana State University.
[16] Treen: ‘Going to Be Touch to Get a Pardon From Me’ “ Alexandria Town Talk (Alexandria, LA), March 9, 1980; Gibbs Adams, “State Prisons Must Expand,” Morning Advocate (Baton Rouge, LA), May 19, 1983.
[17] “Remarks by Jack D. Foster, Project Director Law and Justice Section, The Council of Staet Governments Before The Governor’s Pardon, Parole, and Rehabilitation Commission,” May 9, 1977, Folder 2: Governors Pardon, Parole, and Rehabilitation Commission Remarks and Reports, Box 3, Rev. James Stovall Papers, Louisiana State University; “The Crowded Cage,” The Angolite, November/December 1983, 35-60.
[18] “Orleans Prison Above Inmate Ceiling for 3 Months,” State Times (Baton Rouge, LA), May 17, 1983; Nanette Russell, “District Attorney Angry State Prisoners in Jails,” Lafayette Advertiser (Lafayette, LA), June 28, 1983.
[19] “Foti Gets OK to Put Inmates in Tents,” The Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), June 14, 1983.
[20] Pierre V. Degruy, “Packed Prison Feared,” The Times Picayune (New Orleans, LA), September 12, 1975.
[21] Memo from Carey J. Roussel to Donald G. Bollinger, March 17, 1981, Folder 1: Public Safety 1981, Box 815: P 1981, David Treen Papers, Louisiana Research Collection, Tulane University; “Sheriff Layrisson Angry Over Jail Fund Postponement,” Vindicator (Hammond, LA), May 25, 1983.
[22] Monte Williams, “Crowded Jails Let Criminals Free,” Daily Iberian (New Iberia, LA), June 12, 1983.
[23] “Comments on Governor David C. Treen’s Criminal Justice Package for Possible Use by President Reagan in his September 28 Speech to the International Association of Chiefs of Police,” Folder 4: Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice 1981, Box 796: L 1981, David Treen Papers, Tulane University.
[24] Louisiana Coalition on Jails & Prisons, “Jail Project Update” pamphlet, 1981, Folder: Louisiana Coalition, Box 2, Southern Coalition on Jails and Prisons Records, 1974-1980, The Southern Historical Collection, Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Louisiana Coalition on Jails & Prisons, “Louisiana Jails” pamphlet, n.d., Folder: Louisiana Coalition, Box 2, Southern Coalition on Jails and Prisons Records, 1974-1980, The Southern Historical Collection, Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
[25] “Legislative Digest,” The Angolite, September/October 1978, 9.
[26] Memo from C. Paul Phelps to William A. Nungesser, October 3, 1980, Folder 8: Corrections 1980, Box 666: C 1980, David Treen Papers, Tulane University.
[27] Mark T. Carleton, Politics and Punishment; the History of the Louisiana State Penal System (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971).
[28] “Executive Budget 1974-1975, Vol. 1,” 9, Box 1, State Budget Reports 1970-1989, Louisiana State Archives; “Louisiana State Budget 1982-1983,” 39, Box 4, State Budget Reports 1970-1989, Louisiana State Archives;
[29] “Executive Budget Program 1982-1983 Vol 1,” A11, Box 2: Executive Budgets 1980-1985, Louisiana State Archives. For more on the precarity of oil economies at this time see Petter Nore and Terisa Turner, Oil and Class Struggle (London: Zed Press, 1980).
[30] “The Moment of Truth” The Angolite, May/June 1982, 12.
[31] Southern Legislative Conference, Louisiana Legislative Fiscal Office, Adult Corrections Systems 1998, by Christopher A. Keaton, (Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1999), 7-8.
