The U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit Friday alleging that Louisiana and its correctional department continue to keep prisoners detained far past their sentences.

The lawsuit is aimed at both the state and the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections for confining incarcerated people for “weeks and months” after their legitimate release dates.

“Every person in the United States, whether incarcerated or otherwise, enjoys certain fundamental rights,” said Kristen Clark, assistant attorney general of the DOJ’s Civil Right’s Division. “Foremost among them is the right to individual liberty. The Founders were keenly aware of the potential abuse of power when government can arbitrarily take away a person’s freedom without a lawful court order specifying the period of their confinement.”

State department of corrections officials could not immediately be reached for comment.

Ongoing problem alleged

In a release, the Department of Justice said its lawsuit comes after a multiyear investigation into allegations of “systemic overdetention” in LDOC’s system.

In a report from January 2023, DOJ made Louisiana aware of the alleged conditions, providing written notice of the supporting facts and what the minimum necessary measures would be to remediate them.

The report was required under the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act, which also authorizes the DOJ to act when it believes an institution is depriving detainees of their constitutional rights.

“In this context, the right to individual liberty includes the right to be released from incarceration on time after the term set by the court has ended,” Clark said in the DOJ statement.

The lawsuit reportedly does not seek monetary damages, but instead “injunctive relief” to the ongoing conditions in LDOC’s institutions, outlined in the DOJ’s investigation.

The release says Louisiana has made “marginal” efforts to address the problem of overdetention, but the DOJ does not find them adequate, since the problem has allegedly been well-known to Louisiana for a long time.

“To incarcerate people indefinitely, as LDOC does here, not only intrudes on individual liberty, but also erodes public confidence in the fair and just application of our laws. The Justice Department looks forward to proving its case in court,” Clark said in the statement.

A report from the Louisiana Legislative Auditor earlier this year found that the Department of Public Safety and Corrections did not have an adequate review process to ensure changes to release dates are accurately calculated. An agency official said it was the fourth time the auditor’s office had made such a finding.

The corrections department disputed the findings at that time, asserting in a response that its review process was adequate and noting the auditor did not find any errors in the release date calculations it reviewed.

The land in Louisiana’s River Parishes is populated with lost families.

Unmarked graves of formerly enslaved people — sometimes totaling more than 1,000 in a single area — have been found in tree clusters in the middle of empty fields.

In 2018, Shell Convent memorialized the Bruslie Plantation and Monroe Plantation cemeteries, which had been found on its property. BASF completed a similar project in 2022, preserving a Native American burial site and cemetery of around two-thirds of the 300 enslaved people who lived and worked at what was once the Linwood Plantation.

And in October, research conducted by an environmental advocacy group identified five formerly enslaved people — Stanley, 31; Simon, 23; Harry, 18; Betsy, 18; and Rachel, 9 — believed to be buried on the site of the proposed Formosa plastics plant in St. James Parish.

Many of the graves are unidentified. And family histories in the region remain incomplete because of the lingering effects of the trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, from the unmarked burials to the recording of people as property — without names — in U.S. Census Bureau records from the era.

But the River Road African American Museum in Donaldsonville is working to help people uncover and repair some of those voids through quarterly genealogy workshops, which educate attendees on databases and ways to search for their history.

Untold stories

One such largely forgotten story is that of Lawrence Minor, who was enslaved as a child at the Linwood Plantation, where the BASF plant in Geismar currently sits.

Regina Bergeron, the museum’s former board director and a BASF employee, led the museum’s most recent workshop in early December. During it, she explained her role in BASF’s preservation of the cemeteries on its property and her research into Minor’s life.

“Learning about this is history … opens doors, and we can have more conversations about it,” she said during the session. “ … I run into a roadblock with the 18th century, and so (for) my peers to understand those challenges that I had as an African American just opens a door and some additional dialogue.”

The Linwood Plantation owner, Phillip Minor, had at least three children with an enslaved woman named Lucy, Bergeron explained. In his will, Phillip Minor left provisions for Lucy and her children to be freed.

“One of those children is Lawrence Minor. Lawrence was the first president of Prairie View A&M, and he was very influential in the Underground Railroad,” she explained.

Prairie View A&M, a historically black college in Texas, is the second-oldest public college in that state and one of its two land-grant universities, according to its website. Bergeron said she discovered Lawrence Minor’s story when Steve Kleinpeter, another member of the BASF project, sent her an old newspaper article he found.

“Steve actually found this article, and he saw that it was a Black man. And he said, ‘Well, this can’t be the same Minors that I’m looking for because this is a Black man,’” she explained. “And then when he read the article again, he said, ‘Maybe this is connected, it says this man came from a plantation in Ascension Parish.’”

He notified Bergeron early in the afternoon, and the two independently found Minor’s will that emancipated Lucy and her children around 3 a.m. the next day. From there, they reconstructed his tree using newspaper articles, and records from his bank and Oberlin College, which he attended.

Workshop in action

But reconstruction is difficult. Census records from 1850 didn’t record any names for enslaved people. Instead, they documented the enslavers’ name, and the age, sex and color of each person owned. Fugitive slave advertisements, which offered rewards for runaways and were posted in papers including The Advocate and Times-Picayune, usually only contained a first name.

“In 1859, if enslaved people were transferred from one plantation to another, they would get the name of the plantation owner from the prior,” Bergeron said during the workshop. “So if they came from the Harris plantation, they might have the name Harris.”

The workshops guide attendees through the building their ancestry trees and locating these disparate sources of information. Dawn Kaigler, of Gonzales, said the December workshop was her second as she was trying to reconstruct her ancestral tree.

“With my father’s family … they had already done theirs,” she said. “But I was looking to find out some information about my mom’s family because we’re still trying to piece together some information on that.”

Kaigler added that the previous workshop she attended included a presentation on the 272 enslaved people who Georgetown University’s Jesuit founders sold to two Louisiana sugar cane planters in 1838. In 2022, the museum opened a permanent exhibit in the Episcopal Church of Ascension in Donaldsonville about the sale. The Jesuit order formally apologized in 2017 to the descendants of the enslaved.

“We got information on that and where some of those families migrated to once those enslaved people were sold off to further areas in Louisiana,” she said. “ … They had a list of the names of the people who were descendants … it was really quite interesting.”

During December’s meeting, Kaigler said she was looking into her grandfather’s history.

“My sister and I had started looking into things for that, and we went to the Ascension Parish Library and … got some information on various databases to try to start finding things,” she said. “And we kind of did find a census document from when my grandfather might have been about 16-years-old or so.”

‘Stories are beginning to be become erased’

The museum, which celebrated its 30th anniversary this year, has another workshop tentatively planned for February, Executive Director L’Oréal Evans said. The museum owns five properties, including one of 400 original Louisiana Rosenwald Schools that were established to educate Black students between 1912 and 1932.

In the school’s bathroom, a quote attributed to Henry Brougham is framed on the wall: “Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive, easy to govern, but impossible to enslave.”

Evans emphasized that historical education such as the workshops are vital to understanding the region’s history.

“We’re at a very detrimental time right now in America, where stories are beginning to be become erased as we see people taking books off of shelves, burning books, destroying books. Saying that these books are not good for education, for the future of America,” Evans said. “But what we do is we collect and preserve those stories. And so, part of doing so means that we allow people to come in, trace their heritage, find out … what their past is and who their people are. And in doing so, they record their own history.”