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Local group holds remembrance of trans-Atlantic slave trade [1]
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Date: 2025-07-03
Shaddai Livingston has had her hands full this week—organizing contracts for artists, submitting paperwork and talking with the press— preparing for an event held to commemorate the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
This Saturday (July 5), the Ashé Cultural Arts Center will lead a procession in remembrance of the horrors of the slave trade that will start with an interfaith ceremony at Congo Square at 8 a.m. From Congo Square, drummers, dancers, musicians and other attendees will march through Tremé to the Mississippi River, stopping along the way at sites important to the story of slavery in New Orleans. The commemoration, called MAAFA, is open and free to the public.
“When you’re in that procession and you hear those drums, and you’re going to all of these different stops and you’re hearing these stories, it’s really a beautiful experience,” Livingston, chief creative officer at Ashé, told Verite News.
But the event, which is in the 25th year, is happening amid heightened attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion that she said threatens the work groups like Ashé do to preserve Black history. While planning the event this year, her organization and others in the nonprofit sector, which relies on grants to fund operations, have been mindful of the current political climate while figuring out how to help people confront the truth — no holds barred.
“The truth is we were an oppressed people,” Livingston said. “We’ve gotten where we are now by overcoming oppression and continuously challenging ourselves to overcome oppression.”
One way the center is helping the public unearth the truth of slavery and its legacy is through this weekend’s event. The word “maafa” comes from Swahili, and it can be translated to mean disaster, tragedy, or in this context, the great tragedy. For the Ashé Cultural Arts Center, that great tragedy is the horror of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and the commemoration is meant to honor and remember the ancestors lost during that time period.
Gabrielle Edgerson, the chief experience officer at Ashé, said that it’s a positive way for the Black community that lost so much due to the slave trade to come together.
“I would call it overwhelming, and not in a negative way,” she said. “You just feel washed over in ancestry and history.”
The trans-Atlantic slave trade, which lasted for over three and a half centuries, was a massive international practice where Europeans brought over ten million African people bought from slave traders or stolen from their communities to the Western hemisphere. When importing slaves from other countries was abolished in the United States in 1808, cities like New Orleans continued to receive slaves from states in the upper South in a domestic slave trade that saw over one million enslaved people displaced. New Orleans was the largest slave market in the country during the domestic slave trade before the abolition of slavery, and the economic boom from slavery played a key role in building the city.
The planned route for the procession will stop at sites such as St. Augustine Catholic Church and the Tomb of the Unknown Slave — sites pivotal to the history of Black New Orleans. The procession will end at the Regional Transit Authority’s Canal Street Ferry terminal for the official unveiling of a collaborative mural there, followed by additional activities at the river such as speeches and a river offering for ancestors.
As part of the lineup for the 25th anniversary of the city’s Maafa commemoration, Ashé is also hosting two exhibitions that opened on June 28 and are set to remain at the center through October.
For Saturday’s procession, the drummers, dancers and musicians are planning to leave Congo Square at 9 a.m., and the event at the ferry terminal is set to last until 12:30 p.m.
“I don’t even know if I can put a word on what it means for me and what it means for community,” Livingston said. “It really is just something that you would have to experience.”
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