aWhen twin sisters Joy and Jo Banner founded their non-profit, the Descendants Project, in 2020, their goal was to protect the Black-founded “freetowns” in Louisiana’s river parishes. Like the Banners’ hometown of Wallace, many of the Black communities that abut the lower Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans were founded after emancipation by people who’d once been enslaved.
Today, decades of disinvestment have left freetowns vulnerable to predatory development, land theft and industrialization. The Banners hoped to reverse those trends. Yet within weeks of creating their organization, their purpose shifted dramatically. Instead of supporting other Black communities, the twins found themselves fighting for their own hometown’s survival. Wallace, population 1,240, was facing an existential threat in the form of the proposed construction of a gargantuan grain-export terminal, the latest in an onslaught of industrial growth along the lower Mississippi River. The terminal would “drain us of all of our resources and all of our quality of life”, Joy said. “The overall goal is to run all of us out.”
