600 Beauregard Ave., New Orleans 70124
Originally named Fort St. John of the Bayou, this fort was constructed in 1701 by the French and maintained by the Spanish government because of the bayou’s strategic location. From 1823-1926, the Old Spanish Fort became a thriving entertainment district and hotbed for jazz with its own restaurants, hotels, amusement park, and casino. In the late nineteenth century, revelers and newspaper reporters from all over the country converged on the remote area near the fort in a futile search for garish Voodoo ceremonies. The popular image of Voodoo depicted black people as superstitious, savage, and a threat to democracy and was used to support limiting or the revoking the freedoms they had gained from the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. In reality, New Orleans Voodoo was a threat to the racial and gender hierarchies that upheld the city’s male-dominated, racially unequal society. The religion emerged in colonial Louisiana with the arrival of enslaved Africans and most likely reached its peak by the 1840s. It developed from a synthesis of different African religions with Native American spiritual practices and Catholic rituals and iconography. In the early 19th-century, Voodoo also incorporated features of Haitian Vodou brought to New Orleans by Santo Domingo refugees.
One unique feature of New Orleans Voodoo was that it was a predominantly women-led religion. Many of the Voodoo queens and priestesses came from the city’s quasi-independent class of free women of color who were entrepreneurs, property owners, and respected members of their communities. Ceremonies also attracted some white celebrants, primarily women, who were included in a sisterhood of black and white, enslaved and free women in search of holistic healing. Voodoo scholar Ida Fandrich explains that Voodoo appealed to women because “It offered powerful symbols of female god-imagery and strong role models for female religious leadership lacking in any other religious context at the time. Furthermore, its secretive nature granted its members the necessary anonymity to secure their social identities outside the ritual context while simultaneously homogenizing, or at times, reversing the class and racial privileges of the larger society during the ceremonies.” This secrecy was maintained because Voodoo ceremonies were held clandestinely in wooded areas, private homes, swamps, or marshy areas near Lake Pontchartrain on the outskirts of the city. Even the famed Voodoo queen Marie Laveau is reported to have owned a home in Milneburg, a nearby lakeside community.
Yet, even these clandestine activities were no longer safe by the 1850s. As part of a citywide effort to entrench the institution of slavery and strip free people of color of the limited rights and protections they had, Voodoo became a target for its potential to unite different races and social classes in a slave revolt. The economically independent and socially powerful Voodoo queens were singled out in a series of raids and arrests throughout the antebellum period. However, many of these women fought back, defiantly exercising their legal right to assemble and worship as they chose. For example, Betsey Toledano, a Voodoo high priestess, was arrested twice in 1850 for Voodoo dancing and violating laws banning mixed gatherings of enslaved, white, and free people of color. Toledano eloquently defended herself and proudly affirmed her right to continue the rituals that her grandmother had passed down to her from Africa. In the same year, police officers raided a “temple in the neighborhood of the lake” and arrested seventeen women accused of unlawful assembly. In a bold move, the women sued the police force for unlawful arrest, false imprisonment, extortion, and assault and battery. They insisted that they were respectable women who had not violated any civil or moral law by engaging in their secret religious rites. While it appears that they did not win any damages, the judge ultimately ruled that the women had not assembled illegally and dismissed the case against them. In 1863, twenty women were arrested for unlawful assembly and nudity. In protest, “more than four hundred women of all hues and colors of the spectrum, speaking several different African languages” demonstrated outside the courthouse. Dozens of women were fined when they refused to disburse after the police arrived. Days later, all charges against the Voodoo practitioners were dropped. As these examples show, Voodoo empowered women, especially women of color, to assert themselves, demand equal protection, transmit healing practices, form community, and resist racism and sexism even in the most repressive circumstances. The woman-dominated Spiritualist Churches that emerged in early twentieth century New Orleans are a legacy of these early Voodoo queens. [See Mother Catherine Seals]
To Learn More
- Ina J. Fandrich, “Defiant African Sisterhoods: The Voodoo Arrests of the 1850s and 1860s in New Orleans,” Fragments of Bone: Neo-African Religions in a New World, 187-207. Ed. Patrick Bellegarde-Smith (University of Illinois Press, 2005).
- Michelle Y. Gordon, ““Midnight Scenes and Orgies”: Public Narratives of Voodoo in New Orleans and Nineteenth-Century Discourses of White Supremacy.” American Quarterly 64.4 (2012): 767-86.
- Carolyn Morrow Long, “Perceptions of New Orleans Voodoo: Sin, Fraud, Entertainment, and Religion.” Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 6, no. 1 (2002): 86-101.