Ashé: Cultural Arts Cornerstone in New Orleans’ Central City

Introduction

 I learned the lesson that often our dreams are not as big as they could be.–Carol Bebelle (Akua Wambui)

Founded in December 1998, the Ashé Cultural Arts Center grew out of a need to reclaim New Orleans’ Central City neighborhood as a hub and haven for African and African American art, culture, and activism. In Yoruba, Ashé references the ability to make change or come into existence.  Carol Bebelle and Douglas Redd (1947-2007) co-founded Ashé with the mission to use culture and art to foster community, cultural, and economic development. Bebelle, a native of New Orleans’ Seventh Ward, is a published poet and writer. For nearly two decades, she worked in the public sector as an administrator in educational, social, cultural, and health programing before starting her own consulting firm offering services to non-profit organizations and churches.¹"Ashe Cultural Arts Center Has Been Making It Happen in Central City for 20 years,” New Orleans Tribune, January 24, 2018.

Born in New Orleans and raised in Baton Rouge, Douglas Redd obtained a bachelor’s degree in studio art from Dillard University. In 1993, members of the Black Social Workers of New Orleans urged him and Bebelle to create an exhibit that presented a positive and inspiring view of African Americans. Redd created Efforts of Grace, five exhibits that celebrated Black self-determination and excellence. Three years later, on display at the Atlanta Olympic Games, Efforts of Grace received a Cultural Olympiad Recognition Award.

During this time, Bebelle and Redd in partnership with Dollie Rivas, a local choreographer and Montessori arts-integration educator, created and produced The Origin of Life on Earth: An African Creation Myth, a stage play adapted from Dr. David A. Anderson’s children’s book. The production was remounted by Ashé Cultural Arts Center with Rivas as director. While searching for rehearsal sites in 1998, they stumbled upon a vacant four-story building at 1712 Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard and leased the first floor. “The day we walked in,” Bebelle recalls, “there was nothing but the balcony and concrete, which was about as much as Douglas needed. It was an art installation to him.”²"Ashe Cultural Arts Center,” New Orleans Tribune, January 24, 2018.

The two transformed this raw space into the Ashé Cultural Arts Center to promote, celebrate, and produce works by and about the African and African American experience.

When Ashé began, the Central City neighborhood was in decline, plagued by overgrown lots, crime, substance abuse, and sex-work. Cultural development and revitalization were at the forefront of Ashé’s beginnings. Redd told reporters that “We want to be part of turning the community around, and we can do that as artists.”³“Artists Guilds Have Been Established,” Times Picayune, March 16, 2000.

Among the first art exhibits developed by Ashé, The Ties that Bind displayed more than one-hundred photos celebrating Black families in New Orleans. Soon after, The Origin of Life received a Big Easy Award for the best ethnic performance production. In tandem with its artistic accomplishments, Ashé began developing projects and events for children and adults.

Two of the Ashé Center’s longest standing initiatives include the Kuumba Institute, a year-round academy to raise cultural consciousness and to mentor children through arts and drumming as well as “Sistahs Making a Change,” a women’s program that uses dance to promote exercise and healthier eating. Annually, the Center spearheads the New Orleans’ Maafa ceremony, a commemoration of the tragic Middle Passage during the Atlantic slave trade. In its first decade, Ashé garnered a wealth of positive recognition and numerous awards from the Arts Council of New Orleans, National Conference of Artists, and the American Association of Applied Clinical Sociology. Amid the institution’s growth, co-founder Douglas Redd passed away in 2007. As a tribute, the Ashé staff established Redd Linen Night, a fundraiser event featuring music, poetry, dance, and visual art.

With Redd in spirit, Bebelle continued the quest for Black empowerment and civic engagement as Ashé’s executive director. The Center formally purchased the property on Oretha Castle Haley in 2009. A significant expansion took place in March 2015 when Ashé unveiled a new performing arts facility on the same block. The 10,650 square-foot Powerhouse features a muscular arts and crafts façade with tall contemporary windows. Inside, the building consists of thick iron girders and concrete footings to complement a two-hundred seat theater and lobby art gallery. During the ribbon-cutting, Bebelle described the Powerhouse as representing Ashé’s “ability to grow up and to play with the big girls and the big boys” of the greater arts world.⁴Doug MacCash, “Ashe Cultural Arts Center Expands with Opening of New Performance Venue,” Times Picayune, March 1, 2015. Representing Black resilience and sustainability, the Powerhouse became a central location for Black theater, concerts, and cultural events.

