Jo and Joy Banner: Reclaiming Home

Often, I'm going to conversation starts as I tell us about cancer alley. Why are you cancer alley? This is Joe Banner of Wallace, Louisiana. And I have to say wait, let me just back up and say this is my hometown. I grew up here. My great, great, great grandparents grew up here. We form and we have animals and I get to really enjoy nature. It's a beautiful place. And it's my home before it's cancer alley, before it's anything else is a home and a place that I love. This is Broken Ground, a podcast by the Southern Environmental Law Center. I'm Leanna first to write your host. Here at Broken Ground, we dig up environmental stories in the South and introduce you to the people at the heart of them. This season, we've been exploring the root causes of some of the environmental injustices that communities face throughout our region. This is our last episode for the year, but the digging continues online with SELC's multimedia storytelling series Plantations to Pollution. That communities legacy pollution in the path forward. I hope you'll check it out. Some of the deepest roots of environmental injustice and the most formidable resistance we've encountered are in Louisiana, along an 85 mile stretch of the Mississippi once known as plantation country. At one point enslaved labor is powered nearly 500 sugar cane plantations along the river's banks. Today, many of those plantations have been replaced by patchochemical plants, which have earned the area a pretty awful nickname, Cancer Alley. As these chemical plants have multiplied over the last half century, descendants of the enslaved who remained in the area have found their homes and neighborhoods increasingly hemmed in, degraded and cut off by these massive polluters. But now, a nonprofit called the Descendants Project and the twin sisters who run it are using the region's history to shape a more promising future. As they describe on their website, Dr. Joian Jo Banner founded the Descendants Project to preserve and protect the health, land and lives of the black descendant community in their area. This is joy. There are descendant communities that are still living nearby the places that enslaved their ancestors. Those places are still physically visible. The part of the landscape, we've had a vibrant plantation tourism market. Many of the plantations do not address the narrative of slavery and they do not address the living descendant community. And that's what inspired the Descendants Project. For listeners who might not have any familiarity with the river perishes in Louisiana, tell us a little bit about where you all are from and what some of the elements are that make you love it. How this is a lovely rural community along the Mississippi River bank. So we are a community as with the other river perishes that were inundated with plantations and inundated with sugarcane farms. But post-emantopation, people that were formerly enslaved and many of them who fought for the union for their freedom, they collected their resources together and formed communities on the outskirts of these plantations. And so you have free towns such as mine, Best Wallace, Louisiana, and at the small town of 800 people. This is Joe. Wallace to me is irreplaceable. I wake up every morning and just I'm surrounded by greenery. The birds are so loud sometimes. If I take a meeting outside, I have to go in because it's just constant chirping on me here. So it's very much just beautiful place and there's been a lot that we lost. I just want to remind everyone that still so much that we can save. Wallace is also home to the Whitney plantation. The nation's first plantation museum to be focused on the perspective of the enslaved, rather than the lives of the plantation owners. The banners ancestors were once enslaved there. Our roots are so deep, I joke, I can't step out of the house without tripping over a root. And the enjoyment a lot of time with our grandparents as our parents worked and we were able to learn a lot about our community, about the history around. And that's what we want to share. Part of that history, of course, is the area's rapid transition, primarily in the 1980s, from largely agricultural land to a quarter filled with heavy industry. The Wallace itself is part of an 11 mile stretch along the West Bank that has remained largely green and open so far at least. How is industry most visible or disruptive in your life today? Oh gosh, I am directly across from Atlantic aluminum, aluminum smelting plant. It's obnoxious. The red dust, the boxite that's used in the smelting process gets all over our homes, our cars, our plants. And that's what we can see. Can you imagine what we're not seeing? Yeah. I wake up with headaches, I have itchy eyes, I have breathing problems, just the cumulative impact of those different plants. All of it piles up and it really does pack a wallet. Despite the health effects they experience, the banners know that lots of folks here along the Mississippi live even closer to industrial facilities. And that's no accident. As we have these companies coming in that descendant communities descendant of enslaved who were living together as a village on these sites were either moved off of the site. Sometimes the sites we even chopped up to where industry is right through their communities. You open your front door and guess what's there? Heavy industry. You go to the side, you go to the playground, it's all around us. Joe is not exaggerating here. If you've never looked at a map of this area along the Mississippi River between Baton, Rouge and Orleans, I want to encourage you to do it now. In fact, we'll post a link on our website, brokengroundpodcast.org, to one of the best mapping resources we've found by a group called