Environmental Racism in Death Alley, Louisiana

In the US state of Louisiana, along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, a heavily industrialised ‘Petrochemical Corridor’ overlays a territory formerly known as ‘Plantation Country’.

When slavery was abolished in 1865, more than five hundred sugarcane plantations lined both sides of the lower Mississippi River; today, more than two hundred of those sites are occupied by some of the United States’ most polluting petrochemical facilities.

Residents of the majority-Black ‘fenceline’ communities that border those facilities breathe some of the most toxic air in the country and suffer some of the highest rates of cancer, along with a wide variety of other serious health ailments. They call their homeland ‘Death Alley’. Here, environmental degradation and cancer risk manifest as the by-products of colonialism and slavery.

Sugarcane was historically the most dangerous crop to cultivate. To accommodate a negative demographic growth rate among the enslaved population, each plantation established at least one, and sometimes as many as three cemeteries for its enslaved population. The majority of these burial grounds were omitted from historical maps. Over the decades, all outward traces of many of these cemeteries have been erased. On rare occasions, cemeteries resurface – when petrochemical corporations break ground on new construction sites.

In 2015, two cemeteries were uncovered during a survey for a proposed expansion of a refinery owned by Shell Oil Company. Four years later, four more cemeteries were located during the early stages of the construction of a new facility by the company Formosa Plastics. How might we recover the memory of the hundreds, if not thousands, of missing cemeteries at risk of desecration?

Together with fenceline community activist group RISE St. James, Forensic Architecture (FA) has developed a method to help locate these cemeteries in support of longstanding local efforts to protect ancestral sites and demands for a moratorium on the further expansion of the Petrochemical Corridor. All of our research will be open-sourced and made available to the public.

Sites of PM2.5-producing facilities are layered onto a ‘heat map’ showing concentrations of PM2.5 (particulate matter) in the atmosphere, according to a 2014 survey. (Forensic Architecture)

In the period after the American Civil War of 1861-1865, known as ‘Reconstruction’, emancipated Black people formed small towns, which grew from the slave quarters on the plantations of their former enslavement. Over the course of the 20th century, large-scale industrial facilities have been constructed atop those plantations, and historical ‘freetowns’ have since become today’s ‘fenceline’ communities. As polluting industry surrounds these communities, it subjects them to another register of racist violence: assault by invisible toxic chemicals.

Cartographic regression techniques reveal the occupation of the community of Lions and its surroundings by petrochemical industry. (Forensic Architecture)

Working with researchers from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Imperial College London, FA developed a fluid dynamics simulation to track the spread of a range of airborne pollutants from three dozen facilities along the Mississippi River under simulated meteorological conditions, drawing on ten years of data from a local weather station. Our simulation reveals the scale and concentration of chemical gassing of communities throughout Death Alley.

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The saturation of Black descendant communities with toxic and criteria air pollutants is sanctioned by local and state authorities. In 2014, the governing council of St. James, Louisiana, passed a comprehensive plan that wrote off the district’s majority-Black communities – the hometowns of our partners with RISE – as ‘industrial’ and ‘existing residential/future industrial’ sites.

The erasure and degradation of hundreds of known, suspected, and unmarked burial sites throughout Death Alley is the result of a persistent racist imaginary the regards Black communities and cultural sites as unworthy of preservation, or worse, as a threat to development.

Petrochemical companies are required by federal law to identify historic properties, including cemeteries, that would be threatened by their plans for development. To fulfil this legal requirement, they typically hire for-profit archaeological firms to survey the field, who – with an eye to receiving further contracts – are incentivised to produce favourable reports. Our study of over 50 field reports found a systemic lack of regard for antebellum Black cemeteries.

Read more detail on this in our full report.

Multiple layers of public data reveal the ongoing sell-off of land along Death Alley, including residential land that is home to ‘fenceline’ communities. (Forensic Architecture)

State authorities maintain a list of ‘development-ready’ sites. Around 200 properties throughout Death Alley are deemed ‘ready’ for industrial development by Louisiana Economic Development, a government agency. Yet members of RISE were unaware at the start of our investigation that so much of their homeland was on the auction block.

For generations, Black descendant communities held fast to knowledge of their ancestral sites against the tide of erasure. Today, they search the ground for evidence of these sites’ locations – but are denied access by private landowners.

Our work on this case offers a tool in support of these efforts: we have developed a methodology for determining the probable locations of ancestral cemeteries at risk of future desecration.

We built a platform that ‘mosaics’ and ‘anchors’ aerial imagery and maps from multiple sources spanning three centuries of the region’s transformation, including the reconstruction of the land according to racist, profit-oriented principles. We began with a 1719 chart of Indigenous territory used by colonists to prefigure the genocidal dispossession of the region’s original inhabitants. From there, we identified US Coast Surveys from 1877-78, Mississippi River Commission charts from 1894, and aerial imagery spanning seven decades, from 1940 to the present.

