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Lit Louisiana: The origins of Congo Square [1]

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Date: 2024-03-19  

Let’s talk about Congo Square.

There is no author in the city who has studied the place and its origins longer and deeper than Freddi Williams Evans. Her book “Congo Square: African Roots in New Orleans” (also published in French as “Congo Square: Racines africaines de la Nouvelle-Orléans”) gives historical context to this place that we know well as the location of dancing and drumming in the city—practices which still continue. Evans brought together a wide range of information including early legislation, geographical information and more to bring the data to our fingertips. From the earliest observations of Benjamin Latrobe, who sketched the instruments played in Congo Square in the early 19th century in “Impressions Respecting New Orleans, Diary and Sketches, 1818-1820 to Congo Square” as the site of the Municipal Auditorium and its first integrated dances, to place where we hear the Jazz Fests, Congo Square has been central to our understanding of our African origins and the continuation of Black culture in the diaspora.

Evans’s “Come Sunday: A Young Reader’s History of Congo Square,” illustrated with 130 photographs accompanied by a teacher’s guide, won a bronze medal for the Independent Publisher Awards in 2018 and was nominated for the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Book of the Year 2017.

Evans was the expert historian on the subject and wrote the foreword for the picture book for younger children by Carol Boston Weatherford called “Freedom in Congo Square.” The book won a Caldecott Honor and a Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honor. The illustrator was R. Gregory Christie.

Embers

Published in 2011, “Ancestors of Congo Square: African Art in the New Orleans Museum of Art” by Bill Fagley explores the local collection for those who would like to research the origins of the city’s early culture bearers.

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[1] Url: https://veritenews.org/2024/03/19/lit-louisiana-the-origins-of-congo-square/

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