Under Carol Bebelle’s direction, Ashé flourished and became an “an economic and cultural flagship for New Orleans and Louisiana.”⁵“City Council Honors Ashé Cultural Arts Center co-founder Carol
Bebelle,” Uptown Messenger, December 18, 2019.

Bebelle retired in 2019, but her work as an advocate was far from over. Currently, she serves as a scholar for Tulane University’s Center for Public Service and a mentor with the Mellon Foundation. In January 2020, Bebelle passed Ashé’s torch of leadership to Asali DeVan Ecclesiastes, who Bebelle described as a “fabulous and dynamic young community developer and artist.”⁶Uptown Messenger, December 18, 2019.

Ecclesiastes, also a native of New Orleans’ Seventh Ward, is a graduate of the city’s public school system and Vanderbilt University. Before coming to Ashé, she taught in New Orleans public schools, universities, and prisons, held leadership positions with many cultural initiatives in New Orleans—including the Jazz and Heritage Festival, the Essence Music Festival, and Tremé festivals—and received numerous awards and fellowships. Her commitment to civic engagement and the growth of Black arts became evident immediately after she became the chief equity officer of Ashé.

Carol Bebelle expressed a high confidence in Asali’s ability to excel, but reminded her to stay authentic.  “People have told her that she has big shoes to fill,” Bebelle said to reporters in late 2019, “but I tell people she’s got wings on her heels, so we don’t have to worry about shoes.”⁷Uptown Messenger, December 18, 2019.

Asali took Ashé to new heights. In 2021, she led efforts to secure a $3,000,000 grant from the Warner Music Group/Blavatnik Family Foundation Social Justice Fund for programs and racial equity activism in the city. “I Deserve It!,” another recent initiative, is a collaborative effort among Ashé, the New Orleans East Hospital, Tulane University’s School of Public Health, and the City Health Department that works to shrink the twenty-year life expectancy gap between white New Orleanians and those residing in predominantly Black neighborhoods.

“I Deserve It!” artists and culture makers sign a two-year contract as part-time grassroots health ambassadors in exchange for full-time salary and insurance. Ashé coordinates a network of nutritionists, nurses, and social workers; artists distribute health and wellness information at gigs, festivals, and second-line parades. According to Stafford Agee, a Mardi Gras Indian as well as a trombone player with the Grammy-winning Rebirth Brass Band, “Basically, you’re working as a translator."⁸Sara Ivry, “New Orleans Creatives Get to the Heart of the Matter,’ Mellon Foundation Report, November 10, 2022.

One of Agee’s “I Deserve It!” duties includes monitoring an eighty-four-year-old diabetic. “I help him navigate going to the doctor and understanding the lingo of what they’re saying and what he has to do with his medication .” Poet and performance artist Sunni Patterson also works as a health influencer through “I Deserve It!” Patterson equates caring for the culture as caring for the people who make it up. For her, these individuals are “the people that are blowing the horns, that are sewing feathers and plumes and beads, and knowing that he walked however many miles and he has asthma, second lining all these birthdays and still can’t pay the light bills.”⁹Mellon Foundation Report, November 10, 2022.

With partnerships in Kenya, Puerto Rico and South Africa, Ashé’s health programming reaches across the diaspora. Asali is launching a community fund called “Getcha Some Fund” to invest in real estate and artwork, which she hopes will include a Black-owned hotel.¹⁰Lottie L. Joiner, “Ashé Cultural Arts Center at 25: Q & A with Asali DeVan Ecclesiastes,” Verite News, December 15, 2023. Asali’s early strides indicate that Ashé will remain at the cornerstone of cultural arts and social justice in New Orleans.

In the following interviews, edited for length and readability, Carol Bebelle and Asali DeVan Ecclesiastes discuss the roots and resilience of the Ashé Cultural Arts Center.

The Foundation with Carol Bebelle

Carol Bebelle: I am the granddaughter of Baptist ministers on both sides. My paternal grandfather is the one who had the most influence on me. My maternal grandfather was a minister, kind of, as a side thing. He was a laborer as his primary work and came from the St. Bernard Parish where he had a huge family. When my mother and my father got together, my grandfather was the very popular Baptist minister in the Seventh Ward, which at that time was predominantly Catholic. That marriage didn’t last long. I was created and then two years later the marriage was over. My grandparents were kind of embarrassed about my father’s poor performance as a husband.

