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Floods, hurricanes and globally rising waters may be the most common associations with Louisiana’s levees, but the 28.5-mile stretch of fortified Mississippi River banks in St. John the Baptist Parish have also born witness to centuries of history and three key movements of protest, including one of the largest slave revolts in America, a key Civil Rights student walk-out, and a 1970s push for interracial peace, love and community, all staged on a landscape facing constant threat.

History

French colonizers seized on the mouth of the Mississippi as both a tremendous asset and significant liability. In 1717, they began constructing levees to protect their fledgling southern center of commerce in New Orleans. The original levee was three-feet high and 5,400 feet long, according to . Colonial leaders encouraged landowners upriver to build their own levees, with much of that work shouldered by enslaved and indentured laborers. Beginning in the early 1720s the French recruited German immigrants to settle and develop a section of the Mississippi that became known as the “German Coast.”

Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase, finalized in 1803, grafted thousands of enslaved people into the American system.

On January 8, 1811, Charles Deslondes, an enslaved Creole overseer, led a two-day uprising of enslaved people at Woodland Plantation in LaPlace, Louisiana. The German Coast Uprising, as Deslondes’ movement would come to be known, ranks among the largest antebellum fights for freedom in the United States.

Estimates vary, but between 200 and 500 people participated. The marchers set off towards New Orleans in hopes of commandeering ships, freeing others or even taking the city, burning plantations and sugar cane fields as they walked along the levees. The marchers were eventually intercepted by the territorial militia and federal soldiers, which swiftly exacted retribution. Deslondes and others were executed on January 15 and some of those killed found their heads on stakes, like a scene out of Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” but on banks of the Mississippi rather than deep in an African jungle.

By 1812, when Louisiana gained statehood, the east bank levee stretched from Caernarvon to the bluffs near Baton Rouge.

For African American Louisianans, freedom from enslavement meant more freedom to worship. The baptism rituals developed by African American congregations merged Christian practices with Afro-Caribbean traditions, both closely linked to water. Clad in white, parishioners processed from St. John the Baptist Parish churches to the levee, singing spirituals as they walked.

These worshippers recognized that the Mississippi was both a source of life and a problematic economic engine. In 1879, the federal Mississippi River Commission took control of the levees, hoping that centralizing the system could limit damage when waters rose. By 1927, the average levee was 22 feet high, but catastrophic flooding still left nearly 23,000 square miles underwater, sending a clear message that the levee system needed to be raised and thickened.

In 1968, the fortified walls along the Mississippi River witnessed another act of protest. In the wake of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., students at the former Second Ward High School in Edgard, walked out of their segregated classrooms to protest subpar learning conditions. On paper, the “separate but equal doctrine” had been overturned in 1954, but change was hard fought in Louisiana.

In Edgard, African American students read from battered books and walked along the levees to school, while white students had buses and new materials. Two Second Ward teachers and coaches who fought for more resources were fired without cause, and state police were called out to the school to quell the protest that ensued. “Stand up and take part,” recalled student Virgie Johnson in 2020, at a reunion of Second Ward students.

Achieving interracial peace, love and harmony – as lofty as that goal may sound – was the aim of the next major movement set on the St. John the Baptist Parish levee, with music as the bridge that drew visitors and residents together. In 1972, former music mogul Eddie Edwards set up a tenement camp along the levee in Wallace. A jazz prodigy from generations of Creole musicians, Edwards enlisted in a U.S. Coast Guard band as a teenager, but eventually immigrated to Canada, where he encountered less discrimination than in the American South. He co-founded Music Canada, served as musical director for the 1967 World’s Fair in Montreal and recorded experimental jazz with his own ensemble, Duke Edwards and the Young Ones, and the band Rhinoceros.

“Better times are coming,” Edwards bellowed, . Two years later, Edwards sought to put that message into practice. He left Rhinoceros and set up a traveling commune of musicians and white-collar professionals. Not everyone welcomed “The Mud People,” as the band of hippies became known, but they spent 22 months in Wallace serving as ad hoc social workers and capped off their stay with a music festival. A , “Papa Dukie and the Mud People,” popularized the story of the encampment and the spirit of protest that has marked the levees of St. John the Baptist Parish for more than 200 years. “Make you wanna dance and cry and laugh and sing,” the band sings in a catchy refrain. “Down by the river, behind the levee.”