As part of the Perspectives on Public Space series, Sara Ivry speaks with Joy and Jo Banner, co-founders of The Descendants Project, an organization that works to eliminate the narrative violence of plantation tourism, champion the voice of the Black descendant community, and combat the health threats to residents in Louisiana’s Cancer Alley. Links to some of the research mentioned in the conversation can be found at the bottom of the page.
Transcript
Sara Ivry: Hi everybody, I’m Sara Ivry, features editor at JSTOR Daily. About five years ago in Charleston, South Carolina, authorities announced plans to remove a public statue of John Calhoun. He was the seventh vice president of the United States and a defender of slavery. The news ignited passionate debates about public monuments and their role in society. Should public sculptures that cause offense be removed, or should they be left intact, so we’re reminded of our history even when that history is profoundly ugly?
These questions are part of a larger project that we’re undertaking at JSTOR Daily about public space and how it’s used. Our project includes this podcast series, which brings me to today’s guests. Jo and Joy Banner are twin sisters from Louisiana and the founders of The Descendants Project, which is anchored at Woodland Plantation about thirty miles from New Orleans on the banks of the Mississippi. You’ll hear more about that in a moment.
First, I want to welcome Jo and Joy to our podcast. Hello, and thanks for being here.
Jo Banner: Thank you for having us.
Joy Banner: Thank you.
I wonder, Joy, if you can start off by telling us a little bit about The Descendants Project. What are its origins?
Joy: Yeah, so The Descendants Project is a non-profit organization that my sister and I started about five years ago—can’t believe it’s already been five years. And we started The Descendants Project with the interest of protecting our Black descendant community, because we are in probably the most industrialized stretch of the Mississippi River, and our communities are getting wiped out by heavy industrial development. And so we wanted to protect our community. And Jo and I’s background is in tourism. And so, we are in a very heavily touristed spot as well. And most of the tourism is because of the plantations that we have around.
You won’t be surprised to hear that most of those plantations are one, not addressing the narrative of enslaved people, and, our tourist commissions and tourism bodies are not involving and including Black descendant communities and local community in the tourism economy, which we think is, you know, a good shift away from heavy industry, a much greener alternative economy and is one that actually centers the preservation of historic communities like ours. So, The Descendants Project, we sit sort of in this intersection of historic and community preservation along with environmental justice.
Ivry: And to be clear, descendants are descendants of the enslaved people who worked the plantations, is that correct?
Joy: Yes. So, along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans there were hundreds of plantations, and so communities like ours, who—it is not unique, me and Jo are tenth-generation Louisianians—and so, literally, we are we are still living in the spaces and places where plantations once existed, right? And so we are descended of people that were enslaved at the plantations that are as near as, you know, a couple hundred feet, in fact, from us.
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Ivry: I want to talk more about The Descendants Project, but first I want to know a little bit more about the plantation itself, Woodland Plantation. Jo, maybe you can tell us a little bit about the history of this particular plantation and also its connection to you, if you grew up visiting it, what that was like for you, and so forth.
Jo: Woodland Plantation is located in Laplace, Louisiana, which is approximately twenty-five miles away from where we live. It was started around the 1700s, and [in] 1811 there was the German Coast uprising that occurred on a plantation site. So, this German Coast uprising was led by Charles Deslondes. Charles Deslondes went through numerous plantations along the river, throughout the river parishes of Louisiana, which is now known as Cancer Alley. He organized a revolt with about 500 people that participated in it. The intent was for the revolutionaries to gain their freedom, to march into New Orleans, whether it would either try to sell back to their homes, or they would capture the city and set it up as a free society. So, the culmination of that event happened on Woodland Plantation. And it’s believed to be one of the largest, or the largest, slave revolt that happened in this country. Despite that fact, however, many people are unaware of it, including the descendants who still live around the plantation home.
Ivry: I wonder if you can tell me what was your thinking in buying it, and what are your hopes for it? How does it fit into the larger puzzle of The Descendants Project?