I don’t know how my mother and my father met. The person that I had the purest relationship with was my godmother. She was my sanctuary, the place where I got to just be a child. My mother and my grandmother, in a certain kind of way, were in a competition for me. Even though I wouldn’t have understood it to be like that as a child, I now understand it that way. I could sense that. I didn’t want to be the source of giving either of them an upper hand. I was loved a lot as a result, but it didn’t make me feel entitled. I became aware of what other people feel like inside of things that are tense. I learned a lot by listening and watching. I learned how to read both sides. I think that’s the biggest thing that I would say about who I am. I'm a bridge builder.

That childhood was capped off by being a sixteen-year-old college freshman at a university that was taking Black students for the second year only. I was at Loyola when I stepped into yet another circumstance where my development was thwarted for a good reason. It was like that as a child through tensions between families. And, here it was in the fact that I wasn’t in a welcoming environment. In my twenties, I was in professional work with the school board.  That made me a bit of an oddity. Too young, but persistent.

Then I applied to a foundation to be in a program that was going to create more Black superintendents in the US. I was refused for the same reason—too young and without enough experience.

I asked myself, “What do I want to do?” I’m doing community-based planning at the school board level first, and then with the city where I was the planner for substance abuse and prevention services. Then, to the city’s health department where I worked with special administrative services. Next, I became one of the primary grant writers during a time when we brought millions of dollars for community-based health for early childhood and infant mortality, for school-based health clinics and healthcare for the homeless. We were on a roll. We had a visionary leader in Dr. Sheila Webb. She understood what a city public health system ought to be doing, and what resources were available.

In the early 1980s, an opportunity arose at Covenant House (which had just opened) for a communications director. I got the job but didn’t stay long. I had been working on the side with community organizations and local artists. I worked with Papa Camara, one of the Africans who came here and started the African dance community. I was doing things with churches, a major part of our cultural environment.

Smith: Is this the cultural landscape that preceded Ashé?

Bebelle: Yes. From the time that I was a child, I remember second lines and Mardi Gras Indians. While we were sitting in St. John Divine Baptist Church on Sundays, you could hear the blast of the horns as the second lines were moving down Claiborne Avenue. The landscape of culture was rooted in the sacred and the secular. Me being the grandchild of the pastor, we were at church longer than anybody. We were the ones locking the door. But Mardi Gras Indians was something different—I participated in the Mardi Gras Indian tradition as a supporter and spectator. And the church brought culture to me: spoken word, improvisational prayer, sermons, and a lot of music.

Of course, the bars had musicians. And as poetry became more popular, it was everywhere. One of the leaders in that group of poets was Kalamu ya Salaam, a most prolific writer and thinker.

And you can’t forget Zulu. As time went on, more and more Black Krewes came about. When people say that culture bubbles up from the street, it is true. If you were not rocking in church, you were rocking in the second line, or rocking with the Mardi Gras Indians, or in one of the Krewes.

After I got out of college and graduate school, a friend, QuoVadis Gex, had become my roommate. She helped to bring me closer to theater and poetry in New Orleans. I fell in love with the Free Southern Theater. I’m running around, going to theater here and there, meeting all of these great people, and discovering how they struggle. I’m a grant writer. That’s what I have to offer. I helped people think about what they could do to bring money to invest in their work.

Now while our church activities were going on, and the second lining, I’m in school doing plays. And every year Xavier put on an opera. I’m being influenced by all these things, including going to the symphony. I was in choirs. We learned about our culture and got an opportunity to understand how creative we were. At Loyola, I became very involved with Upward Bound and with putting on productions with the kids during summer camps. I was also starting to work with the Alliance of Community Theaters (ACT 1) and becoming more conscious of the varieties of cultural work in anchoring values, rituals, traditions. That’s when I met Douglas Redd who was doing similar work as a visual artist.

                                                                                                 

Doug was designing logos for the Jazz Festival and helping to design the Koindu stage, now the Congo Square stage, as well as the logo for Congo Squadre Festival. He designed the first logo for Essence. When anybody needed an image that had Africanity in it, Doug was who they went to. Most visual artists wanted people to see their work in galleries. Doug said that he would prefer to have a million people wearing a t-shirt that he designed rather have something hanging on a gallery wall. He saw himself as a community artist.

At this point, I think was Catholic. I’d gotten just fed up with the Baptist church. They were not recognizing that young people were not willing anymore to just sit and listen. Catholics were doing something different; engaging in bigger conversations. I became Catholic for about twelve years at St. Francis DeSales, an important church for Black Catholicism, especially in New Orleans.

