Alyssa C. Arnell

In 1962, the federal government condemned Fazendeville, a postbellum Black community in Louisiana, to expand Chalmette Battlefield Park. Though framed as historic preservation, the displacement was justified through what this project terms predeterminism—the belief that land sanctified by national battle is predestined for memorialization, regardless of the cost to marginalized communities. Drawing on rarely accessed condemnation papers, federal correspondence, and local press, the project reveals how legal instruments and preservationist networks operated in tandem to dispossess politically active landowners under the banner of patriotic unity. Grounded in sustained relationships with descendants and shaped by community trust, the work blends legal history, public memory studies, and community-engaged research. It centers Black agency and reframes the displacement not as inevitable but as a strategic erasure of Reconstruction-era Black life.