[32] Chris Adams, “Tragedy Marks a Night of Crime,” The Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), August 5, 1990; Walt Philbin, “Shooting Sets Murder Record,” The Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), October 23, 1990; Michael Perlstein, “Beyond the Bullet – Murder in New Orleans,” The Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), July 1, 1993; Sheila Grissett, “Murder Rate in N.O. Exceeds One a Day,” The Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), July 17, 1993; Sheila Stroup, “When Will It All End?” The Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), July 26, 1994. International Association of Police Chiefs, The New Orleans Police Department Revisited, June 29, 1993, 2-8, Marc H. Morial Papers. Box 33, Folder 1: Morial Transition The New Orleans Police Department, Revisited 1993, Amistad Research Center.
[33]Building New Orleans Together: City of New Orleans 1997 Annual Report, 1997, 7, Box 43, Folder 7: Mayoral City of New Orleans Annual Reports, Marc H. Morial Papers 1994-2002, Amistad Research Center.
[36] This is not to be confused with the widely lauded bipartisan package of prison reform bills that passed the Louisiana legislature last summer, which has served to primarily tinker with the penal system rather than make meaningful reforms. “Louisiana’s Parole Reform Law Continues a Positive Trend in Criminal Justice Reform,” Voice of the Experienced, accessed September 26, 2017, https://www.vote-nola.org/archive/louisianas-parole-reform-law-continues-a-positive-trend-in-criminal-justice-reform.
Élisée Reclus in Louisiana (1853-1855): Encounters with Racism and Slavery
In January 1853, the future anarchist geographer Élisée Reclus (1830-1905) arrived in Louisiana, where he spent almost three years. Reclus was in self-exile, having left France in the wake of Louis-Napoléon’s 1851 coup d’état. Élisée and his older brother Élie, future anarchist anthropologist, had organized local opposition to the coup, but left ahead of the authorities for sanctuary in England and Ireland. After various jobs, Élisée decided to see the New World, and booked passage on a ship bound for New Orleans. Antebellum New Orleans was still largely a bilingual city, with both professional and proletarian class French speakers, and francophone publications. Reclus’s biographers are unanimous in stating the importance that this sojourn played in shaping the ideas and the personality of someone later considered as a founding figure in both scientific geography and socialist libertarianism (anarchism). (Dunbar 1978; Clark and Martin 2013; Ferretti 2014; Pelletier 2013). In Louisiana, according to his most recent biographer Christophe Brun, Reclus “fortified his atheism, anticlericalism, antislavery, anti-capitalism” (Brun 2015, 29). The New Orleans Reclus entered was the second largest port in the U.S., exceeded only by New York. It was also second to New York in the number of immigrants arriving, and New York had just surpassed New Orleans as the nation’s prime banking center. By many measures New Orleans rivalled New York as the most prosperous city in the U.S., led by its banking, shipping, sugar, cotton and slave trading economy. Reclus stepped ashore into scenes of dynamic, raw capitalism – a bustling world port, trading all manner of commodities, including humans. It also boasted a non-stop carnivalesque character (not much changed from today) with more bars and bordellos per unit area than anywhere in North America, save frontier boomtowns. Atop this street-level demimonde, a genteel stratum of older “Creole” (French and Spanish) and newly arrived “Anglo” planters preceded over a society bent on both pleasure and profit. Reclus initially found work on the docks, where free labor was the exception. Given his background and education, he soon found employment as a tutor to the children of sugar planter Septime Fortier, at their upriver plantation Félicité. This gave Reclus an intimate inside view of the workings of planter society, one that he increasingly found repellent.
Fig. 1 – La Nouvelle Orléans – vue prise par la levée (Reclus, 1892, 492)
At the same time, Reclus took the opportunity to further his geographical studies (he had studied with Carl Ritter in Berlin). Fascinated by the Mississippi River and its hinterlands, he travelled upriver as far as Chicago (Reclus 1859). The amphibious nature of the city of New Orleans, he compared to “an enormous raft on the river’s water” (Reclus 1860a, 189), and the problems of town and regional planning that this situation implied, were one of the first issues that impressed the young geographer. In the aftermath of the 2005 Hurricane Katrina, John P. Clark argued that “much of what [Reclus] said is rather prophetic” (Clark 2007, 11), stressing the accuracy of Reclus’s analyses on the necessity of a rational planning and a harmonic integration between humankind and environment. For the anarchist geographer, this task stood in complete antithesis with the logics of capitalism, building on speculation and commodification. Almost forty years later, in the volume of the New Universal Geography dedicated to the United States, Reclus described his old Saint-Simonian dream of claiming this land for social purposes. “When the line of division between land and sea will be established, then it will be possible to claim this region for agriculture and to transform Louisiana in a new Holland through a system of dams” (Reclus 1892, 489).
