The Tomb of the Unknown Slave monument outside St. Augustine Church honors the tens of thousands of enslaved African Americans who were murdered and forgotten in New Orleans — the only monument in the city acknowledging thousands of forgotten Americans buried under the foundations of the city.
Louisiana’s slave trade was particularly brutal given the extremely hot conditions and intense work. Overworked Black people would often die from heat-related illnesses while clearing fields or pulling sugarcane. It became routine for masters to dump dead bodies into random grave plots without markers. Today, there are upwards of tens of thousands of hidden resting places around New Orleans and Louisiana as a whole. Non-profit workers and other organization will likely never find them all due to the sheer number of hidden resting places, which could be anywhere from beneath highways to homes.
The grim, cross-shaped statue, the sole public fixture honoring the lost lives of enslaved people, depicts two intersecting chains. Separate rusting chains dangle at their length, appearing to represent the layout of plantations that often placed slaves in parallel chain gangs while doing field work. At the foot of the statue are five red tiles, representing the unmarked graves of those who were killed during slavery. In the more recent past, New Orleans officials have begun introducing public acknowledgments of the state’s harrowing Confederate past, with former Mayor Mitch Landrieu taking the biggest step in 2015 when he pushed city council members to remove four statues dedicated to white supremacists. This came only after a mass shooting at a Black church in Charleston earlier in the year renewed outrage over racism in the city…