THE CORRIDOR: Episode 3

The Smoke of Progress

At the beginning of the 20th century, the corridor began a transition from one deadly industry to another— from sugar to petrochemicals. This transition wasn’t a coincidence. The history of industry intersects with the history of race in Louisiana all the way up to the present day. In this episode, we look at how and why petrochemicals came to the corridor. 

Guests

NICK MESSeNGER

BARBARA ALLEN

A sociologist of scientific knowledge at Virginia Tech, Dr. Barbara Allen’s research engages local residents of industrial areas in shaping public health and environmental science to promote stronger policy participation. In 2022 she completed a 10-year transformative participatory health project in one of France’s most polluted industrial zones near Marseille. In 2026, Allen and her team won the Prix de la recherche participative from INRAe, The French research institute for agriculture, food, and the environment. Her first book, Uneasy Alchemy: Citizens and Experts in Louisiana’s Petrochemical Disputes (2003, MIT Press), documented the dynamics between local residents and allied experts in the area. Currently, Allen and her team at Dillard University are completing the CoDA Environmental Heath Study, an NSF-funded participatory project that looks at patterns of health given industrial exposures in Louisiana’s petrochemical areas.

EVA BAHAM

Dr. Eva Semien Baham is a native of Welsh, Louisiana. She received her BA in Journalism from Southern University and her MA and PhD in American Studies/History from Purdue University. She was an associate professor of history for 21 years at Southern University and then spent the last seven years of her career at Dillard University, retiring in 2023. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, such as Louisiana History, Intersections, American Baptist Quarterly, African Americans in Covington, La Creole, and Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia.

REBECCA ALTMAN

Rebecca Altman is a writer, environmental sociologist, and a research affiliate at the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society at Brown University. Her work explores the environmental legacy and social history of plastics and associated petrochemicals. Recent work has appeared in The Atlantic, Science, Orion, Aeon and The Washington Post. Her first book, The Song of Styrene: An Intimate History of Plastics will be published next spring by Scribner (US) and Oneworld (UK). You can read her work at: www.rebecca-altman.com.

Credits

The Corridor is presented by Threshold and Auricle Productions. Jaha Nailah Avery is the lead reporter and host. Writing, mixing, and production by Erika Janik and Sam Moore. Music by Joy Clark and Todd Sickafoose. Executive produced by Amy Martin. Learn more and support the show at thresholdpodcast.org.

Transcript

[00:00] INTRODUCTION

AMY: You’re listening to The Corridor, presented by Threshold. To learn more and support our work, go to threshold podcast dot org.

JAY: There’s a town just upriver from New Orleans called Saint Rose. On the grassy levee there, a marker commemorates the town of Elkinsville. 

JAY: Its namesake was Palmer Elkins, a free Black man who founded the town in 1873. We don’t know much about Elkins. He was born around 1832, possibly in Louisiana, but he went north at some point. After the Civil War, he  came back to help newly emancipated people create a future for themselves. 

JAY: A big part of that vision were towns like Elkinsville: Freetowns.  Freetowns existed before the Civil War, but they grew dramatically after the war freed  about 4 million people from  slavery. Newly emancipated people founded and built communities throughout the South, often right on the edges of the plantations where they were once enslaved. In these communities, Black people owned property, operated businesses, and protected and enriched cultural traditions. Free towns helped people  survive racism, violence, and economic hardship. 

JAY: Elkins paid around $950 for 160 acres of land. He invited families to come and build a life together there, offering training and education. He also established Mt Zion Baptist Church, and the oldest Black Preacher’s Union, both of which still exist today 

EVA: There were a couple of things that would be at the root of what allowed Black people, African-descended people to survive, thrive and prosper. 

JAY: This is Dr. Eva Semien Baham, a retired historian at Dillard University. 

EVA: And that would be, one: their belief in education. Two, which is a biggie: land. Owning land. Three would be: owning their labor themselves, having had their bodies and labor owned for over 200-some years. Now they're saying, I want to own my own body and my own labor. 

JAY: In the tumultuous years after the Civil War, African American men, armed with new rights, began to vote and to run for office. And they won. Louisiana had one of the first Black governors and one of the first Black senators. There were Black mayors in Baton Rouge and Donaldsonville, and Black sheriffs, judges, and policemen all over the state. And like Palmer Elkins, many also bought land.