Fig. 2. Paquebot et bateau remorquer sur le Mississippi (Reclus, 1860a, 185)
However, it is on the topics of race, slavery and exploitation that Reclus took special advantage of his experience in Louisiana, becoming one of the principal European advocates of North American abolitionists during the American Civil War from 1861 to 1865, and a lifelong antiracist and anti-colonialist (Ferretti 2014). According to Clark, “Reclus was unusual among classical radical theorists in grasping racism as a major form of domination – an understanding that resulted in large part from his experience in Louisiana” (Clark 2007, 16-17). Ronald Creagh (2012) also notes that Reclus’s analyses of the American Civil War were more complex than the merely economistic views of Karl Marx, because the anarchist geographer analyzed the different kinds and levels of oppression that operated in the North American society.
In Reclus’s (1855) “Fragment d’un voyage à la Nouvelle Orléans,” an article published as a travel narrative for the popular French journal Le Tour du Monde, his dismay and indignation before the spectacle of a slave market were expressed in vivid terms:
On a platform stands the auctioneer, a large, red-faced, bloated man with a booming voice: “Come on, Jim! Get up on the table. How much for this good nigger Jim? Look how strong he is! He’s got good teeth! Look at the muscles on his arms! Come on, now, dance for us, Jim!” And he makes the slave turn around. “Here’s a nigger who knows how to do everything – he’s a carpenter, a cartwright, and a shoemaker. He won’t talk back – you never need to hit him.” But most of the time there are long whitish rays etched by the whip on their black skin. Then it is a Negro woman’s turn: “Look at this wench! She’s already had two niggers, and she’s still young. Look at her strong back and sturdy chest! She’s a good wet nurse, and a good negress for work!” And the bidding starts again amid laughter and shouts. Thus all the Negroes of Louisiana pass in turn on this fateful table: children who have just ended their seventh year and whom the law in its solicitude deems old enough to be separated from their mothers; young girls subjected to the stares of two thousand spectators and sold by the pound; mothers who come to see their children stolen from them, and who are obliged to remain cheerful while threatened by the whip; and the elderly, who have already been auctioned off many times, and who have to appear one last time before these pale-faced men who despise them and jeer at their white hair. … Sold off for a few dollars, they might as well be buried like animals in the cypress forest. According to the advocates of slavery, all this is willed by the cause of progress itself, the doctrines of our holy religion, and the most sacred laws of family and property (Reclus 1855, 190; English version in Clark and Martin 2003, 83-84).
Nevertheless, together with the dynamics of oppression, Reclus also analyzed subaltern agency and resistance, stressing the on-going efforts of Black slaves to get an instruction, a point that the geographer considered as strategic for any project of social emancipation. “One even mentions Blacks who learned reading alone by studying the names of the boats they saw constantly floating on the Mississippi. Planters are aware of that and start to fear for their future” (Reclus 1859, 625). Reclus was likewise prophetic in foreseeing the incoming conflicts which Southern society would have experienced in the following years, and concluded that: “For all generous men, rare in America as all over the world, the only homeland is liberty” (Reclus 1855, 192). In his correspondence, Reclus expressed the impossibility of remaining in this system without being morally accomplice of slavery and oppression, what determined his decision of leaving. As he wrote to his brother Élie in 1855, “I need to starve, now … For me, it would be better than robbing the Blacks, who deserve the money I put in my pocket by their blood and their sweat; getting back on the chain of oppression, that’s me who keep somehow the whip, and I am hating that” (Reclus 1911, 104-105). Feeling the need to leave Louisiana before he was further compromised, Reclus embarked on the steamboat Philadelphia in December 1855, bound for Colombia via Cuba and Panama. He settled in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta region of Colombia with the idea of forming a multi-ethnic community of progressive-minded European colonists and local folk, including indigenous people. Disease and failed recruitment efforts doomed the venture. But his time in Colombia gave him material for his first book – Voyage à la Sierra-Nevada de Sainte-Marthe; paysages de la nature tropicale (1861) (Mathewson 2016).
