Entry · catalog no. 5016
Congo Square
/ /ˈkɑŋɡoʊ skwɛr/ /KONG-go SKWAIR
proper noun · New Orleans, Louisiana · 1810s
✓ Verified
1.
The plaza at the back edge of the old French Quarter, beside Rampart Street, where enslaved and free Black people met on Sundays and holidays through the late colonial and early American period to sell goods and to dance and drum in African-rooted forms. The site now lies within Louis Armstrong Park.
“Her family's stories about Congo Square were older than any street sign there.”
Origin & Attribution
The Sunday gathering grew out of the late colonial custom that allowed enslaved people a day off to trade and socialize at the edge of the city. In 1812 the authorities reserved the ground where Fort St. Ferdinand had stood as a Place Publique, and Black New Orleanians called it Congo Square. The benchmark eyewitness is the architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe, who watched the dancing in 1819 and, though writing with plain disapproval, recorded that there was "not the least disorder among the crowd." City rules and market consolidation squeezed the gatherings, which faded after about 1856 and had ceased before the end of that decade. The popular claim that Congo Square "gave birth to jazz" compresses a real but indirect lineage: Black musical practice in a French-Creole Catholic port city, carried forward through brass bands and second lines. "Congo" in that period named Central Africa broadly, not a single nation.
1812
The ground is reserved as a Place Publique; Black New Orleanians call it Congo Square
1819
Latrobe describes the Sunday dancing in his diary
1856
Gatherings fade and cease before the decade ends
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide
New Orleans, Louisiana · 1810s
Spoken by
New Orleanians, Black musicians and cultural historians
$CONGOSThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady207 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
70/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1819
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
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Citations & Sources
■
Benjamin Henry Latrobe, diary entry on Sunday dancing at New Orleans, 1819
1819
■
Latrobe, Impressions Respecting New Orleans: Diary and Sketches, 1818–1820 (Columbia University Press)
1951
■
+ Cite a source64 Parishes (Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities), 'Congo Square: La Place Publique'
online
See also