Mossville was a community of free Black families before the Civil War — one of the oldest in Louisiana, founded in the 1790s by formerly enslaved people who built farms, churches, and schools on the prairie north of Lake Charles. For nearly two centuries, Mossville persisted as a self-sustaining settlement. Then the petrochemical plants arrived. By the late twentieth century, fourteen industrial facilities ringed the community. Residents documented elevated cancer rates, respiratory illness, and contaminated water. In 2013, South African chemical giant Sasol offered buyouts to acquire land for a $21 billion ethane cracker complex. Most residents took the money. Mossville, as a place, is gone — replaced by industrial infrastructure. The story is one of the starkest examples of environmental racism in the American South. In Lake Charles proper, Carver Courts tells a different but connected chapter. Built in 1959 by the Housing Authority as 44 brick duplexes for Black families during legal segregation, the development was nominated to the National Register in 2018 under Criterion A for Social History. It is still occupied — a rare example of postwar public housing that survived the demolition waves that erased similar developments across the South. Black Lake Charles has always existed in the tension between building something permanent and watching external forces threaten to erase it. That tension has not resolved.
