The American South, an open-air museum of the struggle for equality

Illustration: Cédric Gagnon Le Devoir The Negro Motorist Green Book travel guide listed safe places for African-Americans during the era of racial segregation laws.

Marco Bélair-Cirino In Memphis (Tennessee), New Orleans (Louisiana) and Africatown (Alabama)

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• United States

The American democratic experiment has been an object of fascination since its infancy. Pretending to study the penitentiary system, French magistrates and aristocrats Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont traveled across the United States in 1831 and 1832 to get a closer look. They observed not only “its inhabitants, its cities, its institutions, its customs,” but also “the mechanism of its republican government.” Tocqueville wrote two iconic works from this 10-month stay: Democracy in America and Fifteen Days in the Desert. Le Devoir followed in their footsteps, 193 years later, at a time when this democracy seems more threatened than ever.

New stops: the Lorraine Motel in Memphis (Tennessee), the Destrehan plantation near New Orleans (Louisiana) and Africatown (Alabama), where the marks of slavery and segregation are indelible.

A police officer walks past the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, followed by about 40 recruits dressed in black pants, white shirts, and ties. “During your stay, stay together. It’s dangerous,” he says through his sunglasses. The trainer turns his head toward the artificial flower wreath hanging outside Room 306 of the establishment. Civil rights leader Martin Luther King was assassinated there on April 4, 1968.

The Lorraine Motel was one of the few establishments in the American South to appear in the Negro Motorist Green Book travel guide listing hotels, restaurants, gas stations, and other businesses that were safe for African-Americans during the Jim Crow era of racial segregation. Artists Cab Calloway, Aretha Franklin, B.B. King and Nat King Cole have stopped by.

Photo: Marco Bélair-Cirino Le Devoir Lattrevia and Morris outside the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee.

The building, located just east of the Mississippi River, now houses the National Civil Rights Museum, much to the chagrin of the establishment’s last patron, Jacqueline Smith, who camped out on the sidewalk at Mulberry and Butler, far from the frenzy of Beale Street, to denounce the neighborhood’s gentrification.

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Inside, the horror of slavery and segregation that reigned under the sunny South of the United States hits visitors in general, and black people in particular, hard. There, a woman tells her two daughters about the hatred that relegated black people to the back of public buses. There, a man explains to his granddaughter the murderous hatred that lurked beneath the white hoods of the members of the Ku Klux Klan. “I brought my daughter and my granddaughters. We just experienced [slavery and segregation] again together.” We know more about where they come from and where they need to go,” Reushell explains, on the eve of a family celebration in the area.

Photo: Marco Bélair-Cirino Le Devoir Scherell tells his two daughters about the years of racial segregation when black people were pushed to the back of public buses like the one transported to the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee.

After walking through the row of rooms plunged into darkness, we wonder how African-Americans were able to get through nearly 250 years of slavery, 100 years of Jim Crow laws, and then the everyday racism they left in their wake.

“They still refuse to give us reparations,” Turone Sledge laments as he leaves the museum. “You’re talking about a country built on racism! We were brought here against our will. The country was built on our backs. The White House was built by black people. All the infrastructure was built by black people.” Free labor,” adds the recent retiree, who pays “tribute” to those who fought at the risk of their lives for equality.

Photo: Marco Bélair-Cirino Le Devoir Turone Sledge speaks with “Le Devoir” in front of room 306 of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, where Martin Luther King was assassinated on April 4, 1968.

Moreover, the Cleveland, Ohio resident says he has no choice but to vote on November 5, since his grandparents and parents fought to obtain this right.

This text is part of our Perspective section.

After a few stops in Tennessee, Turone Sledge will head to Alabama, where, in the mid-20th century, his mother and other children amused themselves by identifying the white supremacists of the KKK marching through the streets by spotting distinctive signs through their coverings, like a pipe. “Oh, that’s Mr. Jones! Oh, that’s Mr. Smith!” he relates as the retro sign of the Lorraine Motel soars into the air. “I have a dream,” it says.

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Crime against humanity

The southern United States is dotted with places of memory, like old plantations here and there.

Visitors to the Destrehan Sugar Plantation, located near New Orleans, are apparently pleased with the balance of slave history and owner history that is told there. Indeed, the plantation, established in 1787, gets a four out of five rating from Tripadvisor users.

The guide, dressed in a wine-red dress, lists the value of the slaves held by the Destrehan family: from Babette, a blind 60-year-old woman, worth $5, to Essex, a healthy 28-year-old man, worth $1,500. “These are human beings who are given value,” she says, pointing to the only available document on the slaves who were held captive there.

