ONE DAY LAST FALL, THE USUAL HUBBUB OF THE New Orleans French Quarter was interrupted by the cries of hundreds of people of color, dressed in nineteenth-century clothing, who marched through the city streets like a fired up militia. They banged drums and shouted “Freedom or death!” and “We’re going to end slavery!” It was a potent intervention that asked onlookers to remember the horrors of slavery and to see its contemporary forms in structural racism.
This was the work of artist Dread Scott, who staged his Slave Rebellion Reenactment on November 8 and 9. Produced by Antenna, a local nonprofit arts organization, the project reenacted the 1811 German Coast Uprising, in which more than five hundred enslaved people rose up in armed rebellion against multiple plantations in the farmland just west of New Orleans. The performance, which was filmed by John Akomfrah, involved hundreds of participants who walked twenty-six miles, retracing the route of the original uprising, starting in St. John the Baptist Parish and ending in New Orleans’s Congo Square.
