Louisiana State Penitentiary (Angola)

Angola is a plantation that changed crops — from cotton picked by enslaved Africans to a prison farm worked by the convict lease. The land was Isaac Franklin's Angola plantation, named for the homeland of the people enslaved on it; after the Civil War the state leased its convicts to Confederate Major Samuel James, who moved prisoners into the old slave quarters and subleased the Black inmates to replace emancipated labor on levees and railroads. The continuity was the point: slavery's ground became the South's prison.

The state bought Angola in 1900 after the newspapers exposed the lease's brutality, but the prison kept the plantation's logic — 18,000 river-bend acres, larger than Manhattan, where inmates work fields bounded by the Mississippi. The twentieth century's record is the archive's darkest file — the 1930s inmates who slit their own Achilles tendons to protest conditions, the 1960s title 'bloodiest prison in America,' the Red Hat cell block, the electric chair, and the reform decades that made it a model of a different kind.

Angola is still Angola — the country's largest maximum-security prison, 6,000-plus men on the old plantation, a prison museum interpreting the whole ledger from slave quarters to death row. The ground remembers both plantations — the one that took labor by bondage and the one that takes it by sentence, the land named for Africa holding the institution that replaced it.

Louisiana State Penitentiary is the archive's Angola file — the 18,000-acre prison farm built literally on and named for a slave plantation, 'the bloodiest prison in America' reformed on the same ground.