Reclus returned to France in 1857 to embark on a highly successful career as publisher of geographical studies and political writings. As a geographer, he started with publishing articles in the popular journal Revue des Deux Mondes. He contributed a series of articles describing the condition of the Afro-Americans and expressing radical anti-slavery positions. According to Soizic Alavoine-Muller, “Reclus’s clear opinions and his sharp arguments could exert a decisive influence on the Revue’s readers” (Alavoine-Muller 2007, 43). This meant that Reclus’s ideas had an important impact on French public opinion, because the Revue was the most read French periodical of that time, with a distribution of around 16,000 copies per issue. A very significant topic discussed by the anarchist geographer was the principle of the solidarity of freedoms and rights: if they are threatened anywhere, this concerns all kinds of oppressed people all over the world. “The degradation of Black slaves is that of all proletarians, and their liberation will be the most beautiful victory for all the oppressed in the two worlds” (Reclus 1860, 870). Another significant feature of Reclus’s thinking was his idea that juridical equality and end of formal slavery would not mean automatically complete emancipation, a problem which still today dramatically haunts the debates on the rights of Afro-Americans.
Indeed, Reclus’s articles continued to focus on these problems also after the end of the war in 1865, denouncing the sloppy or ineffective purge of pro-slavery Southern leaders and the retaliation that freed slaves were suffering in several Southern states (Reclus 1866). Again, Reclus insisted on the necessity of education for emancipation, praising those teachers who challenged the threads of pro-slavery people by reconstructing the schools where “the children of the ancient slaves … will certainly learn the virtues of the citizens” (1866, 788). In countering the advocates of scientific racism, especially those committed to the notion of “purity” of race (Coquery-Vidrovitch 2003), Reclus proposed generalized miscegenation as an antidote to racial hatred. He came back to this proposal in his final book, L’Homme et la Terre (1908), published posthumously fifty years after his departure from New Orleans. Here he offered a final assessment of the social progresses accomplished in the United States in the decades after the end of the Secession War:
“Despite what is being said, the population of the United States, red, white and black, is ready for this despised evolution called miscegenation. The union of races will be done from below. Among the abolitionists’ sons, generous men will be able to stand upon prejudices of caste and colour and found families whose children may have a brown shadow on their cheeks. In the big cities, where migrants are more and more concentrated, the girls from abroad, Irish, German and Slavic, are no longer willing to be subjugated … Several of them become wittingly the partner of a Black who charms them for his handsomeness, strength and goodness. Finally, among Americans, misery often associates the wretched of the two races. In the big army of revindications, Blacks and Whites march side by side, and the shared sufferings made the colour diversity disappear (Reclus 1908, 108-109).
Therefore, in Reclus’s thinking, racial emancipation was linked to class struggle and also to women’s emancipation, a view that anticipated some features of what is called today “intersectionality.”
Nevertheless, in the same work, Reclus nuanced his optimism by denouncing the “disguised slavery” which was represented by the discrimination and social subordination that most of the Afro-Americans still suffered in the United States. He sarcastically wrote: “Everywhere, in the buses, trains, theatres, schools, churches, one cares for people of the despised caste can’t soil the noble sons of Japheth with their contact. In case of serious violations, horrible practices of torture became so common that one might consider them as a part of local common law” (Reclus 1908, 107).
