Welcome to Unobscured, a production of I Heart Radio and Aaron Minky.

A bloody flag hung over the door.

Korra stepped up onto the platform, surrounded by black drapery that covered the columns

of the Mechanics Institute.

After all, they were in mourning for the honored dead.

The flag didn't represent the Civil War, though, and the blood on the flag wasn't decorative.

It was a relic from a dark event that took place a year before.

America's first black daily newspaper, the New Orleans Tribune, had called a political

convention.

The Tribune had been founded by an Afro-Creole doctor named Louis Charles Roudenet, as

rallying point for Louisiana radicals, and it commanded respect among the state's reformers.

They met to confirm an 1864 state constitution that had stripped power from the planter class

and abolished slavery.

The backlash, though, was vicious.

White planters had the ear of General Banks, the Union Army commander governing the state.

They said Louisiana should have, and I quote, a government of white people for the exclusive

political benefits of the white race.

Yeah, they weren't subtle about it at all.

The planters were powerful, though.

They convinced banks to keep the plantation system, and he used the Union Army to force

Black Louisiana's to keep working the land of any planter who would declare loyalty to

the United States.

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