EVA: It's heartwarming sometimes when I watch Finding Your Roots and they're talking about somebody, a black person whose people bought land in the 1870s or so, and it's still in their families. 

JAY: In Destrehan, not far from Elkinsville, the Union Army turned one of Louisiana's largest sugarcane plantations into an agricultural colony that supported formerly enslaved people who were sick or injured. The army built schools and hospitals, and stationed Black soldiers there to guard it. Palmer Elkins spent time there too, working as a laborer and possibly as an educator. 

JAY: The new state government passed laws recognizing marriage between formerly enslaved couples. Records from this time are overflowing with new marriage certificates. And children, who had been born into slavery, finally became legally recognized as family, not property. 

EVA: So the parents marry, the father and the mother goes in, and the father writes down all of his children that they had during slavery, so that now they are legitimately ours…they are written into the document, that they appeared here, and these are my children. It just still gives me chills, that these are my children. These are my legal children. 

JAY: Black people were reclaiming and restoring what slavery ravaged...family, agency, culture…peace. Black communities in the River Parishes and all across the South knew  that a new world was possible, and they were building it as fast as they could. But as much momentum as they had, another kind of momentum was building among the people whose power had been stripped away by the Civil War. 

EVA: there were riots, violence inflicted on Black people all over the South, and outside of the South, too, but particularly in these slave states. Terrible acts of violence.

JAY: The legacy of this period, known as Reconstruction, shapes the culture of the corridor today. Its history of kinship and resistance, where communities were advancing and even flourishing,  makes people here proud. But it's how Reconstruction ended that got us to where we are today. 

EVA: Much of what has happened and what is happening is rooted in slavery, but more directly in reconstruction…if you want to understand the 20th century and now the 21st century, look through reconstruction….if we skip reconstruction and go straight to slavery, we obscure what was happening that set up the 20th century…the past is an indication of the present. 

JAY: And in the corridor, something happened at the beginning of the 20th century that shaped everything that would come next. It’s why plantations and petrochemical plants have so much overlap. And it’s why so many people in the River Parishes can draw a straight line from their history to their present. 

ARCHIVAL: Striking oil!

JAY: In this episode: how Louisiana traded one industry for another, and brought oil and plastic to the River Parishes. I’m JNA and this is The Corridor.

[07:10] A Segment

EVA: Louisiana was just, it was worse than many other places. And that's saying a lot because the other places were terrible.

JAY: This is historian Dr. Eva Semien Baham again.  Although violence against African Americans was terrible everywhere, particularly across the South, Eva says that Louisiana was especially brutal. 

EVA: The Knights of the White Camellias, in Louisiana, the Ku Klux Klan, all of these people were inflicting all this violence on formerly enslaved people, as well as people who had been free.

JAY: In the years after the Civil War, massacres happened in New Orleans, Shreveport, Opelousas, Bogalusa…pretty much all over Louisiana. 

EVA: There was also one in a place called Freetown, out near New Iberia…a place where formerly enslaved people had settled and...they had a thriving community there, taking care of themselves…They just about murdered everybody there…It just wiped out the town…

MUSIC

JAY: One of the defining moments of this era was the famous court case Plessy v. Ferguson, the case that established the doctrine of “separate but equal.” That happened here, in Louisiana. In fact, the “whites-only” train that Homer Plessy boarded was just a few blocks from where I got beignets at Cafe Du Monde. Plessy was a free person of color, or “gens de coleurs libre,” which was a legal and social designation in Louisiana. His case made it to the Supreme Court, but the justices ruled against him, legalizing segregation across the country. All over the South, the rights that Black people had won during Reconstruction were being clawed back. 

EVA: All these massacres I just talked to you about? They are rooted in voting rights…they were out there trying to prevent, effectively and successfully preventing these formerly enslaved people from voting. 

