Photo from the Library of Congress: Collins, Marjory, photographer. Lititz, Pennsylvania. Calf about to be slaughtered at Lutz's slaughterhouse. Pennsylvania Lititz United States Lancaster County, 1942. Nov. Photograph.

We have followed local struggles to sustain a healthy environment in New Orleans and Louisiana for many years. The recent campaign to stop the Alabo Street Warehouse conversion is part of that ongoing movement. 

Like the St. James historical sites cited in preservation efforts, the Lower 9th Ward is home to an important site of African American history, though it is not officially recognized. 

The warehouse is a landmark of the Slaughterhouse Cases of 1873, which began along the Mississippi River and led to a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court. 

Many 9th Ward residents worked at the Alabo Street Wharf, which began operations nearly 50 years later, in 1921. In the 1970s, the Port of New Orleans purchased the site to transport river and train cargo, including lumber, copper and sugar.

The wharf has been fairly quiet in recent years. The job market, too, has been muted in the area. But are poor health outcomes the cost that the 9th Ward must pay for more jobs? Grain dust, noise, increased traffic, and greater emissions from trucks and freight trains are not a healthy solution. 

Because of those potential hazards and more, current residents oppose the plan by Sunrise Foods International to convert the Alabo Street Wharf into the first U.S. dedicated organic port.  New Orleanians across the Parish widely support the demands of Lower 9 neighbors for environmental justice, recognizing that even a business supporting organic products can nonetheless impose a toxic footprint. 

Behind the current-day debate, what caught our attention is the Alabo Warehouse’s place within the city’s history. During the decade or so after the end of the Civil War, the land at North Peters and Alabo Streets became the upriver corner of a state-designated slaughterhouse, or abattoir, that stretched across the parish line into Arabi.  

Photo from Library of Congress: Advertising Painted on Windows of Butcher Shops View from Inside the Shop. New Jersey United States Paterson, 1994. -08-13. Photograph.

In 1873, race and public health were at issue in the Slaughterhouse Cases, the first U.S. Supreme Court decision interpreting the meanings of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, known as the Reconstruction Amendments because they abolished slavery, established birthright citizenship and due process, and gave Black men the right to vote. As interpreted in the Slaughterhouse Cases, the Court declared narrowly that Black Americans were the primary beneficiaries of these constitutional amendments.

The 14th Amendment played a prominent role in two other landmark Supreme Court cases with roots in the 9th Ward. In 1896, in the case Plessy v. Ferguson, the court again relied on the 14th Amendment, but only to the point where it ushered in the Jim Crow era, requiring that white and Black people be “separate but equal.” The ruling was a blow to a group called the Comité des Citoyens, or the Citizens’ Committee, which had called to alert police that Homer Plessy, a light-skinned shoemaker from the 7th Ward, would board a whites-only car at the Press Street stop, with hopes of successfully challenging the state’s “Separate Car Act.” 

Then, in 1954, the Supreme Court used the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause to undo Plessy’s “separate but equal” stance, dismantling racial segregation in public schools, which led to the 1960 desegregation of William Frantz and McDonogh 19 elementary schools in the 9th Ward.

But the Slaughterhouse Cases were the Supreme Court’s first interpretation of the 14th Amendment. The cases challenged public health laws passed by Louisiana’s Reconstruction legislature that closed hundreds of butcher shops, which kept animals and dumped their waste into streets and the river, affecting the city’s drinking water. Citing the spread of yellow fever and cholera, lawmakers closed neighborhood butcher shops and designated the Crescent City Livestock Landing & Slaughterhouse Company, in Orleans straddling the border of Arabi, as the exclusive communal site for all butchering in the metropolitan area. 

Because it was Reconstruction and new civil rights protections were in effect, Black and white butchermen worked in the Arabi facility.

White butchers in Arabi did not want to work alongside Black butchers doing the same work. They sued, claiming the law was illegal and discriminatory against white men. Justice Samuel Miller’s majority opinion decided that “the one pervading purpose” of the Reconstruction Amendments was to ensure “the freedom of the slave race, the security and firm establishment of that freedom, and the protection of the newly-made freeman and citizen from the oppressions of those who had formerly exercised unlimited dominion over him.”

Local Black butchers celebrated winning the right to work in slaughterhouses despite white butchers’ opposition.

Their victory was short-lived. With the end of Reconstruction, Louisiana’s 1879 constitution banned state and local monopolies. 

In 1884, white butchers in Butchers’ Union Co. v. Crescent City Co., 111 U.S. 746, defeated Crescent City’s challenge to the provision as racial segregation. Since the ban on local butchering remained in effect, Black-owned butcher shops could no longer carve their own cuts or sell their own products and were forced to buy meat from white producers. 

In today’s conflict, local opponents and their representatives are also up against a state facility, the Port of New Orleans. 

Redress for the 9th Ward, like the Black butchers 150 years ago, only seems possible through petitioning a higher power, in this case, state decision-makers.

Certainly, leaders at the Port must understand that, for 150 years, civil-rights fighters have been at the core of this neighborhood’s history. 

Once more, the health of the African American community is under threat by monied white interests. Sacrificing our health for jobs is an inequitable exchange. 

Dr. Chateauvert is a former professor of African American studies and history. Dr. Berry has a longstanding concern about environmental justice. As chief education official of the United States in the Carter administration, she led the United States delegation to the world’s first intergovernmental conference on environmental education organized by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) in Tbilisi, Georgia (USSR) in 1977. Thereafter, in her teaching and writing on legal history and social policy issues, and in her role as Commissioner and then Chair of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, she continues to pay close attention to environmental justice issues. One of her proudest achievements is the Louisiana Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights report on environmental justice in the state, published in 1993.