Share and Follow
-
One pulled into the manicured grounds of a former slave plantation that has been transformed into a popular tourist site and hotel in St. Francisville, Louisiana, where visitors pose for wedding photos under old live oaks draped with Spanish moss.
As a reporter watched, a West Feliciana Parish van emblazoned with “Sheriff Transitional Work Program” pulled up. Two Black men hopped out and quickly walked through the restaurant’s back door. One said he was there to wash dishes before his boss called him back inside.
The Myrtles, as the antebellum home is known, sits just 20 miles away from where men toil in the fields of Angola.
“Slavery has not been abolished,” said Curtis Davis, who spent more than 25 years at the penitentiary and is now fighting to change state laws that allow for forced labor in prisons.
“It is still operating in present tense,” he said. “Nothing has changed.”
