Congo Square

Congo Square is the southwest corner of Louis Armstrong Park, on North Rampart Street between St. Ann and St. Peter in the Tremé. In 1724, six years after New Orleans was founded, the Code Noir made Sunday a day of rest for everyone in the colony, enslaved Africans included, though it gave them no right to gather. They gathered anyway, and a city ordinance of 1817 limited assemblies of enslaved people for dancing to one site chosen by the mayor: this square.

Field hands, domestic workers, hired-out laborers and free people of color came on Sundays, in crowds of hundreds and by some reports thousands, and formed circles around the dancers and musicians. Drums were made from barrels and logs, and there were banzas, balafons, gourd rattles and panpipes. The dances included the Calinda, Bamboula, Juba and Carabine, and market women sold pralines, calas and ginger beer. The same ground was also used for slave sales and public executions. In 1864 more than twenty thousand people gathered here to celebrate the Emancipation Proclamation.

The city renamed it Beauregard Square in 1893 for a Confederate general, and the name Congo Square returned in the 1970s with the park; the City Council made it official unanimously in 2011. The first New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival was held here in 1970. The square today is about half its nineteenth-century size, and the park is at 701 North Rampart Street.