Joy: So, the headquarters of The Descendants Project is actually not at Woodland, it’s in Wallace, at a separate plantation. And our community was being threatened by a massive industrial grain facility that would have wiped out our community. And in some type of mitigation to offset the damage that they would have done to not only us, but to Whitney Plantation, which is a slavery museum, they partnered with Woodland for $25,000. It had been operated as a museum for a couple of years, but it was not doing very well.
And so that was really the impetus of us understanding that when it comes to these plantation houses, it’s not strange for industry to come in and—they have to purchase them because they want the land—and then you have the big house that’s there, and then there’s some type of, again, like mitigation, public relations that happens where it’s like, “Look, we’re restoring a plantation.” You know, “We’re restoring this historic site.”
And so that was the company’s intention, was to really downplay the impact it would have on us by partnering with this plantation museum at the time. And that partnership did not work out, but it certainly signaled to Jo and I that if we did not step in to be the stewards of Woodland, that it was going to be used by industry to turn, like literally turn Black communities against each other, so that’s when we made the decision that we were going to seriously consider buying Woodland, and here we are.
Ivry: You mentioned Cancer Alley. Can you explain for listeners who may not have ever heard that phrase, what that refers to?
Jo: Cancer Alley is stretched between New Orleans and Baton Rouge that is heavy industry. It’s also been called Industrial Corridor because there are numerous plants, hundreds of plants, throughout the area. They’re all involved with pollution in one way… We have plastic pollution. We have oil and gas, we have grain, there is sugar refining, there’s aluminum, there’s steel. And because of our exposure to pollution, the residents in our area are at a higher risk of cancer. So, we have one of the highest risk of cancers in the country, we’re the 95th to 99th percentile, depending on where you’re located within Cancer Alley. So our community, St. John the Baptist Parish, is actually, like, we are in the exact middle of that stretch of, between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. We have been on the United Nations. Oh, there’s been at least a couple of reports from United Nations, the situation that’s happening here in our community. So, it’s really like an international human rights crisis that’s happening right here in the United States.
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Ivry: Of course, environmental degradation and pollution doesn’t observe any boundary, property lines or boundaries. It goes everywhere. It infiltrates all public space. I wonder how do you see the boundary between public and private, both in that case and in a more global sense?
Joy: So, I would like to correct that, because actually the science has proven for us that because of where these plants are sited—and they are sited around a predominantly Black community—that there is more polluted air based on race, right? And there are more health impacts, but you are right that in terms of the way that air works, these facilities and industries are not going to stop with our communities. And in Cancer Alley, just because we’re impacted more based on your community doesn’t mean that we don’t have white people that are getting cancer as a result of pollution. So yes, it’s an issue of private and public, but I think it’s more of an issue of the haves and the have nots. Right? Because even if people that are getting sick from the various diseases are going to have more access to the medical care that can alleviate their symptoms, that can still extend, you know, their life, can give them a better quality of life. And, like the way that the system is getting, as things get more and more expensive, and as there’s less and less restrictions on the permitting, I think that that space of, that cone of who’s getting impacted, is going to get larger and larger and larger. And I just hope that we can all, like, realize beforehand that they’re coming after the people that are most vulnerable.
Jo: Well, to your point, just recently, in the parish that’s neighboring us, St. Charles Parish, has been a public-private partnership between Shell and the community to create this whole park. So, this park is literally on the fence line of one of their refineries. It’s like a half-a-million-dollar investment has been put into this plant, and, “Wow, look how great it is, it’s new and shiny!” except literally the fence right there is just pollution billowing out of it. And there’s a constant hissing noise around it. So, all of this is happening as if there’s something we should be rejoicing about these public spaces. Like, do you realize how absolutely dangerous it is now? But yeah, it’s the shutting down of the senses, literally, to say, “Oh, wow, and let’s cut the ribbon at this public-private partnership!” The fact that we’re not noticing, or we ignore the danger, or many people are ignoring the danger. Some people just, they see it, but what can you do to stop it?
