Tomb of the Unknown Slave — St. Augustine Church

The iron cross hung with shackles stands in a garden plot on St. Augustine Church property — installed in 2004 to memorialize enslaved Africans buried in unmarked graves across Tremé. The parishioners who designed it placed it here because this ground was the site of the Tremé Plantation House, where enslaved people lived for centuries. St. Augustine was founded by free people of color who organized in the 1830s and received permission from Bishop Antoine Blanc to build a church. The Ursuline Sisters donated the property on the condition the church be named for their patron saint, Augustine of Hippo. When word spread that free people of color had begun purchasing pews for their families before the October 9, 1842 dedication, white residents launched a campaign to buy more pews. The free people of color bought three pews for every one purchased by whites, then bought all the pews in both side aisles and gave them to enslaved people as their exclusive place of worship — the first time in the history of slavery in the United States that slaves had dedicated space in a church. One large row of free people of color, one large row of whites, two outer aisles of slaves: the most integrated congregation in the country. New Orleans was the largest port in the Southern United States throughout the 19th century, exporting most of the nation's cotton — which means most of the nation's enslaved labor passed through here as commodity or as the people who grew it. Tremé is one of the oldest Black neighborhoods in America. The tomb names what the export numbers never did. The church hosts a weekly Gospel Jazz Mass on Sundays. Go to that first, then walk outside to see the memorial in the context of what was built to survive it.