by Marc H. Morial
(TriceEdneyWire.com) — “This proposed structure will be as tall as the Statue of Liberty. It is a major threat to the slave-descendant community of Wallace. This grain elevator would take up hundreds of acres of the fields around you that once formed Whitney Plantation, potentially destroying unknown burial sites. It will contribute to the existing toxic burden with grain dust pollution, and permanently change the landscape of West St. John Parish” — Whitney Plantation Museum.
The cancellation of plans for a sprawling grain export facility in Louisiana is a victory for community activism, historic preservation, and environmental equity.
Following a three-year campaign by the Descendants Project, Greenfield LLC this month announced that it was “ceasing all plans” to build what would have been one of the country’s largest grain facilities just footsteps from the Whitney Plantation, a historic site dedicated to the memory of those who were enslaved there.
That includes my own ancestors. My great-great-grandparents, Victor Theophile Haydel and Marie Celeste Becnel, were born on the Whitney Plantation. When the last Haydel to own the plantation died in 1860, Victor and Anna were listed as part of the estate’s inventory, valued at 800 and 100 ‘piastres’ (the Cajun word for dollars) respectively.
I was proud to join the fight, chiding the company financing the project as insensitive to the historic, treasured, and sacred site of an essential element of African American history, and outlining the adverse health and environmental impacts and the destruction of the surrounding landscape.
Egregiously, the developers altered a report on the project’s impact to erase a historian’s conclusion that the grain elevator would have “an adverse effect on historic properties” and that the entirety of proposed site should be in the National Register of Historic Places,
“Thus far, no enslaved cemeteries have been found for either Whitney or Evergreen Plantations despite hundreds of enslaved people being kept there for over 155 years,” Erin Edwards and a co-author wrote in the report they submitted to her employer, Gulf South Research Corporation.
When the company submitted the report to the state three months later: “The determination of the historic district, the findings about the impact on Whitney and the community around it, and the lone sentence about unknown graves had all been removed.”
The Army Corps of Engineers ordered a new study after the deception came to light. The Corps also rejected the second report, criticizing the developers for “failing to meaningfully consult with people whose lives would be impacted by the dozens of looming grain silos, new rail, truck and shipping traffic and pollutants from the facility,” or “to account for the ways that the development project might harm communities of color.”
Descendants Project co-founder Joy Banner was among the crowd that “burst into jubilant cheers” when the developers made the announcement at a local church.
“It shows what happens when communities fight,” she said. “The erasure of the Black communities didn’t work.”