Joy: Well, and then the economic part of it, right? Like, how much money, and we say this as people who—our parents worked at Shell and Union Carbide, so we are children of industry. We are an industrial family. But that Shell emblem was everywhere. I mean, everywhere in our household, and Union Carbide, everywhere. But, like, Shell is getting how many hundreds of millions of dollars of tax incentives, right? And so now, that money that would have been used for infrastructure, that would have been used to build a park, Shell got excused from it. And then now, because they’re giving you a little bit money back of your own money, right? And now it’s like, “Let’s celebrate Shell for doing the good thing,” but it’s, like, but that’s way less than the money that you owe anyhow to actually address the harm. That’s the reason why you’re being taxed the way that you’re being taxed is to address the use and address the harm that you’re putting on a community, and, like, you get off with just building a park and then putting your logo on top of it.
Ivry: I wanted to ask you both, are you historians by training? What is your professional background? You mentioned being in tourism, but you’re definitely well versed in the environmental and history parts of this. So, tell me a little bit about your backgrounds.
Joy: Well, as I like to say, I’m a recovering business professor, business and marketing professor. My PhD is in communication studies—and I will say that that training in communication, especially now for this fight, is an excellent tool to have. I have never used it and appreciated it as much as I appreciated it now. And I think in terms of our background, we’re from an old community, and we had the benefit and pleasure of growing up around our elders, who were fantastic storytellers and who told about life on the river. And so it ended up making us enchanted by the history. And so I think we are just unrequited historians, but really being in a place where the focus was so much on industry and business, never saw a place for us career-wise in history, anthropology, and archaeology. And so the good part is now we’re getting to live all of that, you know, through The Descendants Project.
Jo: I would just say that, Joy expressed the humanities side of it, if you want to call it that, but also living in an environment where we have had our community almost taken away from us twice, from plastic production with PVC from Formosa to Greenfield Louisiana with grain, having that experience. Also being exposed to chemical leaks and going through explosions along the river or seeing our community treated differently because we were a Black descendant community versus a white community who’s pushing back against industry. That was a great teacher as well. So, we live in this intersection, we live in the middle of it all, and there’s no way we can shut out one without embracing or talking about the other.
So, like that plantation-to-pollution pipeline, we live right in the middle of it all. And because we are descendants, and we say we descend from the enslaved, but we descend from the river, and we descend from everything that happened along that river. All of that is in our blood. And that is also how I think it helps us and what we do in educating others and just also showing, “This is what it looks like in real life. This is what it looks like in the flesh and blood.” It’s not just, you know, a chapter in the history book, it is part of our lives, and it’s real.
Ivry: I can imagine you know, buying a place like Woodland and wanting to destroy it, you know, just as people wanted to take down the statue of Calhoun or something, that it represents something so toxic, why would you want to even leave it standing?
Joy: Well, I think for Jo and I, well, we understand, first of all, slavery is not something that just happened on plantations. Jo and I, we have worked as staff members, as tour guides, as administrators, you know, in all different positions, as directors at plantations. And people think that slavery happened here on this site, and just specifically. So, first of all, plantations, like, yes, is it ground zero? I call it ground zero. But the northern economy was also, you know, like, we forget that the north was like the first places where slavery is happening. You know, there are many people that are benefiting from slavery. You know, there are many buildings that have [been] built by the enslaved. So I don’t think that there’s any spot in the United States that hasn’t been touched by slavery and/or acts of racist violence against Black people. So that’s certainly one aspect of it.