JAY: White Democrats did everything they could to keep Black people from voting in Louisiana, including perpetrating violence. In 1898, there were one hundred and thirty thousand registered Black voters in the state. Just six years later, there were less than a thousand. That’s more than a hundred times fewer voters! A big reason for this decline was a new state constitution that Democrats forced through in 1898. This new constitution solidified the Democrats’ power and made Black people second-class citizens. The new governor, Murphy J. Foster, campaigned for the constitution, and said when it passed: “The white supremacy for which we have so long struggled…is now crystallized into the Constitution.” 

JAY: At the government-run colony in Destrehan, freedpeople had grown sugar and cotton, and a hospital had cared for hundreds of the sick and injured. But when the plantation’s former owner, a high-ranking Confederate, received a pardon, he took the land back and evicted the freedpeople. Eventually, he passed the plantation on to his son, who kept it until 1914, then sold…to an oil company. 

JAY: And there, next to the big plantation house, next to slave row, a new kind of building went up: an oil refinery.

ARCHIVAL, LOWELL THOMAS: The Refinery with its modern structures, technological towers…and scientists wrest from the crude petroleum its tremendous power.

JAY: So, while Black political power was being thoroughly and brutally suppressed in the South, while rights were being stripped from the communities in the River Parishes, and after a new constitution had proudly written ‘White Supremacy’ into law, guess what new industry came to town? 

BARBARA ALLEN: One oppressive economy begets another.

JAY: This is Barbara Allen.

BARBARA ALLEN: I'm a professor in the Department of Science, Technology and Society at Virginia Tech’s Washington DC Campus. 

JAY: Barbara grew up in Louisiana, and she used to teach architecture in New Orleans. But a drive up the River Road to look at plantation homes with some historic preservationists changed everything for her. 

BARBARA ALLEN: And as we were driving along the Great River Road, I could barely look at the plantation houses because of the looming, enormous petrochemical plants which sat right behind them, in some cases just literally practically touching them. And I asked my colleague, you know, what's the story here? Why are these enormous chemical plants in the same space that the plantations used to be?

JAY: That question actually drove her back to school, and she ended up writing a history of how this area came to have so much heavy industry. 

BARBARA ALLEN: So it goes back pretty early where the oil companies and later the chemical companies were buying plantations and then using that land  for their facilities. And the reason that they bought the land from the plantation owners, the big white families, is because that family typically owned a large portion of land that they owned outright in the family name. 

JAY: So, these big pieces of land were perfect for industry, and the transactions were easy to make when one family owned the whole thing. 

JAY: But why did the plants want to come here in the first place?  Well, Louisiana had some of the biggest oil fields in the United States. And of course… the river. 

BARBARA: The plantations themselves had really good docking availability along the levee…what's termed in Louisiana as good Bachir. And that's from a French word, and I can't spell it, but that's what they call it. Batcher. is how you bring your boats in how you bring the ships in and dock it.

JAY: In many ways, southern Louisiana was perfect for the oil industry, almost like a petrochemical laboratory built by nature. It had the natural resources the plants depend on: oil, natural gas, water, and sulfur. It also had something else: vast underground caverns called salt domes, sometimes miles wide. These once held brine, and the plants used the salty water for industrial processing. Once the brine was gone, these empty caverns became storage tanks for oil and gas. These salt domes still store hundreds of millions of barrels of oil all over Louisiana. 

JAY: Just like the plantation economy, the oil industry was concentrated among a powerful elite. Standard Oil built a refinery in Baton Rouge in 1909. It soon became one of the biggest in the world. 

JAY: And these plants weren’t just producing oil—they made everything that comes from it…tons of synthetic products, including rubber and plastic, derived from petrochemicals. 

REBECCA ALTMAN: The story of plastics in the South predates the construction of the big petrochemical facilities, and it begins with the story of cotton.

JAY: This is Rebecca Altman. 

REBECCA ALTMAN: I'm an environmental sociologist who writes about the history of plastics and petrochemistry.

JAY: Although we think of plastics as synthetic, Rebecca says that many early plastics weren’t made from petrochemicals at all. 

REBECCA ALTMAN: Some of the early plastics even came from, like, uh... the waste off of meatpacking. There was like a blood-based plastic. There was a milk-based plastic. There was a lot of interest in agricultural waste-based plastics.

REBECCA ALTMAN: those kinds of plastics we would call today bioplastics…Made by the chemical and physical modification of things like rubber or cellulose. 