It is also worth noting that Reclus was not only a supporter of the Afro-Americans, but also of the Amerindian peoples in both North and Latin America, condemning the crimes of the conquest and the still on-going genocide of the “Redskins” by war, alcohol and diseases (Ferretti 2013). It is possible to conclude that Reclus’s sojourn in Louisiana was paramount in inspiring some of the most radical contents of his engaged geography, one which still talks to present-day debates on geography as a means to counter oppression, racism, sexism and social exclusion.
— Federico Ferretti
School of Geography
University College Dublin
Dublin, Ireland
Alavoine-Muller, S. 2007. Introduction. In Reclus, É. Les États-Unis et la Guerre de Sécession: articles publiés dans la Revue des Deux Mondes, 1-70. Paris, Editions du CTHS.
Clark, J. 2007. Letter from New Orleans. In élisée Reclus, natura e educazione, ed. M. Schmidt di Friedberg, 11-33. Milan: Bruno Mondadori.
Clark, J. and C. Martin. 2003. A Voyage to New Orleans: Anarchist Impressions of the Old South (revised and expanded edition). Thetford, VT: Glad Day Books.
Dunbar, G. 1978. Élisée Reclus historian of nature. Hamden: Archon Books.
Ferretti, F. 2010. Comment Élisée Reclus est devenu athée. Un nouveau document biographique. Cybergeo: European Journal of Geography: https://cybergeo.revues.org/22981
Across the U.S. South and beyond, cities are debating the fate of their Confederate monuments. In New Orleans, the May 2017 removal of the Robert E. Lee monument in Lee Circle, the large round-about on St. Charles Avenue, was the culmination of over two years of public and political drama, driven primarily by Mayor Landrieu’s 2015 charge less than a week after the Charleston massacre to “look at the symbols in this city to see if they still have relevance for our future” (Times Picayune June 22, 2015). He explained that a conversation with jazz musician Wynton Marsalis, who when asked to help plan the city’s 2018 Tricentennial Celebration, challenged the mayor to consider Lee Circle through his eyes. “Who is he? What does he represent? And in that most prominent space in the city…does that space reflect who we were, who we want to be or who we are?” (Times Picayune June 24, 2015).
Landrieu proposed the removal of four monuments – statues of Robert E. Lee, P.G.T. Beauregard, Jefferson Davis, and the Battle of Liberty Place Obelisk. Dedicated between the years 1884 and 1915, these four monuments were erected as part of a national trend, particularly in the South, symbolizing the Confederacy’s Lost Cause mythology – a revisionist Civil War narrative intended to transform the South’s military defeat into a political and cultural victory, promoting white dominance and states’ rights, while deifying southern leaders (Gallagher and Nolan 2010).
Using a public nuisance law, the Mayor brought the issue to the city council that ultimately voted six to one to remove the monuments. Yet, unsurprisingly, the issue was far from resolved. While the Mayor’s office moved forward with plans for removal, pro-monument groups such as the Monumental Task Committee deployed multiple legal maneuverings to slow the process. Meanwhile, contractors bidding on the removal contract received death threats. Countless protests occurred, mostly in front of the three figurative memorials which became gathering places for supporters and opponents of removal. At times the protests were small and cordial; others were tense and required police barricades and security. Some were organized by anti-monument organizations such as Take ‘Em Down, Nola, and others by anti-removal groups like Save Our Circle, and still more were informal and grew from people walking by or patrons of local bars and restaurants coming out to engage. Not even during the city’s beloved Jazz Fest was there an escape from the controversy as a plane flew overhead with a banner reading “OUR MONUMENTS OUR HISTORY!”