forensic architecture. It's striking just how squeezed these communities are between industrial sites. These black descendant communities are getting pollution first and worse. So the river parishes, our home is also known as cancer alley because of the high risk of cancer. But we could also be called heart attack alley, anxiety alley, sleep deprivation alley, because all of those health problems are impacting our communities. I know it serves a really important purpose in naming the phenomenon, but you ever get sick of being called cancer alley. Yeah, I hate it. I hate being called cancer alley. It hurts me because I would love to be on the other side. But I know that this moniker is important because it really does, it's supposed to wake you up. You know, if you look at the map of Southeast Louisiana, fall of the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, you see so many plantations and so many oil operations and petrochemical plants make the connection for us in terms of how that geography landed. Between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, there's approximately about 200 different plants along the river. The real plants are in the literal footprints of plantations. In many cases, plantation homes are still on the site, so you can see a plantation and it's surrounded by tanks and bridges across the road because that home is still on the property. The plantations have exactly what these plants needed, which was access to water, large acreage of land and also governments that supported our government that will subsidize it and also a government that looks the other way in many cases when their citizens are getting harmed to facilitate that business. So because that setup was established through the plantation system, these plants were able to come in and just essentially plug and play. Just to add on to what Joe was saying, by the time of the Civil War, no one could afford to be in the plantation economy except a small, small percentage. So this is Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos type of wealth, right? And because they have thousands of acres of land that then gets passed down to their descendants, when these industries come in, they don't have to negotiate with a thousand people to get a thousand acres. They may only have to negotiate with one person. day to sugar cane farm and the next day it can be whatever in our political leaders wanted to be. (gentle music) Four years ago, political leaders in the Banner's Parish set their sights on the Sugarcane Field next door, and they had a clear idea of what they wanted it to be. A massive grain operation, which would have included some structures as tall as the Statue of Liberty, and would have dubbed hundreds of tons of pollution, it would have wiped out our community of Wallace. (gentle music) The port of South Louisiana voted to lease that land to a company called Greenfield, Louisiana. The company plans to build a $600 million dock, grain elevator conveyor system, and silos there. - Dr. Reggie Roe. - Much of that infrastructure would be squeezed between the Banner's rural neighborhood and the Whitney Plantation Museum, three quarters of a mile away across the field. How's that even possible? (gentle music) Well, as with many environmental injustices, it came down to zoning, a seemingly boring bureaucratic tool that as we often talk about unbroken ground, has an outsized influence on who is forced to live with what? In this case, a Sugarcane Field was surreptitiously re-zoned from residential to heavy industrial 30 years ago. At the time, it was to woo a plastics company called Formosa. There was actually a whole corruption scandal around it. Formosa eventually withdrew its plans, but the industrial zoning, well, that was never changed back, so it butts right up against the Banner's neighborhood. - I don't even know if we could say a foot. It's like literally you just step from residential, zoning to boom, heavy industry. - Come on out. In response to Greenfield's proposal, which parish and state officials, enthusiasm has to be supported with tax breaks, the Banner sisters joined with their neighbors and brought the descendants project into the fight. - Listen to the message that we deserve better. Join us in the fight to stop the Wallace-Gray elevator. Visit thediscindanceproject.com today. - Hey, hey, hey, oh, howdy, we're just out of town. Along with other residents, the Banner's protested, the pressed town officials at public meetings, they even sued the parish for the zoning discrepancy. Anything that might help. - They say their preservation work and the emerging black history tourism that draws 100,000 visitors to Whitney each year are now threatened by a plan to build a 250-foot tall, gray elevator. - It's a right next to our homes. It would tower over us and it would block out the morning sun. - The Banner's say they're worried about potential health impacts. - Dust of the grain terminal would contain everything from rodent droppings to dead insects and pieces of metal, all of that we would be inhaling. (gentle music) - The company, of course, promised jobs plus donations to the community. They even provided $25,000 to help reopen a financially struggling museum at Woodland Plantation across the river. - And so now it was sort of a mitigation effect of life. Well, we're going to wipe out Whitney, we're going to wipe out this black disindic community, but hey, look, we have this other site that we're going to partner with. - Joe and Joy thought the offer was manipulative and frankly, unlikely to revive the struggling museum. But they did agree that the Woodland Plantation, where one of the country's largest slave revolts began in 1811 was worth saving. - Joe was very wise in telling me like, leave it