Jo and Joy Banner: Reclaiming Home

BROKEN GROUND SEASON 8

Jo and Joy Banner: Reclaiming Home

 

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Jo Banner: Often, um, when a conversation starts, it’s like, ‘Tell us about Cancer Alley. Why are you Cancer Alley?’  

HOST: This is Jo Banner, of Wallace, Louisiana. 

Jo Banner: And I have to say, wait, let me, let me just back up and say, this is my hometown. I grew up here, my great-great-great grandparents grew up here. We farm 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, it’s a home and a place that I love.  

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HOST: This is Broken Ground, a podcast by the Southern Environmental Law Center. I’m Leanna First-Arai, 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. 

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HOST: 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: Black Communities, Legacy Pollution, and the Path Forward.” I hope you’ll check it out.   

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HOST: 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 laborers powered nearly 500 sugarcane plantations along the river’s banks. Today, many of those plantations have been replaced by petrochemical plants, which have earned the area a pretty awful nickname – “Cancer Alley.”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. Joy and Jo Banner founded the Descendants Project to “preserve and protect the health, land and lives of the Black descendant community” in their area.  

Joy Banner: This is Joy. There are descendant communities that are still living nearby the places that enslaved their ancestors. Those places are still physically visible, they’re part of the landscape.  We’ve had a vibrant plantation tourism market, and many of the plantations do not address the narrative of slavery, and they do not address the living descendant community. And that’s, you know, what inspired the Descendants Project.  

Leanna First-Arai: For listeners who might not have any familiarity with the river parishes in Louisiana, tell us a little bit about where y’all are from and what some of the elements are that make you love it. 

Joy Banner: Wallace is a lovely, rural community along the Mississippi River bank. So we are a community, as with the other river parishes, that were inundated with plantations and inundated with sugarcane farms. But post-emancipation, people that were formerly enslaved and, and many of them who fought for the Union Army 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, um, that’s Wallace, Louisiana, and that’s a small town of 800 people. 

Jo Banner: This is Jo. Wallace to me is … to me, it’s irreplaceable.  

Leanna First-Arai: Mmm. 

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Jo Banner: I wake up every morning and just, I’m surrounded by greenery. Um, the birds are so loud sometimes if I take a meeting outside, I have to go in because I just, it’s just constant chirping, um, you hear. So it’s very much just beautiful place. And there’s been a lot that we lost, but I just wanna remind everyone there’s still so much that we can save.  

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HOST: 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 Banner’s ancestors were once enslaved there. 

Jo Banner: Our roots are so deep, I, I joke I can’t step out of the house without tripping over a root.  

Leanna First-Arai: [laughing] 

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Jo Banner: Me and Joy spent a lot of time with our grandparents as our, 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.  

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HOST: Part of that history, of course, is the area’s rapid transition, primarily in the 1980s, from largely agricultural land to a corridor filled with heavy industry – though Wallace itself is part of an eleven-mile stretch along the West Bank that has remained largely green and open. So far, at least. 

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Leanna First-Arai: How is industry kind of most visible or disruptive in, in your life today? 

Jo Banner: Oh gosh, it’s, um … I am directly across from Atlantic Aluminum, a aluminum smelting plant. It’s obnoxious. The red dust, the bauxite 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?  

Leanna First-Arai: Yeah. 

Jo Banner: 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 wallop. 

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HOST: 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. 

Jo Banner: As we have these companies coming in, the descendant communities, descendants of the enslaved, who were living together as a village on these sites were either moved off of the site. Or sometimes the sites were 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. 

HOST: Jo is not exaggerating here. If you’ve never looked at a map of this area along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, I want to encourage you to do it now. In fact we’ll post a link on our website, Broken Ground Podcast dot-o-r-g, 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.  

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Jo Banner: These Black descendant communities are getting pollution first and worst. 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. 

Leanna First-Arai: I know it serves a really important purpose in, in naming the phenomenon, but do you ever get sick of being called Cancer Alley?  

Jo Banner: 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, it’s supposed to wake you up.  

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Leanna First-Arai: You know if you look at the map of southeast Louisiana and follow 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. 

Jo Banner: Between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, there’s approximately about 200 different plants along the river. Industrial plants are in the literal footprints of plantations. In many cases, the plantation homes are still on the sites. So you can see a, a plantation and it’s surrounded by tanks and bridges across the road because that home is still on the property.  

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Jo Banner: The plantations have exactly what these plants needed, which was access to water, large acreage of land, and also governments that support it or government that will subsidize it. And also a government that looks the other way in many cases when, um, their citizens are getting harmed to facilitate that business. So because that set up was established through the plantation system, these plants were able to come in and just essentially plug and play.  

Leanna First-Arai: Right. 

Joy Banner: Just to add on to what Jo 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 the Jeff Bezos type of wealth, right? And b ecause 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. One day it’s a sugarcane farm, and the next day it can be whatever industrial site our political leaders want it to be. 