The plantation, where “enslaved Africans, free Creoles of color, Acadians, and Native Americans lived, worked, and died,” is now popular for weddings and “historical and mystery tours.” “Your guide, an experienced paranormal investigator, will tell you terrifying stories about the slave revolt of 1811 and other ghosts that some say inhabit this former sugar plantation,” reads a promotional leaflet.

During their stay in the United States in 1831 and 1832, Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont were “painfully astonished that the freest people in the world should now be almost alone among civilized and Christian nations in still maintaining personal servitude.”

“The Ancients knew only chains and death to maintain slavery; the Americans of the South of the Union have found more intellectual guarantees for the duration of their power. They have, if I may express it thus, spiritualized despotism and violence. In Antiquity, one sought to prevent the slave from breaking his chains; in our days, one has undertaken to take away his desire to do so,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, calling for the abolition of servitude for ethical, political and economic reasons. “This is a crime against humanity that sullies the very principles of American democracy.”

At the beginning of the 19th century, the 1,500,000 people reduced to slavery were the driving force both of agriculture in the South and of the industrial success of the North, starting with the textile companies that were supplied with cotton grown by slaves in the fields of the South. The latter had no civil rights. At that time, American democracy, in addition to being masculine, was white…

Alexis de Tocqueville was convinced that the Union would experience “great misfortunes” if nothing was done. He feared not a conflict between the States, but a war between Whites and Blacks, “the most horrible of all civil wars,” which would perhaps culminate “in the ruin of one of the two races.” “[Slavery] will cease by the act of the slave or by that of the master. »

Nearly 30 years later, the election of Abraham Lincoln would serve as a pretext for the outbreak of the Civil War. The Emancipation Proclamation, making “now free […] all persons held as slaves” in the rebel states, issued on January 1, 1863, then the 13th Amendment, “abolishing slavery and involuntary servitude in the United States, except as a punishment for crime,” proclaimed on December 18, 1865, would wipe slavery off the map of the United States. (It would take another century for the Civil Rights Act, passed in 1966, to come into effect.)

The descendants of the Clotilda

The 110 passengers of the schooner Clotilda are considered the last slaves abducted in Africa and dragged by force to the United States.

In 1860, they were captured in West Africa, forced onto the Clotilda, disembarked in southern Alabama, separated, hidden, and then sold to cotton producers, even though the importation of slaves Africans have been illegal in the United States for over 50 years.

In the wake of the Civil War, they regained their freedom.

In 1866, 30 of them chose to buy a piece of land three miles north of downtown Mobile and found a unique community there: Africatown. They built about thirty wooden houses with brick chimneys, a church, a school, in addition to building a local government from scratch that set rules, conducted trials and inflicted punishments.

Africatown still exists today, housing some descendants of the community's founders.

Photo: Marco Bélair-Cirino Le Devoir John, who is enjoying a peaceful retirement in his Africatown home.

John says he is enjoying a peaceful retirement in his small home, which is surrounded by a Frost fence. When asked what the most pressing issue to address in southern Alabama is, the former trucker cites “the right to vote”… even before the rising cost of living.

Cats jump into the driveway before slipping between the wheels of his red pickup. “You want one ??” John asks, half-seriously.

Voter purges, long wait times at polling stations, inefficient processing of mail-in ballots and redistricting have made Alabama the second-least democratic state in the country, behind Mississippi, according to the think tank Movement Advancement Project (MAP).

Despite the challenges, Sally is vowing to vote on November 5 to curb Donald Trump’s authoritarian zeal, she says. “I’m scared. He wants to be the master of the United States, like Vladimir Putin in Russia,” the Cree-African-mixed-race woman says on the porch of her bungalow. “Harris would make a damn good president!” ” she adds, in a deep red state where voters supported Donald Trump by 62% in both 2016 and 2020.

Photo: Marco Bélair-Cirino Le Devoir A bust pays tribute to Cudjoe Kazoola Lewis, one of the passengers of the schooner Clotilda and the very last adult survivors of the slave trade between Africa and the United States, in the heart of the community of Africatown, in Alabama.

A few steps through the narrow streets of Africatown reveal an impressive mural of a two-masted schooner, the Clotilda, blackened tombstones from the Vieux Plateau cemetery, a monument to one of the last slaves, Cudjoe Lewis (1841-1935), and signs that read “Drugs Destroy Dreams.”

Crass racism, too.

If I look at the United States today, I see clearly that in certain parts of the country the legal barrier that separates the two races is tending to be lowered, but not that of morals: I see slavery receding; the prejudice that it gave birth to is immobile.

— Alexis de Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amérique