NEW IBERIA, Louisiana — On a humid September afternoon, wedged between high stalks of sugarcane and old tractors, Jamie Davis felt right at home. He had traveled 170 miles from Waterproof, Louisiana, a 91% Black town that’s home to 576 people, to New Iberia, a bigger city, on another Black-owned farm. There, Davis and a […]
Louisiana
Posted inHBCUs
At Southern University, Power Outages Are Turning College Life Into a Daily Struggle
BATON ROUGE, La. — Last month, Cherie Allen, an 18-year-old first-year college student, successfully accomplished what many teenagers struggle to do: wake up on time. She made the 8 a.m. shuttle bus that comes once an hour to take Southern University students to campus with some time to spare and arrived at her 9:30 a.m. […]
Posted inEnvironmental Justice
Federal Government Moves to Limit Public Input on Data Center Projects
Americans don’t agree on much, but that’s not the case when it comes to data centers. Seven in 10 Americans oppose building data centers for artificial intelligence in or near their communities. Despite this, the federal government is moving to make it easier for them to be built. And in some places, residents won’t even […]
Posted inEconomic Development, Environmental Justice, Politics & Policy
Meta’s Data Center Will Be the Biggest in the U.S., but No One Knows Who They’re Hiring
Across a rural pocket of cotton and soybean fields in northeast Louisiana, Meta, the eighth most profitable company in the world, is attempting to build America’s largest data center. The project, which is located in Richland Parish, an area home to three times as many Black residents as the national average, has seen its anticipated […]
Posted inEnvironmental Justice
In Roseland, an Oil Disaster Leaves Black Parents Asking How to Keep Their Kids Safe
ROSELAND, Louisiana — As a young boy in the 1960s, almost every weekend Elbert McGee walked a half-mile with his father through the wooded streets of Roseland to the Tangipahoa River. There, he learned to swim and fish for bass, crappie, and the occasional catfish. “We had a good, good life as children,” McGee said, […]
Posted inAir Pollution, Environmental Justice, Partner Content
Black Families Breathed Toxic Air as Chemical Companies Blocked Monitoring
This story is from Floodlight, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powers stalling climate action, in partnership with The Guardian and with contributions from The Louisiana Illuminator. Sign up for Floodlight’s newsletter here. Kimbrelle Kyereh lives just a few hundred feet from the massive chemical storage tanks in St. Rose, in southeastern Louisiana. Oily fumes […]
Posted inEnvironmental Justice, Religion
Meta’s $250B Louisiana Data Center Is the Most Expensive in U.S.
RICHLAND PARISH, Louisiana — Seen as far as 2 miles away, a white cross — the size of a 12-story building — welcomes you to this largely forgotten stretch of Delta country. While cotton no longer runs supreme here, every road, ballot measure, and industrial promise still has to pass the faith test that once […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment, Criminal Justice, Violence Against Women
How ‘Is God Is’ Is Changing the Conversation About Black Women and Domestic Violence
NEW ORLEANS — When Gretta Gordy Gardner was a prosecutor, she asked a domestic violence victim’s mother why she had testified for the man who hurt her daughter. The answer stopped her cold: It’s better to have a man who beats you than no man at all. “That made me understand the survivor so much […]
Posted inHealth
Historic Gene Therapy Gives Young Louisiana Man a New Shot at Life
On Monday morning in New Orleans, 23-year-old Daniel Cressy rang a bell inside Manning Family Children’s hospital and stepped into what he calls “Life 2” — a life, for the first time, free of sickle cell disease. His treatment using Casgevy’s CRISPR/Cas9, a gene-editing technology, makes him the first patient in Louisiana and the Gulf […]
Posted inHousing, Politics & Policy
In America’s Poorest State, Unhoused People May Soon Be Jailed
NEW ORLEANS — Louisiana Gov. Landry has signed into law what the National Homelessness Law Center says is “one of the cruelest anti-homeless bills in the country.” As the Louisiana state Senate debated what the National Homelessness Law Center says is “one of the cruelest anti-homeless bills in the country,” more than 50 mainly Black […]