I started producing their newsletter and Doug did the graphic work. We’ve had three or four firebrand young priests. Then Xavier started an Institute for Black Catholic Studies, which had some of the best theologians and Black thinkers who were a part of the collective that did the African Presence in the Bible.

As a child, I grew a love for theology and mythology. I knew a little Roman and Greek mythology. But I was in my thirties before I encountered Flash of the Spirit, and I was pissed off that I did not have a handle on African theology and mythology. Then, I read a children's book, The Origin of Life on Earth: An African Creation Myth, by Dr. David Anderson. I became obsessed with getting it on stage so that our kids would have the opportunity to participate and see it, and that they would know names like Obatala and Shango like they knew Apollo and Zeus. Doug and I got started by being producers for that. We got a script together written by Chakula Cha Jua, a theater artist, and Doug designed the scenery. We found a collection of music from a South African composer and The Origin of Life was born. This would’ve been around 1995 or 1996. We performed it almost every year in the 2000s like the Maafa so that the kids could have the opportunity to participate.

The Origins of Life was a general audience production, but with children in mind. It won the best ethnic performance production with the Big Easy Awards. By that time, Michelle N. Gibson had become the choreographer and Kesha McKey the dance director. We got an opportunity to bring the whole production to Rochester and perform it when David Anderson, the book’s writer, was being honored as an artist in residence at the University of Rochester.

Smith: How did the coming of Ashé factor into the other sacred and secular practices that you’ve mentioned?

Bebelle: Ashé’s birth was the provocation that I had from having been in the public sector where every place I had been was already yielding to Black leadership. But at that time, when I looked at the cultural landscape in institutional terms, I couldn’t think of any establishment where somebody Black didn’t have to ask a white person for a key.

There was a period of time when Kalamu ya Salaam was the executive director of the Jazz and Heritage Foundation. Then, there was Muslim brother after Kalamu. But that came and went. The thing that we owned the most, the culture, had no institutional place. That’s not to say the culture wasn’t being practiced or evolved, but there wasn’t a place for culture. When the opportunity to be able to get the space for Ashé came, Doug and I took it. Early on, I was like “Where are we going to get the money?”  Doug, being the visionary that he was, said “It begins with getting a place. You get the place then the money will come.” It took me about six months to get catch up with him on that. We went on ahead and walked into a space that was just concrete floors, walls and a key on his birthday, the December 15, 1998. This is what eventually became Ashé.

Smith: Can you talk more about Efforts of Grace and the early years of Ashé?

Bebelle: Efforts of Grace preceded Ashé being the corporate umbrella. Efforts of Grace was put in place when we were trying to do the Origin of Life. There was also an art exhibit that Doug did as a companion to Soul Shadows: Urban Warrior Myths that thematically took on incarceration and perception of stereotypes of Black men. It spoke to “Who is really being put in jail?” Black social workers started to see it and they came out fuming because they said that the artists may have intended to make a positive statement out of this, but to them it looked like a matter of stepping into a stereotype. They said we want something else to be up when this is up so that there can be another message. They didn’t know what was going to be up, but the social workers knew who they wanted to do it. They wanted Doug to do it. Doug was great on being able to do the artwork, but the whole process of dealing with people and getting focus groups together and all that wasn’t what he wanted to do. That was my job and to coordinate the whole thing and get schools to come. Efforts of Grace was born. The work Doug did was the creation of a spirit house that had seven rooms. One room for each principle of the Nguzo Saba.

What he chose to do was take images of youth work, blow those pictures up, and colorize them. That was what the walls were. That was the Efforts of Grace exhibit. Then, we used music from Bobby McFerrin. It was beautiful, and kind of a sacred experience to walk through. The original installation of Efforts of Grace turned into five installations. It became a series: Efforts of Grace, Grace Under Fire, Amazing Grace, Throne of Grace, and Saving Grace. They were then selected to be the winner of the Cultural Olympian Award held in Atlanta.  All of that happened before Ashé.

Smith:  Tell us more about the meaning of the word “Ashé”?