JAY: One of these early plastics was celluloid, which was used as movie film until the 1950s. Hollywood was built on celluloid. 

ARCHIVAL HOLLYWOOD BITE TBD

REBECCA: But when you really look at the history of celluloid plastics, where did it come from?

JAY: It came from cotton. And this wasn’t some big secret. If you watched an MGM movie in the 1930s, you’d see Black people picking cotton in the previews. 

REBECCA: Those plantations were already caught up in early plastics production. 

JAY: But fossil fuels unlocked whole new ways of making plastic.

REBECCA ALTMAN: Plastics developed along two parallel tracks, one in which industry figured out how to modify nature's polymers and make them useful and make them into industrial and commercial products. At the same time, chemistry was figuring out how to modify carbon molecules at the molecular level…You see those two historical tracks converge in the early years of the 20th century with Bakelite plastics. 

JAY: Bakelite. A material that was heat resistant, didn’t conduct electricity, and could be molded into any shape. If you have any vintage stuff, like an old camera, chances are there’s bakelite in there somewhere.

REBECCA: That is where we see the beginnings of that relationship between fossil carbon and plastics.

JAY: Bakelite was made from wood, alcohol, and coal tar. 

(ARCHIVAL) THE FOURTH KINGDOM: Two main raw materials: phenol, commonly known as carbolic acid, and formaldehyde. All we need is this burner, this flask, and this reflux condenser…and it so happens that these two chemicals have the natural tendency to react upon each other and combine. 

JAY: The synthetic resin that came out could be used for almost anything: bottle caps, jar lids, telephone handles, car ignitions, aircraft parts, and a bunch of other stuff

JAY: This new plastic was even used to make high-end jewelry: 

(ARCHIVAL) THE FOURTH KINGDOM: We consider it equal, if not better than the natural mineral.  “It’s beautiful! And how light, and so smooth and warm to the touch. But will it keep its fine appearance?” Yes, permanently.

JAY: In 1936, Standard oil built its first petrochemical plant in Baton Rouge. A decade later, there were hundreds of refineries and plants along the Mississippi, and more plants operating all over the world. 

(ARCHIVAL) THE FOURTH KINGDOM: A world circling empire of plastic. 

(ARCHIVAL): Miraculous developments…to make us more prosperous in peace, and more powerful…in war.

JAY: World War II kicked off huge government investment in oil, gas, and petrochemicals. 

REBECCA ALTMAN: You start to see this more mass conversion to using refinery by-products from oil and gas production. 

JAY: By the 1960s, the tangle of oil, gas, and chemical pipelines on the Gulf Coast was so thick it earned a nickname: “the spaghetti bowl.” But I think of it more like an ecosystem—one plant’s byproduct is another plant’s feedstock, and the pipelines are like roots moving resources at every step. As chemists created new substances, they also created new byproducts. These new byproducts created even more new substances. And all of this became a loop that made products cheaper and cheaper until petrochemicals had taken over huge parts of our daily lives. 

JAY: That feedback loop fueled a postwar consumer bonanza. 

(ARCHIVAL) DUPONT: You see, it's not how much money you've got. It's what you can buy with it. Better things for better living through chemistry. 

JAY: All kinds of natural materials were systematically replaced by plastics, synthetic fibers, and other man-made products. 

(ARCHIVAL) THE MAGIC BARREL: The first successful general purpose synthetic rubber ever made. Plastics like polyethylene. Packaging materials like cellophane. Mylar, polyester film. Thousands of products. Asphalt shingles. Upholstery material. Refrigerator enamel. Paints. Thinners. Lacquers and varnishes. A bowling ball. Horseshoes. Squeeze bottles.

JAY: Made with the help of…petrochemicals.

REBECCA ALTMAN: These plants are making synthetic fibers, synthetic dyes, synthetic sweeteners, you know, synthetic textiles, right? Like they're making the synthetic versions of what was made using enslaved labor. Right. Cotton, indigo, sugar. You know, now we're getting synthetic textiles, synthetic sweeteners, synthetic dyes.

JAY: By the 1970s, according to Rebecca Altman, industrial plants in the U.S. were producing more plastic than steel. If you were a chemical engineer or an oil executive, you were living large. It was an oil rush, and champagne flowed like oil at company picnics, in big mansions, and at political fundraisers. 