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HOST: Four years ago, political leaders in the Banner’s parish set their sites on the sugarcane field next door. And they had a clear idea of what they wanted it to be.  

Joy Banner: A massive grain operation, which would’ve included some structures as tall as the Statue of Liberty and would’ve dumped, you know, hundreds of tons of pollution. It would’ve wiped out our community of Wallace.  

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Chief Investigative Reporter David Hammer, WWLTV: The port of South Louisiana voted to lease that land to a company called Greenfield of Louisiana … The company plans to build a $600 million dock, grain elevator, conveyor system, and silos there. 

HOST: 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?  

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HOST: Well, as with many environmental injustices, it came down to zoning – a seemingly boring bureaucratic tool that, as we often talk about on Broken Ground, has an outsized influence on who is forced to live with what. In this case, a sugarcane field was surreptitiously rezoned 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. 

Jo Banner: 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.  

Leanna First-Arai: Wow.  

HOST: In response to Greenfield’s proposal – which parish and state officials enthusiastically supported with tax breaks – the Banner sisters joined with their neighbors, and brought the Descendant’s Project into the fight.   

Announcer, Stop the Wallace Grain Elevator!: Let’s send a message that we deserve better. Join us in the fight to stop the Wallace Grain elevator. Visit the descendants project.com today. 

Hey hey, ho ho, Greenfield’s got to go! 

HOST:   Along with other residents, the Banners protested, they pressed town officials at public meetings, they even sued the parish for the zoning discrepancy. Anything that might help. 

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David Hammer, Chief Investigative Reporter, WWLTV:  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 grain elevator.  

Joy Banner: It’s right next to our homes, it would tower over us and it would block out the morning sun.  

David Hammer, Chief Investigative Reporter, WWLTV: The Banners say they’re worried about potential health impacts.  

Joy Banner: Dust of the grain terminal, um, would contain everything from rodent droppings to dead insects and, and, you know, pieces of metal. All of that … we would be inhaling. 

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HOST: The company, of course, promised jobs, plus donations to the community. They even provided $25,000 to help re-open a financially struggling museum at Woodland Plantation across the river. 

Joy Banner: And so now it was sort of a mitigation effect of like, well, we’re going to wipe out Whitney, we’re gonna wipe out this Black descendant community, but hey look, we have this other site that we are going to partner with.  

HOST: Jo 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.   

Joy Banner:  Jo was very wise in telling me, like, ‘Leave it alone, let it fail again. Let’s start thinking about who are we gonna reach out to for funding in order for us to be able to acquire Woodland Plantation.’  

HOST: 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 U.S. Army Corps of Engineers repeatedly delayed issuing permits while it studied the potential cultural and environmental impacts on Wallace and the surrounding area. And the National Park Service swooped in as well –  studying whether the last eleven 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. 

Jo Banner: This eleven miles really gave us the opportunity to do the research and to dig into the history, to flesh it out, so to speak, and then also understand, oh wow, we really can sustain ourselves if even just from the archeology, from the research of it all. And then, you know, the way that it attracts other people to the area. 

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HOST: After a three-year long battle, at a community meeting in August 2024, Greenfield made an announcement that surprised just about everyone. 

Devin Bartolotta, Anchor, WWLTV: This evening, Greenfield Louisiana announced it’s halting development for the $800 million facility in Wallace. 

[shouts of joy] 

Brandi B. Harris, Reporter, WBRZ: Greenfield blames the permit process, saying the Corp is catering to special interests. Jo Banner strongly disagrees. 

Jo Banner: If you consider the health of my family and my community … and the preservation of my community, if that’s a special interest to you, have it.  

Lee Zurik, Anchor, WVUE Fox 8: Meanwhile, Governor Landry worries the move will hurt an already suffering community.  

Governor Jeff Landry: It’s really disingenuous of those plantations on the levee to stifle an economic development project in a parish that needs it the most. 

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HOST: 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 … 

Joy Banner: What people often miss about slavery and about a plantation economy is that slavery was about economics and economic development. 

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Leanna First-Arai: Hmm. 

Joy Banner: And so that was the 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, as a former business professor, so I, I love, you know, economic development as long as it’s smart and it’s done with a 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.  

Leanna First-Arai: Yeah. 

Joy Banner: Who is going to be sacrificed for economic development and progress, right? Quote unquote “progress”?  

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Leanna First-Arai: 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 and sort of the power struggles therein?  

Joy Banner: 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 the situation that we’re in now? And really, it was slavery. The idea that we’re gonna become inhumane all for the sake of progress and empire and colonization.  

Leanna First-Arai: Mhmm. 

Joy Banner: 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.’  

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Joy Banner: You know, 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, the, quote unquote, wokest things, right, of like Black rights 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 would just end up in a position where we are doing stupid things, promoting policies that are killing us. 

Leanna First-Arai: Yeah. 