alone, let it fail again. Let's start thinking about who are we going to reach out to for funding in order for us to be able to acquire Woodland Plantation. In the meantime, the fight against the Greenfield grain facility continued. Though local parish officials were itching to welcome the company, the Biden administration was more cautious. The US Army Corps of Engineers were repeatedly delayed issuing permits while it studied the potential cultural and environmental impacts on Wallace and the surrounding area. And the National Park Service hooped in as well, studying whether the last 11 miles of industry-free land on the West Bank, including Greenfield's proposed site, might qualify as a national historic landmark. That was a hugely hopeful sign as that designation would likely boost cultural tourism and help keep polluters out for the long term. - This 11 miles really gave us the opportunity to do the research and to dig into the history, to flesh it out, so to speak, and also understand, oh wow, we really can't sustain ourselves. If even just from the archaeology, from the research of it all, and then the way that it tracks out the people to the area. - After a three year long battle, at a community meeting in August of 2024, Greenfield made an announcement that surprised just about everyone. - This evening, Greenfield Louisiana announced its halting development for the $800 million facility in Wallace. (cheering) - Greenfield blames the permit process, saying the core is catering to special interests. Joe Banner strongly disagrees. - If you consider the health of my family, my community, and the preservation of my community, if this is special interest to you, have it. - Meanwhile, Governor Landry worries the move will hurt an already suffering community. - It's really disingenuous of those plantations on the levee, the stifle, an economic development project in a parish that needs it the most. (upbeat music) - In other words, for the governor, as for most politicians involved in these kinds of projects, it's all about a very narrow view of economic development. Not one focused on a thriving economy for the whole community, but rather on the short term success of a single company or industry. To which joy says, - What people often miss about slavery and about a plantation economy is that slavery was about economics and economic development. And so that was a design for people with the money to gain more money and less and less people to have access to it. And so we still have that same mentality today, but it is baked into our economic development strategies. And I say this as a farmer business professor, so I love economic development as long as it's smart and it's done with the community focus, but there's so much of our attitudes towards business where businesses will come in from any part of the world and just say, we're gonna bring jobs with no data to support it. - Yeah. - Who is going to be sacrificed for economic development and progress, right? Quote, quote, "progress." (upbeat music) - You know, when we're looking at present day environmental injustices like what you've described, Wallace and other river parish communities experiencing, why is it important to cultivate an understanding around the full history of how land and a place has been used in sort of the power struggles therein? - You know, I asked myself like, what was the point in our country? Where was it where we needed to make a turn? Like what event was it that we needed to understand so that we would not be in a situation that we were in now? And really, it was slavery. The idea that we're going to become inhumane all for the sake of progress and empire and colonization. When we were in reconstruction, there was an attempt by, you know, the radical Republicans and so many formerly enslaved people that were like, if you do not have justice for black people, you will not have justice for all of America. When we talk about woke and who was most woke, you know, there was radical Republicans and many of them were white who were saying the quote unquote, "wokest things," right? Of like black, brights and black justice equals independence for everybody. And if we continued along that path, attempting to keep justice and keep equality away from all Americans, that we were just end up in a position where we are doing stupid things, promoting policies that are killing us. Yeah. Learning African-American history, learning slavery is not just about the impact to black people, but it's impact to America as a democracy. With everything that is happening in a political climate, now that's literally changing, our by our and in many cases not changing for the better, I think it's important to understand the history because we're literally are seeing it still impacting our present day situations. This is Joe. History gives you instructions. And when you know your history and when you know your roots, that's an advantage because you can go back and you can see patterns. For example, billion dollar investors come in as a big idiot. tell you I know what you need. I mean my family's been here 300 years, 10 generations. What really can you teach me? It's great when we have these meetings like we've had opportunities where there's been permit applications and we've been able to sit across the table for example from Greenfield. They would save some things and we could knock them down within seconds. There's 600 dollar an hour plus lawyers. We would know it just knock them down so quickly because we knew our stuff. We knew our history. We knew the landscape. We knew what they're saying for lack of a better term with BS. I love that image. Just knock them down. It's this audacity that I love and this audacity to say you cannot push me around. I have been