The River Road African American Museum, founded in 1994 in Donaldsonville, a historic and colorful small town that is the seat of Ascension Parish, Louisiana (the state calls its counties "parishes") along the west bank of the Mississippi River, was among the first Louisiana museums to tell the story of Africans and African Americans, slaves and free. In 1868, the city elected Pierre Caliste Landry, an attorney and Methodist minister, said to be the first African American mayor in the United States. Photo by Carol Highsmith, 2021.