Joy Banner: Learning African-American history, learning slavery is not just about the impact to Black people, but its impact to America as a democracy.  

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Joy Banner: With everything that is happening in the political climate now  that’s literally changing hour by hour and, in many cases, not changing for the better, I think it’s important to understand the history because we literally are seeing it still impacting our present day situations. 

Jo Banner: This is Jo. 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, um, billion dollar investors come in as if they can tell you, ‘I know what you need.’ I mean, my family’s been here 300 years, 10 generations. What really can you teach me?  

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Jo Banner: It’s great when we have these meetings, like, we’ve had opportunities where, um, there’s been permit applications and we’ve been able to sit across the table, for example, from Greenfield. They would say some things and we could knock them down within seconds. Their $600-an-hour-plus lawyers, we would know, and just knock ’em 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, was BS.  

Leanna First-Arai: I love that image. Um, just knocking them down. [laughing] 

Jo Banner: It’s this audacity that I love. And this audacity to say, ‘You cannot push me around.’ 

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Jo Banner: I have been here, my family has been here. I’m not just a placeholder for my ancestors; I have my own future and history here too. So having a community to say that and to embrace that, it’s a force field, that power that you already have.  

Leanna First-Arai: Hmm. 

Jo Banner: And you need to know your history in order to do that. 

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HOST: The National Park Service seemed ready to honor that history when, last October, it officially declared that eleven-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. 

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Jo Banner: They framed it as we would be losing money by this, that we were blocking business. 

Leanna First-Arai: Hmm. 

Jo Banner: Um, here’s an opportunity, if we wanna 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, uh, 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, um, in order to sustain that. So here we have an opportunity to bring more diverse businesses, to have more, um, diversity in our economy. If we don’t have a plant that’s employing a hundred people, but you have 10 businesses employing 10 people, if 10 people lose a job, it’s not a whole, um … 

Leanna First-Arai: A full bust.  

Jo Banner: Yeah.  

Leanna First-Arai: Yeah, sure. 

Jo Banner: Right. Right. And even, like, Louisiana, tourism is, I think, third or fourth employer in the state. It’s a multi-billion dollar industry, yet  why are we sacrificing this for a subsidized industry that’s honestly losing money? 

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HOST: Today, Jo and Joy are 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? 

Faith Abubey, Reporter, ABC News:  The 1811 Slave Revolt ignited right here on the Woodland Plantation … Two centuries later, the Banner sisters are now the first Black owners of the historic house and the four-acre plantation it sits on. 

HOST:  Through the Descendants Project, Jo and Joy were able to raise the money they needed to purchase the Woodland Plantation. They’re now turning it into an educational and community space – one they hope will complement the Whitney Plantation museum. 

Jo Banner: We have a lot of people, just visitors, who really appreciate being able to go to a site where enslavement is discussed as openly as it is, where there’s not so much of an attention on just the, the, building or the homes or the antiques. They want more. We always find people who just want more.  

HOST: Of course, the land next to the Banners 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 it were up to them, what would they want to see happen there? 

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Jo Banner: 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.  

Leanna First-Arai: Hmm. 

Jo Banner: Uh, the levee 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, um – the decision is for ourselves? 

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Joy Banner: This is Joy. Both of our dreams is for us to create some food forests in these sugarcane fields, or to have sugarcane fields re-wilded, 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 perimeters of plantations means that we are still getting the legacy pollution that comes along with historic sugarcane crops and fields that are literally hundreds of years old. 

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Leanna First-Arai: When you think about the river parishes in Louisiana in say, 20 years, what do you envision seeing? 

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Jo Banner: We think of industry heavy industry. Well, 20 years from now, when we say industry, it’s gonna be culture and heritage 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, and fighting for that. More choice, more opportunity, more diversity, and ultimately more liberation. 

Leanna First-Arai: I look forward to its renaming in 20 years once it’s the cultural corridor that you’ve described.  

Jo Banner: That’s a good dream.  

Leanna First-Arai: Goodness. Well, thank you again for your generosity of time and space and this has been really lovely. 

Joy Banner: Well, and thank you Leanna. It’s been a real pleasure. And we are just always so appreciative to have the story of our community and the wellbeing of our community uplifted.  

Jo Banner: We need more moments like this and I appreciate you bringing the space for us to, to share what we love about our community and why we wanna protect it. 

HOST: That was Jo and Joy Banner, co-founders of the Descendant’s Project. 

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HOST: 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 Descendant’s Project, visit our website at Broken Ground Podcast dot o-r-g. There, you’ll also find links to SELC’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, Noa Greenspan, Jennie Daley, and me, Leanna First-Arai. With special thanks to Ko Bragg, Sam Lenga and Pria Mahadevan. Our theme music is by Eric Knutson. If you enjoyed this episode, we’d love it if you’d write us a review on your favorite podcast app. Thanks for listening. 

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