(ARCHIVAL) DUPONT WORLDS FAIR SONG: You know we all had a smile on that started with nylon… 

JAY: But if you were living in the shadow of these plants, it was a different story entirely. Because these plants didn’t just produce new products - they also produced dangerous byproducts. 

ARCHIVAL MEDLEY: Benzene; Chloroprene; Ethylene; Toxic Gas; Dangerous Chemicals

REBECCA ALTMAN: Yes, this industry was global. Yes, this industry involved toxics. Yes, it involved extractive harms and human rights violations. From the beginning. 

JAY: By the 1980s, Louisiana had earned a new distinction: the most polluted state in the country. And when other countries got  fed up with their own pollution, some of them moved it to Cancer Alley. In the 1980s, a Japanese diplomat told the press: “We will put these high pollution industries where there is space and water enough to handle them, like here in the South."

JAY: Along with all this industry came explosions and other toxic disasters. Docks and storage areas along the Mississippi also meant many people lost access to the river, a primary feature of this landscape. The side effects of industry were obvious, but for many communities here, the benefits were not. Here’s Virginia Tech’s Barbara Allen again:

BARBARA ALLEN: the chemical corridor was not a boon to the people who lived around it. 

JAY: Morrisonville, a town founded in 1870 by formerly enslaved people, lasted through Reconstruction, through Jim Crow, the civil rights movement, and through the years that followed as refineries sprang up right next door. But in 1989, Dow bought out the whole town. The last person to sell was the deacon of the town's small church. The original Morrisonville now sits beneath a huge petrochemical complex that covers more than a square mile of the riverbank. Residents were relocated to new subdivisions named after the town where they once lived - Morrisonville Estates and Morrisonville Acres. A similar fate befell the freetowns of Sunrise and Reveille. 

JAY: The story of the petrochemical industry in Louisiana is sometimes told in a way that makes it feel natural. After all, the plants were meeting a demand, and the conditions here were perfect. But plants didn’t just end up here; they were brought here. And as we’ve seen, it wasn’t Black people who brought them. In 1922, there were less than six hundred Black voters registered in the whole state of Louisiana. By 1964, two thirds of Black voters still weren’t registered. And into the 1970s, some people were still living on plantations in the same old slave row quarters that their ancestors had. 

JAY: But despite all these injustices, many Black people wanted to stay and continue to build a life here. This was their home and they had a history that extended back generations. Here’s Dr. Baham again:

EVA: In the River Parishes many of the people who are still there, if not the majority of them, are African-descended people…So you have a huge population of people who remain there, and who were kept out of voting rights and the like, but they kept fighting. 

JAY: Memory is still so vivid here in the corridor, maybe because history feels like it keeps repeating. And sometimes, the people caught up in those cycles are generations of the same family.

JAY: After the break: how Louisiana sweetened the deal for industry at the expense of the people who live next door. 

Break

[24:40] B Segment

JAY: Welcome back, I’m Jaha Nailah Avery. OK, so the next part of our story is about taxes. I know, I know, nobody wants to talk about taxes, and most of the time, I don’t either! But they are an important part of why oil, gas, and petrochemicals made their way to  Louisiana.  

JAY: Because…I mean… plants do bring money. They create jobs, especially when they’re being built. They donate to schools, libraries, and hospitals, and they do make money…and plenty of it. But there’s one thing they don’t do much of here in Louisiana: pay taxes. 

NICK MESSENGER: Louisiana has a tax exemption program that…I would use the word generous, but not in a positive way. It is extremely, extremely, large. It gives away a lot of local property tax revenue, to large corporations, without really any accountability. 

JAY: This is Nick Messenger, an economist with the Ohio River Valley Institute, who has studied the tax breaks Louisiana gives to industry. 

NICK: The state gives an incredible amount of tax benefit to these corporations from local revenues. And these are revenues that fund public safety services, fire departments, they fund road construction and infrastructure. They go to schools. 

JAY: States have a lot of tools to attract new business: some do it by making their state an enticing place to live, with good roads, schools, public transportation, and housing, all stuff that is generally funded by tax dollars. But a lot of states also promise to waive taxes for new businesses that create jobs, which, as Nick said, can actually take money away from those local services. 