Bebelle: Ashé is a word from the Yoruba people, and it comes closest to meaning what amen means. When we say prayers, at the end we say, so let it be. Ashé is like saying “the ability to make things happen.” Doug and I defined it for the purposes of the institution as a place where we manifested possibilities. The mission of Ashé at that time was to use culture as a source for human, cultural, and economic development. And it was really driven by what became something that I call “the cultural continuum.” From my observations, the human experience is captured inside of a continuum, which is culture. What you’re given initially are what you bear. You become a culture bearer. Then, culture bridging happens when you start bringing something else in and taking something else out. Finally, culture making, the purest form of creativity, occurs when you just make the decision that there’s something that you have you create because it serves your experience the best.

Smith: How did Ashé participate in the revitalization of Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard and this corridor?

Bebelle: We were a part of a team. When we came here, there had been almost forty plans done on Central City, and probably twenty of them had talked about this corridor. Always the vision was to bring it back to a heyday when there was so much cultural activity and social vibrancy on the street. We wanted to be certain that we were not working outside of their vision, but inside of it. There were some businesses here that were not into that. They were just trying to get their businesses to work. In time we went to the state and got this established as a cultural corridor. We needed to be the biggest, the loudest, and whatever. We began to host festivals like “Holiday on the Boulevard” during Christmas. We would invite vendors and pop-up shops.

We built on that. In the early days, Doug designed the street decor. Holiday on the Boulevard. He created art with symbols recognizing: Kwanzaa, Muslims, Jews, and Christians, which showed that all were welcome. This became part of our work at Ashé. What were ways that we could help to make this corridor cultural? In time, the Jazz Market came and the Food Museum. The Neighborhood Gallery. We started collecting cultural institutions along the street, but Ashé was the loudest cultural presence here. Then we acquired property and we had those beautiful windows that are in front of the building, along with a mural. We had a presence that folks could draw from.

Smith: What about early funding and community programming?

Bebelle: Because we wanted to do services that were grounded in culture and I knew that we would be a unicorn in the various applications we submitted, I started asking myself “what were we going to do for the children?” The first generation of youth programming was a Saturday program, the Ashé High Steppers. We had Shaka and Naima Zulu who were teaching the art of African stilt walking and African dance to the kids. They loved it because nobody else in the city was doing that. It became a big thing. That was the first generation. The Kuumba Institute was born second, also for the kids. For the women, we had Sistahs Making a Change. We were using dance as a form of exercise and we were also teaching them how to eat differently.

Michelle N. Gibson came to us and said “wouldn’t it be interesting to see what elders are thinking and how are they moving? She was thinking choreographically, but a program was born. Then, we had the men’s program; one of the hardest ones. We tried for years to get men to sit in a room and talk. The effort was there, but we kept missing the mark. Baba Luther pointed out that “men don’t like to sit in a room and talk, they like things to do.” We were looking at Black male development, but also men as fathers. What we got out of that was the Favorite Father’s initiative, every year in partnership with Dr. Petrice Sams-Abiodun who was at the Boggs Literacy Center at Loyola. Then, we had the arts: theater, poetry, visual art, and music. We were doing over a thousand events a year, including meetings, gatherings, community convenings. It was intense, but necessary because it was about overcoming inertia.

Smith: I want to shift into talking about disaster relief. Less than a decade after Ashé was established, Hurricane Katrina hit. In previous conversations, you described Ashé as a “beacon of light” in Katrina’s aftermath. Can you speak more about Ashé’s relief efforts?

Bebelle: We had exposure and a reputation, but we were a little flickering light when it came down to resources. When Katrina hit, the lights went out in New Orleans and our flickering light became a beacon. We were a place that was available and open. All kinds of people came to us.

It was the beginning of our heyday. National philanthropy organizations became willing to make investments in us because we were there for relief. We had mattresses we gave away. We had boxes of kitchenware to give the people. We became a place to accumulate and distribute. We understood that people were reeling. We started doing programming that was about healing. We had something called the Chill Zone one Friday a month.  We had acupuncturists, massage therapists, musicians, and poets. We were making culture and creating a way to take care of a community that has been traumatically harmed.

We spoke at conferences. We went to the board of philanthropic organizations. We went to Japan after the tsunami. We went to New York after Hurricane Sandy. We went to Italy with people who came from around the world to talk about disaster response. I’m not convinced that we have emerged from it yet, almost twenty years later. We’ve been working on fixing the city and the streets, but there hasn’t been a major investment in uplifting emotional and mental health after such a trauma. Culture is our rock and our doctor.

Smith: Can you talk more about Ashé’s international presence?