Jo: What I think, too, is what I’ve noticed, is that what most people are angry about is not the fact that the plantations exist, because that is part of our history. You can knock down the building, but that wouldn’t change the fact that our ancestors were enslaved and that we’re still dealing with the ramifications of enslavement that are around us. What most people respond to I think negatively is the way the history is treated—or the erasure of that history. So, if we are going on a plantation, and it’s a Hollywood version of plantation life, that is the infuriating and frustrating part. So I mean, just from owning it, this was something, owning plantations—and something that I never expected—was how many people were, actually, Black people rejoiced in the fact that, “Wow, you all own a plantation, now we get to tell our story, now we can’t they can’t ignore it anymore,” because it symbolizes that the plantation is a part of our history, and they feel like we will honor—and we will—honor every part of that and respect it and give it the care that it deserves.
Joy: And I also think too, like, yes, a house is an inanimate object, but it’s made of organic material, and I believe that in our liberation, like, we’re liberating the house itself. You know, like that house, that wood never said it wanted to be used for the enslavement of people. Like those crops never said that they wanted to be used, you know, to cause such brutality and labor. And so I do feel like when we liberate ourselves, and it does feel like I’m releasing, you know, that house from that kind of violence. And then also to be used as an important resource, you know, I think it’s important education-wise and also as a center of healing. So, there’s so many uses that it can still be used for that I think we as a Black community still need, you know, for our healing.
Ivry: I wanted to ask you, Jo, you mentioned, like, the Hollywood version of plantation life, what do you mean by that? Can you explain a little bit more?
Jo: Yeah, I’m thinking of movies that glamorize plantations and the Civil War such as Gone with the Wind and, we will even see renditions of that in modern day, right? I’m surprised, I look back and Louisiana tourism had a commercial, and it featured the plantation on this tourism commercial, and it’s very, like, the person who was there was eating pecan pie, and it was like “Come visit sweet Louisiana!” So, it’s those images that are totally made up it shows this glamorous lifestyle of the plantation owner, of the sugar baron, and we see that often a lot because these plantations are our royalty. This is what royalty looks like in the United States or in North America. We still see it. I’m still surprised at how often I see that imagery. And that’s what is infuriating when someone can talk about, “Come and have a mint julep, and come dine here and imagine yourself in the footsteps of these people” without understanding that: But what was that built on? What about those who were enslaved? And also, even the lifestyle of a sugar baron wasn’t necessarily easy either. It was hard life, it could be very dirty life. But that part has been totally sanitized, has been totally erased in many instances, and that’s what people, I think, that’s what they respond to as a fact that this is totally not an accurate depiction of what plantations would have been and are.
Ivry: Where I live in New York City, you often see efforts, you know, to make spaces public, to take it away from private hands in order to make it accessible for everybody, or you have a private corporation that comes in and makes something accessible to everybody. In your case, it’s kind of like you flipped the script, and you’ve taken something into your own hands to make it more accessible to a population that wasn’t being served by the former owners of the site. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about that, about sort of, like, privatizing in order to publicize in a way.
Joy: Yeah, I think that’s, it’s a good point of showing how government can be so difficult for communities like ours that have been deemed sacrificial from the start. It touches back to being, our ancestors being sacrificed, coming from Africa, being put on these plantations, even when they were buried, there wasn’t really much concern. So, it’s just this lineage of not caring, of ignoring, of sacrificing our communities. So you have a government that’s very much doing what it’s been doing for, you know, all of these centuries, which has not been for our protection. So the only way that we can truly protect ourselves, until we can get a government that will truly honor the independence that it brags about every year and celebrates, we are the ones who have to take our own health into our hands, and our own happiness into our hands. So that is what liberation looks [like] for us: is being able to own that land and then find some way to then give it back to the public, until we can have a system that finally cares about us and [is] concerned about our survival and our existence.
Ivry: I think one of the really interesting things about this conversation is that it highlights that there are different publics and different communities. I mean, when we say public space, that’s so amorphous, and then when we start to sort of drill down, we’re like, oh, there’s different populations that are served. And it makes you really wonder what would be a completely public space in which everybody was equally represented and felt equally welcome. I don’t know what that would be, where that would be, and how it would look.
