As we seek to create a shared vision for the future of New Orleans, in order to know where we are going, we must know where we have come from. The urgent need to preserve historic sites in New Orleans became apparent to me on my return to the city after Hurricane Katrina. My work as Director of the Archives at the Amistad Research Center kept me extremely busy as I worked with returning residents to preserve family documents, books and photographs. While also documenting the recovery, and collecting oral history interviews with displaced and returning residents of Treme, the lower 9th ward and Pontchartrain Park, I began to see the many abandoned schools, churches and civil right sites as sacred spaces of community memory. Prior to the floods of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans school libraries had been the repositories of family and neighborhood stories. The churches had nurtured the faithful, inspired hope and documented a long heritage of community activists. The civil rights sites were the “sacred places” where love had conquered hate, where justice had bravely challenged and defeated injustice. But, today, these “sacred spaces” of New Orleans are threatened by the bulldozers of “progress and recovery”.

My awareness was also shaped by exposure to civil rights in Africa. In January of 2005 I visited a burned out township in Captetown, South Africa, and toured the former home and monuments for Mahatma Ghandi, Chief Albert Lithuli, Robben Island Prison and the District 6 Museum. This museum is dedicated to preserving the history of a displaced community in Capetown South Africa. In 1966, it was declared a white area under the Group areas Act of 1950, and by 1982, the life of the community was over. 60 000 people were forcibly removed to barren outlying areas aptly known as the Cape Flats, and their houses in District Six were flattened by bulldozers. http://www.districtsix.co.za/frames.htm Also, recalling my visits to U.S. civil rights sites in Boston, Montgomery, Selma, Birmingham and Atlanta, I came to see the urgency of preserving New Orleans civil rights sites as sacred spaces, to connect communities to history, and educate future generations.

Adopting a comprehensive list of New Orleans Civil Rights sites prepared by historian Keith Weldon Medley, the Plessy and Ferguson Foundation works to identify additional sites that have not been significantly recognized by the State of Louisiana, and advocates for preservation and or public awareness of these sites as sacred spaces. The Foundation will create plaques and or monuments as well as printed materials that will bring public awareness to the sites and their historic significance to the community where they are located. The Foundation will also work to get the sites listed on the National Historic Register and publish an annual report that will list all of the sites that have been added to the Civil Rights legacy.

Brenda Billups Square is the Director of Archives for the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University and Co-Founder of the Plessy and Ferguson Foundation.