Bebelle: Asali is building a lot on that, more than I did. That’s the question you should ask her as well.  I have participated in international gatherings where the experience of Ashé was why I was there. I gave talks about disaster relief and community-based cultural programming at PolicyLink, Imagining America, as well as America Healing. I’ve presented in Japan at the University of Tokyo. We worked hard to give Ashé an international reputation in its first generation.

Smith: What about passing the torch of leadership to Asali?

Bebelle: I started a few years before it actually happened. I thought that it was my job to find the successor. I brought two people on who I thought would replace Doug and me. Ashé was too much for one person. After Doug, I felt like I was working with a team, but I didn’t have that partner — someone you could vent to; someone to try ideas out with. I thought I’d brought in a team at middle management that could grow to executive level as a team. But it turned out that they really weren’t the ones. I knew what it took to be the executive. I did twelve to fourteen hours a day for than six days a week for almost all of those twenty-one years.

There were times that I worked all night long. I’m not saying that’s what you have to do, but it got to be really bad when Doug was gone. Then, I realized that it was not my job to find the successor. It’s the board's job. I got them a consultant to help with the search. I always thought that Asali could be a great successor, but she hadn’t lived a life that looked like she wanted institutional work. She was an independent in what she produced. Anyway, I wasn’t a part of the search directly. The board courted her, she applied, we had a couple of conversations, and then it was on the board. When they came and told me that they offered Asali the job and she had accepted, I was excited because she’s brilliant. She has a fearless quality. She’s very committed to policy and community development. That’s something that's going to help the organization on the economic side.

Smith: What wisdom did you give Asali after she assumed your previous role?

Bebelle: I guess the biggest thing I told her was that she’s not intended to be a second generation, Mama Carol. It’s her turn to define and to design what the leader for Ashé looks like. The other thing is to understand when you’re representing the institution and to understand when you’re representing you. Let other people know that.

Ashé Succession: Asali DeVan Ecclesiastes

D. Caleb Smith: You were brought up in New Orleans?

Asali DeVan Ecclesiastes: I grew up in the Seventh Ward of the city mostly, on Onzaga Street and Miro Street. I went to Albert Wicker Elementary School and Valena C. Jones Elementary. Then, McMain High School. I’ll tell you one of the stories that I often tell to illustrate what growing up in New Orleans was like for me. As a child, I thought white people were mostly on TV. They were not my teachers or my doctors. I really didn’t see them at the grocery store in my neighborhood. There was one older white lady who moved into the neighborhood when I was in sixth grade.

My childhood was magical and very loving. There was barely any distinction between your house, the street, and the block. It was all part of your territory, part of your family and way of being. I grew up in the late eighties to early nineties when there was a lot of activism among young people. We were fighting David Duke being elected. We were fighting Confederate monuments and Confederate names of our schools. This was also when the crack epidemic hit the Black population. I was becoming aware of the injustices in my community. I grew up in the strength of activism and the Black voice being honored. I grew up with a set of codes how you treated people around you. You didn’t go to the store without stopping at the elders’ houses to find out what they needed from the store too. If you didn’t ask and were coming back from the store, they would remind you that you didn’t ask them if they needed anything [laughs].

Smith: And what about your name? Is there a story?

DeVan Ecclesiastes: I was born Asali. My parents are Black Panthers. I have the benefit of being born to parents who changed their own names. I didn’t have to change mine. My father was born Paul Howard DeVan, Jr., but he died Diallo Salahuddin. My name, Asali, means honey, my middle name, Njeri, means worthy of or belonging to a warrior. I think that when my father named me it was like “this is my honey. I'm a warrior.” This is how he thought of himself. And I was his sweetness in the world. Being born into a Black Panther community, I remember the rent strikes and activism. Even though my parents separated when I was about two or three and my mother brought me from California to New Orleans, I remember crawling around and hearing them speaking in Swahili. At that time in New Orleans, nobody around me had African names. My name was always starting conversation. People were like “What does that mean?”

Smith: Can you describe your trajectory as a city leader before becoming the director of Ashé?

DeVan Ecclesiastes: Even though I never thought of myself as a city leader, I think that I had been appointed as a leader for most of my life. When I was young, I was the person who organized the youth block parties. My brother used to wrestle in the backyard. I used to organize the wrestling matches of all of the kids in neighborhood [laughs]. I’d charge a dollar to get in the backyard and go wrestle on his mattress. On another note, I was the president of my class pretty much every year that I can remember in elementary school and high school. I'm the person that everybody in the neighborhood comes to ask who to vote for. I was in education and in event production in a city where hospitality and tourism is the industry. I was a producer for the Jazz Fest, Essence, and Voodoo Festivals. These are some of the biggest festivals in the nation. My role always has been creating access in all of the places and spaces I go.