Jo: I think for, like your point about the statues, if you put a statue of Robert E. Lee in a park, or you name it after Robert E. Lee, and you say this for the public, how would your Black person… Is that space really for you? You’re saying, you’re signifying, this is not your space. Or yes, it’s your space, if you bow down to white supremacy, then yes is your space. So I think, right, just because we say public, what do we mean by public naming and placemaking is also a big part of that public space.
Joy: Yeah. And I think that the argument that, you know, like I’m hearing, like, “Oh, we can, why don’t we keep the statues up and just talk about the context of what it was in. Let’s talk about the racism!”
Really? We’re seeing that right now, right, where the intent of a statue is that it represents a value or an ideal that we as a public want to honor and uplift. That says, “Here is who we should be emulating!” Right? And then for us to take these quote unquote heroes to some and say, we’re going to leave it up there, but we’re going to talk about the fact that he owned 300 slaves. We’re going to talk about the fact that he raped women. You know, we’re going to talk about the fact that he sold children, and the organization that’s behind putting up, you know, this statue in the 1920s, like way after the Civil War, was actually a racist women’s group, you know, from the South. So, really, are you telling me that people are going to be okay with putting all that context in with the statues? Probably not.
Jo: And even if you did, if I’m just going to a park, do I really want to hear all of that? I just want to go to a picnic with my family. Really, do I need to know all about, okay, Robert E. Lee. No.
Joy: The trauma.
Jo: Right, the trauma. And okay, go and enjoy your hamburger, you know. And so, it’s just, like, come on, right?
Joy: That’s a really good point.
Jo: Oh gosh, yes.
Ivry: You know, as I understand it, you want Woodland ultimately to be a site of education. And I wonder what do you imagine that looks like? And then also for whom?
Joy: So, when we say that Woodland is a site of education, there is still a descendant community specific to Woodland that is still near it, it’s called Woodland Quarters. And so first of all, as an organization called The Descendants Project, our first responsibility is to the descendant community. And so what we would hope is that for them and the larger, you know, Black community, and the larger community in general, to think of that space as a place of education but also heritage, and arts, and a resource that assists, you know, their pursuit of quality of life, right? Something that adds something to their population and that’s in service of them.
But in terms of the education… Parts of it, we want to deal with slavery in a way that… We have a lot of organizations that are doing a great job, I named one, Whitney Plantation. But it’s like, how can we build on this education about slavery that’s also not being taught.
Right now, we have a temporary executive director who has a background in, like, the impact of trauma to the body, right? So as we are setting up Woodland as this interpretive space, like, we are looking at what has been the impact of trauma on Black bodies, not only because of racism and because of issues, but like literally when they are walking through a space, like Jo just mentioned, like sure we can add all of this context to a statue, but then as a Black person, does that make it better that I have to see Robert E. Lee and all of the pain that he caused, you know, while I’m trying to have peace and relaxation, you know, with my family? So, we want to address all of those issues.
Jo: And I’ll also add to, like, for education, much of it is about building, but also, it’s about deconstructing and allowing expression. Because what we don’t want is for, especially Black people, to walk into that space and feel that they can’t express themselves because they’re so used to how the tour has been constructed through, like, other sites that they may have visited.
We will find that, as our programming is touching more to like Black community, we may find a need, for example, where we may sing and we may dance, and it may be on a porch of a plantation, but you know what, it fits in because of this is something that we as Black people do. So, like, we’re seeing like all these different threads and through lines and all this engagement now that honestly I hadn’t even thought about it until it happens. And we’re, like, okay right now there is, we have a DJ that’s playing on a porch for a Black commemoration event, and he’s playing music that you hear at a Black family reunion. The Black people are going to dance, are going to want to feel that need to dance. So, how’s it all coming together? I think ultimately what it means, like this is what liberation feels like, and this is what happens when Black people can freely express themselves on sites like Woodland.
