Prayers for the People

Reviewed by: Prayers for the People: Homicide and Humanity in the Crescent City by Rebecca Louise Carter Kaya Naomi Williams Rebecca Louise Carter, Prayers for the People: Homicide and Humanity in the Crescent City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. 272 pp. In 1994, the City of New Orleans was the site of 424 murders: more than the city had ever seen in a single year, or has ever seen since. That same year, a Baptist church in Central City—a neighborhood that was and remains one of New Orleans' "hot spots" for homicide—rented a billboard at the corner of Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard and South Claiborne Avenue displaying the message "THOU SHALT NOT KILL." The idea for the billboard, the pseudonymous Pastor Samuel tells anthropologist Rebecca Louise Carter, came as he was driving down the interstate to get to church one morning. Anyone who has lived in New Orleans in the lead-up to a local election can relate to Pastor Samuel's frustration at the bombardment of campaign billboards he faced on that drive. His decision to put up a different kind of billboard, and his congregation's ongoing support, changed the landscape of the city for three years until the church's contract was abruptly cancelled by the advertising agency, at which point congregation members began posting signs bearing the message throughout the city. When the Department of Sanitation removed all of the signs overnight, Pastor Samuel declared, "We'll be the signs" and began weekly public demonstrations to spread the Word of God. More than ten years later, the ongoing work of the congregation at this church—which Carter pseudonymizes as Liberty Street Baptist Church—serves to anchor her ethnography, Prayers for the People: Homicide and Humanity in the Crescent City. Based on research that began in 2007, less than two years after Hurricane Katrina and the flooding that claimed the lives and homes of so many New Orleans residents, Prayers for the People follows individuals across the city as they grapple with a resurgence of [End Page 563] violent crime amidst ongoing conditions of loss. The routes people took in that encounter, Carter writes, "frequently led to church" (17). The ethnography has breadth: Carter spends time with Catholics praying for peace at an Uptown shrine and with a white vodou practitioner in the Bywater who gathers neighbors to perform anti-crime ceremonies. She introduces readers to a church in the historically-Black Tremé neighborhood that posts a public list of every individual victim of murder in New Orleans in an effort to counter the broader public's selective interest in mourning only those victims deemed undeserving of their fate. The book's center of gravity, however, is Liberty Street: it is there that Carter witnessed most closely efforts at "a slow reframing of the moral architecture of the city" (18). An overabundance of scholarship exists that grapples with violent crime in U.S. cities: the vast majority of this work, which is produced from within the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, criminology, law, policy, economics, and history, to name just a few, identifies violent crime as a distinct problem and seeks to explore direct causes and solutions. This scholarship employs the homicide rate as a key measure of a city's relative health and targets poor and Black communities as the epicenter of the problem. Carter's remarkable ethnography suggests a need to reframe this moral architecture as well. The homicide rate appears in Prayers for the People not as a useful indicator but as a dehumanizing reduction. Violent crime itself is decentered and situated within a historical geography of violence, and poor and Black communities are understood not as the site of a problem but as the only places actively considering the collective moral and spiritual work necessary to even imagine a path towards change. Carter's ethnography is not primarily about homicide but rather about the faith-based practices of mourning and healing produced in its wake. This shift in attention unsettles the terrain of the scholarly conversation about urban violence—shaking the tenuous secular foundations on which it stands. Prayers for the People is a work of profound love and care

Archaeology · Criminology · Downtown · Homicide · Humanity · Media studies · Poison control · Political science · Sociology · Suicide prevention · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Medicine · Religious studies