Site of the Battle of Liberty Place obelisk, removed in the early morning hours of April 24th, 2017. Photograph by Jennifer Speights-Binet
After town hall meetings, hearings, lawsuits, appeals, and protesting, the uprooting of the Confederate statues in New Orleans began in the early morning hours of April 24th with no public notice of the removal. Because of serious security concerns, removal workers masked their faces as well as the company name on their vehicles and wore flak jackets. With snipers overhead in a parking garage, the workers took down the first monument, the Liberty Place obelisk behind a French Quarter shopping mall. Long a controversial monument, the Liberty Place obelisk honored those who fought against political integration of blacks into a white-controlled government (Gill 1997). The White League defeated the much smaller New Orleans’s police force, where 35 people, mostly police officers, died. Nevertheless, protestors rallied to demonstrate their disapproval of the obelisk’s removal.
Removal of Robert E. Lee monument on May 19, 2017.
About two weeks later, the statue of Confederate president Jefferson Davis at the intersection of Jefferson Davis Parkway and Canal Street was taken down in the pre-sunset hours of May 11th. Next, the P.G.T. Beauregard statue, erected at the entrance to City Park in 1915, was removed one week later, again in the morning hours, with a relatively calm crowd. At both sites, protestors for and against monument removal demonstrated, and while the scenes were heated, no physical injuries occurred.
Then on May 19th, in the light of day on a warm New Orleans afternoon, onlookers brought lawn chairs, held parasols while drinking mimosas, played Michael Jackson’s Remember the Time on a boom box; others danced as an impromptu jazz band sounded their instruments. This was the day that the most prominent of the four monuments, the Robert E. Lee northward facing bronzed statue, would be removed from its 60-foot column, where he had been standing for 133 years. This final of four Confederate statues removed seemed to resemble more of a tailgate party than a protest (Times Picayune May 19, 2017). However, contractors again wore masks and protective gear because of the highly contentious Confederate monument controversies. As a crane finally took the Lee statue down, the crowd of hundreds cheered and jeered. Here, New Orleans’s festive culture intersected with serious memory-work, highlighting that such work is always at its root local.
As Lee was descending, just a few blocks away New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu was delivering the speech of a lifetime – now referred to as the Gallier Hall address after the venue where it occurred. (Read entire speech here.) Noted for its rhetorical eloquence engaging pathos, ethos, and logos, Mayor Landrieu’s speech reminded us that like monuments, words matter. Consider the following excerpt:
“America was the place where nearly 4,000 of our fellow citizens were lynched, 540 alone in Louisiana; where the courts enshrined ‘separate but equal’; where Freedom riders coming to New Orleans were beaten to a bloody pulp. So when people say to me that the monuments in question are history, well what I just described is real history as well, and it is the searing truth. And it immediately begs the questions: why there are no slave ship monuments, no prominent markers on public land to remember the lynchings or the slave blocks; nothing to remember this long chapter of our lives; the pain, the sacrifice, the same…all of it happening on the soil of New Orleans. So for those self-appointed defenders of history and the monuments, they are eerily silent on what amounts to this historical malfeasance, a lie by omission.”
The empty plinth where Robert E. Lee stood for 133 years. Photograph by Rebecca Sheehan.
The four monuments are now housed in an undisclosed location with the idea that they will be relocated to a museum where proper contextualizing and interpretation may be provided. Since the beginning of the process, Mayor Landrieu has advocated this as a solution, so that the city may remember but not revere the figures and events that they embody (Times Picayune July 9, 2015). Of course, these monuments are not the only controversial memorializations in New Orleans’s cultural landscape. Take ‘Em Down Nola is advocating for the removal of other monuments such as the Andrew Jackson statue in the beloved French Quarter’s Jackson Square. Jackson, victor at the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812, is hailed as the Savior of New Orleans but also a major contributor to the Trail of Tears. Indeed, difficult memory-work lies ahead for the city and the U.S. South as complex histories and how to remember those histories for the present and future continue to come to the fore.
As geographers visiting the city and no doubt partaking in its festive culture, you are also encouraged to walk by the sites where these statues were emplaced for well over a century and consider what is present in their absence—as of this writing, the pedestals of these Confederate monuments remain empty. We suggest that the now empty plinths where these statues once stood are signs of promise not despair. They are part of the process of memory-work that must occur to broaden one form of spatial justice in the landscape.
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