here. My family has been here. I'm not just a placeholder for my ancestors. I have my own future in history here too. So having a community to say that and to embrace that is a force field that power that you already have. You need to know your history in order to do that. The National Park Service seemed ready to honor that history. When last October it officially declared that 11 mile stretch of the West Bank near Wallace eligible for designation as a National Historic Landmark. But in a sign of shifting political winds, the Trump administration said never mind four months later. They actually withdrew the eligibility based on a request from the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality which despite its name is a huge proponent of industrial development. They framed it as we would be losing money by this. We were blocking business. Here's an opportunity. If we want to talk about the nickel and dime of it all, it's an opportunity for us to actually have land that has higher value unsubsidized unlike the industry that's put on top of us, the petrochemical companies. They have large tax breaks and subsidies. So we end up paying sometimes hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars per job in order to sustain that. So here we have an opportunity to bring more diverse businesses to have more diversity in economy. If we don't have a plant that's employing a hundred people but you have ten businesses employing ten people, two people lose a job is not a whole a full bust. Yeah right right and even like Louisiana tourism is at the third or fourth employer in the state. It's a multi-billion dollar industry. Yeah why are we sacrificing this for subsidized industry that's honestly losing money. Today Joe enjoy our leaning into a vision of a more diverse economy based on cultural tourism all while honoring the goals of the descendants project. Remember the Woodland plantation? The 1811 slave revolt ignited right here on the Woodland plantation. Two centuries later the Banner sisters were now the first black owners of the historic house and the four acre plantation is sits on. Through the descendants project Joe and Joy were able to raise the money they needed to purchase the Woodland plantation. They're now turning into an educational and community space when they hope will complement the Whitney Plantation Museum. We have a lot of people just visitors who really appreciate being able to go to the site where enslavement is discussed as openly as it is where there's not so much of an attention on just the building on a home so to antique they want more. We always find people who just want more. Of course the land next to the Banner's neighborhood is still owned by Greenfield and it's still zoned for heavy industry which means they need to keep tabs on what happens next. But if we're up to them what would they want to see happen there? We often hear let us build it out like we can make your land into something. For us it's the land is already something. The levy system is infrastructure, the waterways, the ditches that's all infrastructure. So understanding that we don't need to be built out it's already built there. And what's the opportunity when we the decision is for ourselves? This is Joy. Both of our dreams is for us to create some food forest in these sugar cane fields or to have sugar cane fields rewilded so return them back to nature. It's only a couple of years now where we've realized that sugar cane has been so exploitive and still so extractive and we still are dealing with the pollution from fertilizer from pesticides from the burning of sugar cane still all around us. That geography and that plantation logic of black communities still living within the parameters of plantations means that we are still getting the legacy pollution that comes along with historic sugar cane crops and fields that are literally hundreds of years old. When you think about the river parishes in Louisiana in say 20 years what do you envision seeing? We think of industry as heavy industry well 20 years and now when we say industry it's going to be culture inherited industry and those plants that we're fighting against are closed and we have the people that we need to be in office in office in fighting for that. More choice, more opportunity, more diversity and ultimately more liberation. I look forward to its renaming in 20 years once it's the cultural corridor that you've described. It's a good dream. Goodness will thank you again for all of your generosity of time and space and this has been really lovely. And thank you, Leanna, it's been a real pleasure and we just always so appreciate to have the story of our community and the well-being of our community uplifted. We need more moments like this and I appreciate you bringing the space for us to share what we love about our community and why we want to protect it. That was Joe and Joy Banner co-founders of the descendants project. That does it for this season of Broken Ground. If you'd like to learn more about any of the topics we've covered in the last few episodes including the Descendants project visit our website at BrokenGroundPodcast.org. There you'll also find links to SLC's multimedia storytelling series Plantations to Pollution. Black communities legacy pollution and the path forward. Broken Ground is a podcast by the Southern Environmental Law Center. One of the nation's most powerful defenders of the environment rooted in the South. It's produced by Emily Richardson-Lorente, Noah Gleenspan, Jenny Daly and me, Leanna first to ride with special thanks to Cobrag, Sam Lange and Priyama-Hadevan. Our theme music is by Eric Knutson. If you enjoyed this episode we'd love it if you'd write a review on your favorite podcast app. Thanks for listening!