NICK MESSENGER:  So tax exemptions are something that pretty much every state in the country does. Cities do them, counties do them. So you see this a lot in areas where things have gotten pretty bad economically.

JAY: Nick says that tax exemptions are seen as a kind of a quick fix for places looking to grow their economy. And on one level, it does seem like it's worked in Louisiana. 

NICK MESSENGER: Louisiana has the highest GDP per capita from the petrochemical industry in the country. Higher than Texas, higher than California. 

JAY: GDP, or gross domestic product, is how economists measure economic production. It’s a number they assign to a place’s total economic output. 

NICK MESSENGER:…so every barrel or every shipment of chemicals that a factory makes counts towards the parishes’ GDP.

JAY: And Nick says that if that GDP were evenly divided it would mean good things for the people who live in the parishes that make all this stuff. But of course, GDP isn’t divided equally among everyone who lives in a state or parish. It’s a measure of the economic power of a particular spot on a map, not the power of the people who live there. The plants are producing goods that are valuable to the world, like oil, chemicals, and steel, but the value of that production is concentrated in the corporations that own the plants. Not much is going to local wages or to tax dollars that can fund public services. 

NICK: They're producing chemicals, they're producing steel, they're refining oil. They're doing all these things that the rest of us need to function in our society. But the workers aren't necessarily benefiting any extra because of that.

JAY: Almost every Black person I interviewed who lives in the corridor mentioned this exact thing - that the plants regularly bring in workers from other parishes or even other states to work the best jobs. 

JAY: The data backs them up. A recent study found that the majority of jobs in the petrochemical industry in Louisiana go to white people - even though BIPOC people  are nearly 70% of the workforce in places like St John the Baptist Parish.  Similar patterns play out in other parishes in the Corridor.  

NICK: What it means is if you are in Saint James Parish and you are a taxpayer, your public services are losing money to help bring a factory to your parish. But the value of that factory get on the highway and drive to the next door parish at the end of the workday. And that might be where they go grocery shopping and go to restaurants and pay their taxes. And so then, if you're a parish in Cancer Alley, you got a factory, you got pollution. You suffer the consequences of declining home values near the plastic factory. You're giving away your tax dollars, and your neighbor might be the only one who really benefited. 

JAY: This isn’t a new thing either. Here’s someone saying the same thing back in the 1990s. 

PAUL TEMPLET, ARCHIVAL: We've got a bad setup here. We grant huge subsidies to these big corporations.

JAY: This Paul Templet, and he isn’t just any citizen saying this kind of thing —he was the head of the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, the same agency now touting the value of industry to the state. 

PAUL TEMPLET, ARCHIVAL: they get very cheap energy, they're allowed to pollute more than any other state, and we have a tax structure that's very regressive, so we tend to tax the people of Louisiana and not these big corporations.

JAY: So how did this happen? It’s not like most people here voted to invite a plant into their community and give it these huge tax breaks. A lot of people here weren’t even allowed to vote when the first plants were being built. And really, nobody was voting on these tax breaks at all.

NICK MESSENGER: The other thing that makes Louisiana's program really quite different is that it's centralized. This is not a case where an individual parish says, hey, we have an idea. We think we want to recruit Exxon Mobil to come to our parish. This is a case where a ten person board, the Board of Commerce and Industry in Baton Rouge, gets together, reviews an application.They don't review them very thoroughly. And then that state board says you will exempt your local revenue to this company that wants a tax incentive to come to our state. 

JAY: Louisiana’s tax exemption program began in 1936, the same year that Standard Oil built its first plant in Baton Rouge. That program remained unchanged for the next 80 years. 

NICK: For residents in that section of the state between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, known as Cancer Alley, this is one of the reasons that so many polluting industries are concentrated in those parishes. So, one, you're polluting the environment and B, you're polluting the environment for largely black residents of the state.

JAY: When industry first moved into the state, some politicians tried to channel Louisiana's fossil fuel wealth into the public good. 

