Congo Square

Congo Square is one of the most consequential small plots of ground in American cultural history, and its story is inseparable from slavery. Under the Code Noir and the ordinances that followed, Sundays were the nonwork days of colonial and antebellum New Orleans, and it was on Sunday afternoons that enslaved people, hired-out workers, and free people of color gathered to make music, dance, trade, and practice the religious beliefs they carried from Senegambia, the Bight of Benin, Kongo-Angola, and the Caribbean, including the beliefs that informed Voudou in New Orleans. In 1817 the city confined all such assemblies of the enslaved to this one square. Gatherers came by the hundreds, sometimes by the thousands, forming circles of dancers and drummers whose rhythmic patterns, as Freddi Williams Evans and many scholars since have traced, sit at the core of New Orleans jazz, second line, Mardi Gras Indian music, and the brass bands of jazz funerals.

The square's afterlife carries both honor and erasure: renamed for a Confederate general in 1893, reclaimed in the 1970s with Louis Armstrong Park, officially named Congo Square by city ordinance in 2011, listed on the National Register in 1993, marked by the Preservation Society in 1997. It sits now inside Louis Armstrong Park, about half its historical size, where on Sunday afternoons the drums still sound, a continuity the Congo Square Preservation Society keeps and guards. Visitors should come as witnesses rather than tourists: this is ground where people held onto their humanity under a system built to strip it, and where the music that came out of that holding-on is still being played.

Visiting

Congo Square sits in the southwest corner of Louis Armstrong Park, on North Rampart Street between St. Ann and St. Peter in Treme; it is open park space with city park hours. The New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park partners on Congo Square programming, and the Preservation Society's Sunday drum gathering is informal and ongoing.

Photo: fred, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons ([source](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:New_Orleans_-_Congo_Square.jpg))