Congo Square
Historic gathering ground where enslaved Africans once drummed and danced under a Sunday exemption in the law.
Location
About this audio guide
Congo Square in New Orleans was, for a century, the one place in the city where enslaved and free Black people were legally allowed to gather without a white owner standing over them, thanks to an 1817 law that herded every Sunday dance in the city to this patch of ground. The guide opens with architect Benjamin Latrobe's 1819 account of five or six hundred people dancing to drums he had never heard, and follows the vendors, musicians and dance traditions carried from Kongo and Senegambia that filled the square each week. Historians still argue over how many people gathered on an ordinary Sunday, since the era's written counts rarely bothered to name Black people as individuals.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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