What is happening in our state (and our country) is appalling. As if the assault on Black votes weren’t enough, our state house actually voted yesterday to pull Confederate monuments out of storage. Meet the new Jim Creaux, though that seems like a sanitized name for the raw racism and cruelty that we are experiencing.

The people we work with along the Mississippi River are targeted for industrialization because of that same dehumanization that says Black votes, Black homes, and Black lives are not worth protecting. Yesterday, we were in court alongside Rural Roots Louisiana, applying pressure on the Ascension Parish government to release the records it has been withholding from us for nine months now. NINE MONTHS!

Back in September we asked for records about the parish plan to industrialize the community of Modeste out of existence. It’s May, and we have still not received a single piece of paper. The parish has a project called the RiverPlex MegaPark, and it includes at least three carbon capture pipelines, a 2.7-gigawatt gas fired power plant, a Hyundai steel plant, a CF ammonia facility and more. All this, yet the parish has for nine months refused to provide residents with requested information about the project.

Redistricting. Secrecy. Industrialization. We won’t stand for it. Jim Creaux is not welcome here.

Thank you for standing with us,

Anne Rolfes
Director

P.S. Gulf States Newsroom covered our post court hearing press conference yesterday. See reporter Drew Hawkins’ posts on TikTok and Instagram.

[Image caption: Representatives from Rural Roots, Centner for Constitutional Rights and Louisiana Bucket Brigade at a Press Conference outside of the Courthouse in Ascension Parish on Monday May 11th]