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Our analysis of these aerial images and maps, along with historical photographs, property surveys, transcripts of interviews with formerly enslaved persons, and other primary and secondary source information about specific plantations, reveals that plantations operated according to consistent spatial and operational logics, determined by the overlapping priorities of a complex which was at once industrial facility, farm, prison, death camp, and luxury estate.

To understand the scale of these logics, we built an interactive 3D environment representing what would have been a ‘typical’ sugarcane plantation within the geography of the lower Mississippi River. (Because no ‘complete’ plantations remain intact, our modelled environment is a composite of several plantations reconstructed using a wide variety of visual and cartographic evidence.)

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Through this process, our cartographic mosaics became the ground from which grew structures – including slave quarters and the sugar factory – as simple volumes, before building out detail from archival photographs. Using topographical features of the USCS 1877 and MRC 1894 maps, we then constructed the topography, roads and field paths, crop classifications, and cypress forest. For the atmosphere, we referenced contemporary satellite imagery and drone footage.

As plantations reorganised life, they also managed death. The spatial logics of the plantation also dictated the siting of Black cemeteries. Slave masters would not sacrifice valuable land for Black cemeteries. Enslaved people were thus interred in uncultivated lands at the back of the plantation, at the ever-retreating edge of the cypress forest.

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Denied stone, enslaved people often crafted simple wooden grave markers, which naturally decomposed over time. And sometimes, drawing on pan-African traditions, they planted magnolia and willow trees to mark the graves of their loved ones, cultivating ‘sacred groves’.

Sugarcane was a crop of scale; as plantations expanded from the mid-1820s until the Civil War, cemeteries became islands of trees and vegetative overgrowth, isolated amid seas of sugarcane.

Clusters of trees or uncultivated patches of land that interrupt an otherwise unbroken topography of agricultural fields are referred to by archaeologists as ‘topological anomalies’.

Through our research, we have found that some anomalies are the ruins of slave quarters or industrial sugar factories. And some are revealed to be the cemeteries of the formerly enslaved.

After decades of ploughing, a single tree remains of the Point Houmas Plantation Cemetery sacred grove. The cemetery is located on land marketed for future industrial development by Louisiana Economic Development. (Forensic Architecture)

In the years after emancipation, the region underwent a process of spatial, economic, and social Reconstruction. Some cemeteries remained in continuous use, while others were lost to time. As industrial development has expanded, many of the anomalies we identified have been erased.

We identified close to 1200 anomalies in the 1940 aerial images; by 2021, only around 350 of these remained. (Forensic Architecture)

Cartographic regression techniques allow us to access the memory of the land, tracing anomalies across time. (Forensic Architecture)

The surface traces of many cemeteries were likely razed prior to 1940, when the first available set of aerial photographs was captured. In the absence of earlier photographic traces, we determined that we could estimate the probable locations of cemeteries by combining multiple factors of ‘plantation logics’ drawn from our cartographic analysis.

Traditional archaeology focuses on the slave master’s ‘Big House’, and other relics of white supremacy, considering the topographically elevated riverfront areas of plantations as zones of ‘high probability’ for finding cultural resources, and the low-lying areas toward the back of the plantation as ‘low probability’. Our analysis inverts this principle, determining that those areas away from the riverfront have a higher probability of holding valuable Black heritage sites, including cemeteries.

Additional factors include the boundaries of the forest at different periods in time, the boundaries of plantation properties, the location of roads and field paths, and the location of living quarters for the enslaved population and the industrial sugar mill. Bringing these factors together within our computer software generates what we refer to as a ‘Field of Probability’.

The probability field, overlaid on 2021 Google Earth satellite imagery. Redder areas indicate higher probability for the location of burial grounds, yet no land is considered ‘improbable’ for holding cultural, historical, and ecological value. (Forensic Architecture)

Through the lens of the petrochemical plantation burial ground, Death Alley is revealed as a 300-year continuum of environmental racism.

The Black descendant community of Wallace traces its ancestry to several plantations under threat by the pending construction of an industrial grain elevator. We have identified several anomalies within high probability zones of the Whitney and adjacent plantations. (Forensic Architecture)

To confront that continuum, the whole ecology of the region must be considered of utmost cultural value: from the fields where the enslaved were born, worked to death, and buried, to the surviving forests, which under the cover of night became sites of ritual, mourning, and liminal freedom, to Black descendant communities who deserve to inherit far more than a legacy of violence, discrimination, and erasure.

The Black descendent community has long voiced demands for accountability from the petrochemical corporations that occupy their lands. Today, this demand is building into a broader vision of justice: reparations for centuries of racist violence, the repair of the environment, jobs that sustain their communities and their health, a moratorium on industrial development, and agency over how their land is stewarded. Moreover, they demand a fundamental revision of the concept of historic preservation toward a recognition of Black communities, ancestral sites, and our wider ecologies as intrinsically valuable, indivisible, and worthy of protection.