As the Congo Square producer, I made sure that the longtime New Orleans vendors were able to hold and maintain their space inside of Jazz Fest.  For Essence, I was doing artist relations work and writing empowerment seminars. I made sure that the issues New Orleanians were facing stayed at the center of that national conversation, and that our local acts got the same amount of resources, dignity, and considerations that the national acts were getting. When I moved into government, that is when I started realizing that getting people into the VIP and getting people funding for projects are two different things [laughs]. I’ve always been a member and a resource provider, but going into government and non-profit work, it’s just a different scope of how you’re able to serve.

Smith: Did Carol Bebelle give you any words of wisdom when you accepted the new role at Ashé. I understand that there was a transition ceremony. What was that like?

DeVan Ecclesiastes: It was the passing of the torch to announce her retirement and bring in new leadership. Carol said, “People ask me–how is anybody ever going to fill your shoes?” She said, “if you look at her [Asali’s] little feet, you know they are not fitting my size tens. But she doesn’t need to because she can fly. You don’t need shoes when you are flapping wings.” I always thought her words were so beautiful.

Smith: Mama Carol mentioned how you were expanding the center’s international presence. Can you speak about transatlantic ties and organizations abroad that Ashé is partnering with? 

DeVan Ecclesiastes: Our most recent partnerships have been in South Africa, with Langa township in Cape Town and its Guga S’thebe community center. They are celebrating their hundredth anniversary. They are a community of artists who do a lot of the same kind of things that we do. We are working with them to start a health worker program like we have. We are concentrating on the twenty-five-year difference life expectancy gap. They are working on gender-based violence and alcoholism. We are exchanging community health workers with each other. We also work with another organization in Lamu, Kenya, on climate. They have environmental issues similar to New Orleans around land subsidence. They share with us some of their physical techniques that they use to build community solutions. We share physical techniques and political strategies for the climate justice fight.

We also have a partnership in Loíza, Puerto Rico, which is a predominantly Black area. Loíza is a beautiful place where ocean meets river. It’s a lot like New Orleans in terms of music, dance, cultural heritage, and history, but also like New Orleans in terms of the history of exploitation by the white populations. Trump and his austerity measures after Hurricane Maria also dealt devastation on Puerto Rico. The people there have many struggles around environmental justice and gentrification. Particularly, the people in the La Perla, on the ocean in Old San Juan. Their land is being taken by the National Park Service. The school that we partner with is on six acres and is 150 years old. In his first term, Trump appointed an austerity board that has dominion over the government in Puerto Rico. It’s no one elected, just appointees, mainly his friends, but the Biden’s administration did not take that board out. It still runs Puerto Rico. It has taken half the money out of the neighborhood schools and directed it to the police. They are closing schools.

The women of La Perla have decided to take a closed school back from the industrial interests that tried to capture it. We partner with them and send resources. I took my whole staff there. We cut grass, fixed machines and lawnmowers.

Since it began, Ashé has sought to bring awareness of the African diaspora that a city such as. New Orleans epitomizes. We have partnerships, in Puerto Rico, Kenya, and South Africa, and we have others brewing. And we have partnerships in the US—in Detroit, Memphis, New York, and Oakland.

Smith: How do you see Ashé cultivating young activists today?

DeVan Ecclesiastes: We have Kuumba Academy which teaches young people how to be responsible citizens. We train them in political education and in organizing their peer groups. Last year, a group of Kuumba teachers who were in their late teens and early twenties told me they wanted to stay in the city and find jobs. We started a partnership with the Power Coalition called Young Fierce Citizenship and began a project called Conjugating Freedom. “We are free, we is free, we be free!” [laughs] in political education and organizing their peer groups.

We are committed to training youth leaders and to building our base of power inside municipal government. We have in New Orleans more people eligible to vote but unregistered than we have registered voters. Many of those people are young.  If we can help them realize their power, we can elect the leadership that represents the people in New Orleans. Artists and activists are much the same. Making space for the creation of Black art and activism is what we do well.

Smith: I remember reading a Times Picayune article in which you stated that “equity is expensive.” Can you talk about philanthropy and Ashé’s growth in the early stages of your leadership?