Ivry: Given all the obstacles that this project faces, given the environmental degradation of the area, how do you yourselves keep going every day? I mean, it’s got to be very emotionally taxing.
Joy: You know, I would say that there is a movement called “Living with the Trouble.” You know, like, even when you are in places of devastation, in some respects, it doesn’t mean that you aren’t in places of absolute beauty. Like, I’m looking at my window right now, and it’s green, and there’s a bird sitting out on my ledge. My parents are right next door. I’m able to work in an organization that Jo and I created literally from the dreams that we had, from our passions. I get to work with my twin sister. And so, it’s like, along these obstacles, it’s not like good stuff isn’t happening, right? And, you know, and I think that there is an art form, and there is a satisfaction that comes with tackling problems. And like, we’re winning some, too; like, we’re winning a lot. And so I think that this idea of, like, because things aren’t absolutely perfect that we give it all up and stuff… That’s not life. That’s not anybody’s reality. Every aspect has its challenges. And so I feel especially grateful and blessed to be anointed and chosen to do this kind of work.
Jo: Yeah, I’ll just add that we don’t have the luxury of giving up. We don’t have the luxury of saying, “How do I keep going?” You just keep going. And so that’s what we do, and I think, like Joy said, there is a lot of beauty around us. This area is… it’s breathtaking. In the bad ways, but also in the good ways, too. It’s life giving, and it’s the roots. I can’t walk out of my door without tripping on a root. So, literally of my roots, and that makes me so connected to the land and understanding the spirituality and the energy that’s here.
And that’s what keeps me going. And you know, it’s fun pissing off billionaires. I have to say, that gives me a lot of joy in the world. When they think they can take you out, right, and they can tell you what to do. And you can push back just on your stubbornness, and you win? Right? That is very life-giving, too.
Joy: We’ve had some fun. We’ve had some fun.
Jo: Like we mean, when we say we are going to fight morning, noon, and night? I mean, we have fought morning, noon, and night. We don’t stop fighting. And so, and that’s what gives us our advantage, is because we have something that we truly love and we’re passionate for.
You know, our, the symbol of our, of The Descendants Project is a Fawohodie, an adinkra symbol, meaning, it’s a symbol of emancipation. But what it really means is: emancipation comes with its responsibilities. And, like, we understand the work that is involved in being stewards of this land, and we’ve, not only did we sign up for it, we created an organization to do just that. And so we just have to, like, again, this is our purpose in life. And we are extremely happy to do the work.
the only thing that I wanted to add, as you talked about, again, at the public and private space, that now we are seeing our public spaces attacked for the stories that they’re telling and the truth that they are telling. And it is going to be the responsibility of private organizations, like The Descendants Project and other private museums, that is going to have to step up. We’ve been doing that work, but I think there’s going to be an even larger responsibility, you know, those of us that are not getting as much funding from the federal government, which we are not, thankfully. It will be up to us to carry that mission. So donating and funding organizations like ours is going to be, you know, extremely important.
Ivry: Jo and Joy Banner, thank you so much for joining us.
Jo: Thank you so much for having us.
Joy: Thank you for having us.
Joy and Jo Banner live in Louisiana and they are the founders of The Descendants Project. You can find out more about it at their website, TheDescendantsProject.org. Today’s podcast is part of a series from JSTOR Daily on public space. You can find other episodes in this series on our website, daily.jstor.org. We talk about public lands, public space in the digital sphere, urban planning, and much, much more. This podcast is produced by Julie Subrin and me, Sara Ivry, with help from JR Johnson-Roehr, and Jonathan Aprea. JSTOR Daily is a project of ITHAKA, a non-profit organization, and JSTOR. Thank you so much for listening.
Editor’s Note: When this conversation was recorded, Sara Ivry served as Features Editor at JSTOR Daily. She has since moved on from the publication. We’re grateful for her thoughtful work and the care she brought to this series.
