Keywords for Black Louisiana

“The truth is like fire, you can’t sit on it forever”
- Ibrahima Seck

The stories of African and African descended people—family, culture, labor, resistance, survival, and day to day life—in eighteenth-century Louisiana appear in the colonial archive, sometimes where we least expect them. This digital project uses the scholarship of Black feminist scholars, historians, and public intellectuals to center Black and Black-Native life in French and Spanish colonial archives dating from 1714 to 1803. Foreground and engaging African and African descended people in the past opens doors to reimagine our histories, envision different futures, build new solidarities and points of connection, bridge gaps acros the diaspora, and turn an ear to a plethora of often-marginalized voices and perspectives.

We invite you to engage these stories through reading the documents, studying the keywords that identify important threads in the text, and checking out the resources we’ve developed to guide you through the project and highlight other work we love in, around, and about Black Louisiana.

Explore the documents.