JAY: Huey Long, the state’s most infamous governor, battled Standard Oil’s business monopoly throughout his political career. In 1929, he tried to raise taxes on fossil fuels to fund social programs. As you might imagine, oil companies weren’t too happy about this, and they led an effort to impeach him. The politics got so intense that bloody fistfights broke out on the floor of the Louisiana House of Representatives.

NICK: When you go all the way back to the 1930s, when this program first started, Louisiana was ahead of a lot of the other southeastern states in the United States, economically, when you talk about income per capita in the state. 

JAY: Even though these plants got exemptions from property tax, the state still got a lot of tax money from each barrel of oil and gas. By the 1950s, this revenue allowed Louisiana to spend more on schools, hospitals, and other social programs than almost anywhere else in the country. So much so that conservative politicians were soon complaining that Louisiana was a ‘welfare state.’ 

JAY: Nevertheless, in the parishes of St. James and St. John, average income was still way, way below the poverty line, and local jobs were scarce. Many of the remaining sugar plantations consolidated and mechanized, so even farm labor was hard to come by. Meanwhile, white supremacist violence was so rampant that local NAACP chapters struggled to stay active outside New Orleans. Baton Rouge had no active chapter for several years. Here’s a local civil rights activist, A.Z. Young, at a protest in 1967:

ARCHIVAL, AZ YOUNG: You take our boys and throw them in Vietnam. These same boys can’t walk the streets in Louisiana and Mississippi and around, and feel free to walk the streets. We’ve been beaten, we’ve been pushed around. The fact that I can’t walk the streets like any other man, gracefully, upright, this is absolutely a disgrace to humanity. 

JAY: In the 1960s, governor John McKeithen made industrial development a top priority. He dubbed Louisiana “The Right to Profit” state, and he met with business leaders around the world urging them to relocate to Louisiana. He ran full-page newspaper ads urging industrial plants to “Fill The Air With The Smoke of Progress.”

MCKEITHEN 1964: We have a moral duty to prosperity, and inescapably, to ourselves. 

JAY: And all this worked: the tax breaks, the river, the abundant oil and natural gas…state and local officials were eager to rezone land from agricultural and residential to heavy industrial use. If you were involved in anything synthetic, Louisiana was a pretty sure bet. 

(ARCHIVAL) 1954 RADIO: Some 85% of all of the petrochemicals manufactured in the country are manufactured in the area around Houston, Texas, and along Louisiana Gulf Coast.

JAY: Plant after plant broke ground, built by some of the biggest companies in the world: Dow, Dupont, Union Carbide, Monsanto [mon-SANN-toh]. But even though Louisiana attracted more industry, its economy didn’t grow as fast as neighboring states.

NICK MESSENGER: You fast forward into the 80s, 90s and now the 2020s, and Louisiana is behind those same states. You know, other states like South Carolina, Georgia, have grown faster than Louisiana, without giving away as much money….

JAY: As more and more plants moved in, some people began to question the promises made by the state and by the plants. Instead of getting better, they felt like their lives were actually getting…worse. 

NICK: If you build it, they don’t always come. Because the reality is people want to live in a, you know, high quality neighborhood in a, in a clean environment, in a place where they can raise, you know, their families or have friends and go to restaurants and parks and, all these amenities, all these quality of life things. Especially younger people.... the reality is that giving a bunch of tax incentives away to large multinational corporations doesn't really do much to help.

JAY: The economic benefits weren’t being shared, and the people who lived in the corridor were stuck with the pollution and the health problems that came with each new plant. And Louisiana politicians kept promising more and more industry. Here’s Barbara Allen again. 

BARBARA ALLEN: The current and projected growth in the petrochemical industry in the state, I think that's surprising given all the decades of environmental injustice. 

BARBARA ALLEN: I feel that this growth is really ignoring all the people that live along Cancer Alley, that live in those refinery zones, which are basically a spine going up all the way to Shreveport.

JAY: But not everyone felt that way about the growth of industry. Here’s the president of the Louisiana Chemical Association, in 1992: 

DAN BORNET: God didn't give us the white beaches that he gave Florida. He didn't give us the three Miss Americas that he gave Mississippi. He gave us dead dinosaurs. He gave us fossil fuels. And from that fossil fuel base has come oil refineries and has come the chemical industry that’s followed the barrel of oil, and the MCF of gas. Even with those huge tax exemptions, which we don't argue with, even with those, there is still a huge economic spin off from this industry in this state.

