Freddi Williams Evans, project founder, author, independent scholar and arts educator, is internationally recognized for her scholarship on New Orleans’ Congo Square. Her book Congo Square: African Roots in New Orleans, the first comprehensive study of the location, received the 2012 Louisiana Humanities Book of the Year Award and is published in French. Her research and advocacy for the historic landmark influenced the New Orleans City Council Ordinance that changed the official name of the location from Beauregard Square, named after Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard in 1893, to the long-time popular name, Congo Square, in 2011. Along with numerous published essays and articles on the subject, she authored Come Sunday, A Young Reader’s History of Congo Square, which received the Independent Publisher Book Awards’ Bronze Medal in 2018 and was a finalist for the 2018 Next Generation Indie Book Award.
Working in the community, Evans co-chaired the New Orleans Committee to Erect Historic Markers on the Slave Trade to Louisiana, helped to erect the UNESCO Site of Memory Middle Passage Marker on the Westbank of New Orleans, and served on the New Orleans Legacy Project Committee.
She holds degrees in music and psychology from Tougaloo College, Tougaloo MS and a graduate degree in creative arts therapy (music) from Hahnemann Medical College and Hospital (now Drexel University) in Philadelphia, PA.
Website Developers
Newcomb Institute, Digital Research Internship
Lucien Mensah, M. A.
Wendy Yang
Kristen Osborne
Evan Henderickson
Rachel Tabor
Project Manager
Kelly Harris DeBerry, M.F.A, KHD Communications
Website and Graphic Designer
Justin Batiste
Advisors
Laura Rosanne Adderly, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
of History,
Tulane University
Jacquelyne Thoni Howard, Ph.D.
Administrative
Assistant, Professor of
Technology and
Women’s History
Joyce Jackson, Ph.D.
Chair, Professor,
Department of Geography
& Anthropology, Louisiana
State University
Zada Johnson, Ph.D.
Associate Professor,
Inner-City Studies
Academic, Program
Facilitator, Northeastern
Illinois University
Kara T. Olidge, Ph.D.
Former Executive Director,
Amistad Research Center
Clyde Robertson, Ph.D.
Director, Center for African
and African American
Studies, Southern
University at New Orleans
Matt Sakakeeny, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of
Music, Ethnomusicology,
Tulane University
Kalamu ya Salaam
Poet, Author, Filmmaker,
and Educator
Bryan Wagner, Ph.D.
Professor, English
Department, University
of California, Berkeley
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