My grandfather only went to New Orleans once. During World War II, he and his military buddies passed through the Crescent City for a night before moving on. With the time off, they decided to enjoy themselves and catch a movie.

Like nearly everywhere in the 1940s South, the segregated theater condemned the Black soldiers to balcony seats and rear entrances. He was accustomed to this, having been born to a sharecropping family and raised on a farm in North Carolina. He wasn’t as familiar, however, with the gong placed conspicuously down in the front of the theater. The movie was a comedy. During any humorous scene, my grandfather would learn, the Black viewers were required to hold their laughter until after the whites had finished theirs. The gong would sound, and the Black people, my grandfather included, would be free to express themselves. He vowed to never return to New Orleans.

He shared this story with me in early September 2005 as he and I sat glued to a television in his living room in a small town outside Greensboro.

It had been several days. They’re still on the roof. Why are they talking about them like this? How can the media get reporters on the ground, but evacuation crews are absent? All these Black faces. Why are they showing floating bodies on national television in the middle of the afternoon? How many days has it been?

Until then, Katrina was a nice name. Its abbreviated version, Trina, was a familiar sound on the New Jersey playgrounds where I grew up. Now it would forever be marred by water stains, death, and state- sanctioned neglect. A bad rap, really, because the hurricane was not itself directly responsible for the destruction that grew synonymous with its name. By the time it reached New Orleans, it was varyingly classified as a category one or two storm, of which the city had seen plenty.

The deluge that flooded the Big Easy was the result of cut corners, risky engineering, and losing bets — an outdated and insufficient levee system that engineers had been calling attention to for many years leading up to the storm. After all was said and done, the devastation was absolute: brick, mortar, spirit, memory.

Before the water receded and the breadth of the destruction could be rendered incomprehensible, I returned to New York — enraged — for my senior year in college. The federal government’s lethargic response to the needs of the people of the Black city of New Orleans, coupled with the media’s malicious depiction of survivors as looters and thugs, confirmed to me what I had long believed: We, Black people, are on our own. Kanye West’s impromptu statement that “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people,” when considered in conjunction with Bush’s foreign and domestic policies and practices, was a matter of fact that should have garnered attention only for its veracity.

So, once back in New York, I joined an organization working for the self-determination of the Black nation and began organizing directly with hurricane survivors evacuated to the Big Apple as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) threatened to terminate their funding in yet another demonstration of the government’s absent desire to protect its Black subjects.

I also doubled down on my studies of marronage in an attempt to develop viable solutions to the issues we were facing. I had spent the year before Katrina studying in Cuba, Ghana and Brazil, where I researched legacies of marronage, or the process and practices by which African people escaped from the dominant social and political order to build autonomous and independent communities.

What initially served as a historical boost of self-esteem— groups of Black people undermining the plantation order by reclaiming their autonomy and wreaking havoc on plantation owners — had grown into an unshakable series of questions: Why did African people from varying parts of the continent express their resistance to enslavement in remarkably similar ways? Why do historians and anthropologists only speak of marronage as a past phenomenon?

If the power relations that structure society have remained consistent — that is, Black people’s collective relationship to a white power establishment has not changed — could marronage prove useful for shaping our contemporary reality? What would that require?

I carried these questions into graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin. On my drive to Austin, two Augusts after Katrina, I spent my first night in New Orleans.

Growing up, I didn’t know much about the city. My father used to tell me it was shaped like a bowl with most of it below sea level; the ninth season of The Real World was filmed there, featuring a character named David who created the underground classic “Come On Be My Baby Tonight”; my brother and I, in our northeastern arrogance, refused to give Master P and No Limit a chance; and Mardi Gras had something to do with beads.

By the time I made it to Canal Street, however, the city had come to occupy my mind as an embattled terrain containing clues to understanding our relationship to both the African Diaspora and freedom.

A few days after arriving in Austin, I met Samori Camara, a New Orleans native in the history department with a commitment to the liberation of African people that matched my own. We became fast friends and began making regular trips to his hometown. When I completed my coursework, I moved to the city’s Algiers section. For the following three years I immersed myself in what is easily one of the most remarkable places I had ever been.

My new book, “Under a Black Star: The Maroon Impulse in New Orleans,” tells the story of a group of people whom I call the BlackStar community. They formed around and were associated with the sibling institutions of BlackStar Books and Caffé and Kamali Academy. They came from varying educational, geographical, philosophical and socioeconomic backgrounds but shared both an evolving identity and a common interest: a broadly defined, and often debated, idea of freedom.

While BlackStar sold books and coffee, its primary function was that of a gathering place. Kamali Academy was a systematic homeschool collective for K-12 students and offered an “education for liberation.” They were seeking liberation at most and autonomy at least. They engaged with various traditions of Black struggle in a dynamic blend of revolutionary and cultural nationalisms in a way that challenged false binaries and invigorated stale tropes. They debated ideas of Malcolm X, Ella Baker, Marcus Garvey, Elijah Muhammad, Queen Mother Moore, Amos Wilson, Toni Cade Bambara, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, Kwame Nkrumah, Thomas Sankara, and the various educational formations associated with the Council of Independent Black Institutions. They experimented with the effectiveness of revolutionary art. While their rhetoric was largely informed by the Black Power movement, their vision was set on a “Black heaven” lying somewhere in the future.

My grandfather passed away a few months after I moved to New Orleans in 2009. I never got to tell him about the city. He never found out about the people I came to know and love. He couldn’t know about the summer night’s air blowing through your hair as you drive down Elysian Fields Avenue. The way the sky turns purple at sunset over the Mississippi River. Wearing all white as a brass band plays Frankie Beverly and Maze. He didn’t know about the Mardi Gras Indians, social aid and pleasure clubs, the Black Panther Party’s standoff with the NOPD in the Desire Housing Project, Mark Essex, or Ahidiana. He would not know about Kamali Academy or BlackStar Books and Caffé, about Community Book Center, Ashé Cultural Arts, or the Burrito Juke Joint.

It was still wartime in America. Louisiana had one of the largest incarceration rates in the world. The homicide rates remained among the highest in the country. Carpetbaggers were flooding the city with capital to drive the locals away. The education system was being auctioned to the highest bidder through state- and private-managed charter systems. The city, as my grandfather certainly believed, was no paradise.

But I never got to tell him, in the face of all of this, what I discovered: that there was a centuries-long legacy of people whose laughter — and joy and movement and music and love and freedom — was not governed by the gong.

Adapted excerpt from Under a Black Star: The Maroon Impulse in New Orleans by Amari Johnson. Published by the University of Minnesota Press. Copyright 2025 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

This post was originally published on Next City.