DeVan Ecclesiastes: The energy that we have put as a society into creating disparities and inequities is the same energy that we have to put into healing them, if not more. A lot of money, a lot of resources, has gone into making sure that Black people are deprived of their economic capacity and intergenerational wealth. If we are going to achieve equity, then we have to put the same amount of energy and resources to recreate the systems that created the inequity. When it comes to philanthropy, our organization has so much impact and does so many things, but as a Black-led organization, we don’t receive nearly the financial resources that organizations like NOMA [New Orleans Museum of Art] the World War II Museum, and Ogden [Museum of Southern Art] get. These organizations don’t have Black New Orleans at their base. Like The Historic New Orleans Collection, they’re written into the city and the state budgets.

The Ford Foundation has been our longest and most fervent supporter. Other big philanthropy organizations have been good supporters of Ashé, but not the greatest. Not what it should and could be. In talking about marginalized groups, I am including Latinx, Asian, and LGBTQ+ people. The kinds of support these groups get is programmatic whereas white-led organizations get general and operational support. People of color have to endlessly show and prove what we are doing. We have to show a dollar’s worth of impact in order to continue to get fifteen cents worth of funding.

Smith: You mention honoring the African diasporic experience. How does that influence programming? For example, the Kuumba Academy. Can you speak more on that and other diasporic programming?

DeVan Ecclesiastes: All of our programming is diasporic centered. Aside from Kuumba, we have a related program called INCUED or the Institute for Cultural Education where we teach educators about culturally competent tools and how to teach our children about themselves and philosophies of the Black experience. We want to make sure that our students are well-equipped and well-grounded in who they are and in knowledge of their ancestors.

Smith: Earlier, you mentioned the number of events that Ashé puts on a year.

DeVan Ecclesiastes: Ashé played a big role in the beginnings of Maafa which was started in New York by a Black man from New Orleans, a St. Augustine High School graduate named Johnny Youngblood. Reverend Youngblood’s church started Maafa. Ashé was the second organization to hold a Maafa. Now, two decades later, it is celebrated around the world. In New Orleans, we brought the aspect of processions and the aspect of the all-white dress. I think that Charleston, South Carolina, is a place that should have a Maafa, and other sites where enslaved people arrived and passed through on the Trans-Atlantic journey. In the New Orleans ceremony, we go from Congo Square to the river to mark the journey by telling the story of the slave trade along the path.

Smith: What connections does Ashé have with other African diasporic institutions in the city such as Amistad Research Center, Congo Square Preservation Society, and the New Orleans African American Museum?

DeVan Ecclesiastes: We are in partnership. Twenty organizations have aligned to form the Alliance for Cultural Equity which is convened by Ashé. We are doing research into how organizations in our city are funded, who gets funded, and what the disparities are. We are calling our government out on those disparities.

Smith: Where do you see Ashé in the next five to ten years?

DeVan Ecclesiastes:  I seek to help Ashé realize the vision of the larger community that helped Carol and Doug to create this institution. While I am here, I want to help Ashé achieve financial sustainability. I want the Center to produce its own revenue. Right now, we are around 70/30 philanthropic to self-earned revenue.  In the next three years, I’d like to move that to 50/50. In the next ten years, I’d like it to be 30/70.  I want our capacity to raise our own money to be ever greater. Also, Ashé should be getting more from philanthropy, more from the city, and more from the state. But it’s not only about Ashé. There’s an ecosystem of organizations that are Black-led, Latino-led, LGBTQ-led, and Asian-led that support the people who make New Orleans what it is.

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About the Author

D. Caleb Smith is an assistant professor in the Department of History and the Department of Critical Race and Political Economy at Mt. Holyoke College. He thanks Carol Bebelle and Asali DeVan Ecclesiastes for their participation in this interview series. Smith also extends his gratitude to Tulane University’s Center for Public Service and the Andrew Mellon Graduate Fellowship in Community Engagement for funding this project. In addition, he thanks Grace Daniels, a former Tulane University student and Mellon Undergraduate Fellow, for her assistance.

All images are courtesy of and copyright by the Ashé Cultural Arts Center. Banner image by Flickr member Diane D Owens, permission requested. The main exterior mural at the Ashé Cultural Arts Center in New Orleans, celebrating Central City culture, was a collaborative effort coordinated by Douglas Redd and painted by local artists including Jamar Pierre, Terrance Osborne, Lidya Araya, Lionel Milton, and Shakor & Ivan Watkins.

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