A World Reborn — The Post-Emancipation Landscape and Preserving African American History

For most of the 20th century, you could drive the entire length of River Road and learn almost nothing about the people who built it. Kathe Hambrick came back to Ascension Parish in the 1990s and found exactly that — tens of thousands of visitors touring plantations where three centuries of Black life had been erased from the telling. She opened the River Road African American Museum in 1994, among the first in Louisiana to tell that story, and eventually moved it to Donaldsonville with its collection naming more than 5,000 enslaved people. Trial lawyer John Cummings spent 16 years and more than $10 million restoring Whitney Plantation, opening it in 2014 as the only museum in Louisiana built entirely around the experience of the enslaved. At Evergreen, 22 original slave cabins still stand in their 1860 double-row configuration — the most intact plantation complex in the South, on a highway most tourists never find.