JAY: Louisiana got another industry booster in the governor’s office in the 1990s. A man who began his career as a sugar planter before developing close ties to the petrochemical industry. He too ran big newspaper ads that invited industry to relocate to Louisiana. 

(ARCHIVAL) MIKE FOSTER: Today we celebrate a new freedom in Louisiana. Freedom from excessive government and mindless regulations.

(ARCHIVAL) CAMPAIGN AD: It’s morning in Louisiana.

(ARCHIVAL) MIKE FOSTER: Please come to Louisiana, give us some jobs.

JAY: That governor’s name: Mike Foster. The grandson of Murphy J. Foster, the governor who, 100 years earlier, had championed the white supremacist constitution of 1898.

(ARCHIVAL) MIKE FOSTER: A century ago my grandfather stood here and took the same solemn oath I’ve taken today. The history of this moment doesn’t escape me, rather it overwhelms me. Despite his vision, I doubt that he could have seen that a century later, his grandson would stand here and take the same oath of office. Louisiana has been good to me and my family. 

JAY: As governor, Mike Foster was extremely pro-industry. He was against environmental regulations, or really, any regulations at all. And he lived in a big house that he had personally renovated: Oaklawn Manor, a former sugarcane plantation where more than three hundred people had lived, worked, and died in slavery.

(ARCHIVAL) LPB INTERVIEWER: Sugar cane, oil and gas, hunting and fishing. Those are sort of the holy trinity of Louisiana, if you will, South Louisiana. And you’re involved in all those things, are you not?

(ARCHIVAL) MIKE FOSTER: Yeah I guess so…you can’t live down here and not be part of it. 

JAY: So the governor who brought Louisiana out of the 20th century and into the 21st was the grandson of the one who brought it out of the 19th into the 20th. The younger Foster  was really popular. He was adamantly against affirmative action, and very much in favor of an economy based on extraction. And he got the endorsement of someone that arguably swung the election in his favor: David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. 

EVA: Power was at the center of all of this. 

JAY: Here’s historian Eva Semian Baham again.

EVA: People who had power prior to this were not willing to concede it. In the post-Civil War black legislatures, in local elections, you see it in the 1866 massacre in New Orleans, this white nationalist white supremacy. You see it all the way through integration, you know, Brown v. Board and then the resistance to it, into 50s, 60s and 70s … I would suggest to you that it is still about maintaining power.

JAY: That unwillingness to concede or even share power ended Reconstruction after only eight years. But for those eight years, it seemed like the United States might actually try to right some of the wrongs inflicted between 1619 and 1865. For those eight years, Black people began to imagine and build a different future. But that future never happened. Reconstruction ended, and power returned to the same people who’d had it before the Civil War. 

BARBARA ALLEN: So the plantations are kind of, they're the residue of this whole system that's now churned and churned, this really oppressive economic system that we have. And now they have at the top of the vat, these awful plants. So I look at them as evidence of the system that came before and the fact that we're still in that loop, that loop of powerlessness, of racial inequity, of income inequity. It just seems to be a continuation.

JAY: The more I learned about what happened in Louisiana after the Civil War, the more it seemed like this is how things go here: people struggle for decades to open up these windows of opportunity, and again and again, that window slams back shut. 

JAY: But if I’ve learned anything from all this history, it’s that the window never closes all the way; and once we’ve looked through it, we can’t forget what we’ve seen.

JAY: Next time on the Corridor: 

KIM TERRELL: People think like, oh, well, what did you expect when you moved in next to an oil refinery? That's not the way it went down. Especially along the Mississippi River…The community has been there for almost 200 years…And that giant petrochemical terminal was built in the 20s. For 100 years, they've been impacted by petrochemical pollution.

Credits

AMY: The Corridor is presented by Threshold and Auricle Productions. Jaha Nailah Avery is our reporter and host. Writing, mixing, and production by Erika Janik and Sam Moore. Music by Joy Clark and Todd Sickafoose. I’m executive producer Amy Martin. Learn more and support the show at thresholdpodcast.org.

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