While most people are finishing up their work week, 47-year-old Terrell Griffin and his 19-year-old nephew Xavier Coleman are still working hard on the north side of Florida Boulevard in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.



They are selling CDs, DVDs, popcorn balls, candy apples, peanuts, and some southern specialties, such as cracklin’ (fried pork fat), pecan candy and teacakes. They set up their wares on a collapsible table and metal hanger, out in front of a strip mall church, next to a Family Dollar store.

As a woman looks over their movie selection, Xavier, who is wearing a black dress shirt and gray slacks, dress shoes, and a gold chain over a tie, goes into salesman mode. “We create relationships with our customers,” he says. “It’s all about being positive and connecting with people – it’s what we do.”

There is one additional item on display: a framed, up-to-date license for the business, Just a Taste of the Fair, registered to his name. He wants everybody to know: “We’re legit.”

Griffin, a married father of 11 who also leads a successful gospel group, lives around the corner. Sometimes he works past midnight, bringing his wares to nearby gas stations and restaurants. Griffin says he’s been selling for 23 years. “I raised my kids off of selling this stuff,” he says.

Griffin and Coleman deal mostly in cash, which raises a question about safety. Griffin says he’s protected in two ways: “I’m covered by the blood of Jesus,” he says, and “I have a gun that’s legal, I have a permit.”

The Rev Jesse Jackson comforts Cameron Sterling as he grieves at the funeral of his father, Alton Sterling. Photograph: Bryan Tarnowski/The Guardian

Almost two weeks ago, not too far from Griffin’s stand, 37-year-old Alton Sterling, a father of five, was also up late selling CDs in front of a store when he was detained and shot to death by a police officer. According to the police account, Sterling was initially detained because he was pointing a gun at someone. That gun, those who know him say, was for protection as he did business in a dangerous neighborhood.

Sterling’s killing set off a week of protests in Baton Rouge, a capital city of around 220,000 residents who normally reserve their rowdiness for college football season.

“I grew up on the north side of Florida Boulevard,” said 47-year-old Tara Wicker, a Baton Rouge city councilwoman who still lives in the home she was raised in, now with her husband and children. “I’m literally on the Mason-Dixon line,” she said, alluding to the dividing line made famous during the civil war. North of Florida Boulevard, where half of Baton Rouge’s population lives, means lower income and black.

The main hospital on the north side of town closed a few years ago, leaving the area with no nearby emergency room. HIV rates are some of the highest in the US. Access to convenient public transit routes is a real issue north of Florida. One neighborhood is struggling so much, said Wicker, that she couldn’t even convince a Dollar Store to open and provide some local jobs. “I was heartbroken, I really was,” she said.

Tara Wicker stands in front of the home she grew up in and still lives in today. Photograph: Bryan Tarnowski/The Guardian

There was a grocery store nearby when Wicker was growing up, but that’s gone, too. “For me to get a banana, I used to be able to walk down the street,” she said. “Now I have to drive well over a mile.”

Wicker, who is running for re-election this fall, said she and her husband considered moving the family to the suburbs, or south of Florida Boulevard, home to the LSU campus, a reviving downtown, and wealthier, whiter communities. The couple, who run relationship counselling and financial literacy courses through their church in their spare time, decided they needed to stay. Wicker said they wanted to be a model for neighborhood kids, “who did not have the opportunity to see husband and wife and children, and people waking up every morning and going to work”.

As one drives north from Florida Boulevard, Baton Rouge becomes a series of small neighborhoods, local businesses and a few chain stores. An Exxon refinery releases plumes of smoke as it towers over rows and rows of small single-family homes, many of them built a century ago for, and still occupied by, oil industry workers.

Even farther north, at Southern University, a historically black college set in north Baton Rouge, the basketball arena’s parking lot is packed. Sterling’s body lies inside in a casket at his public funeral last Friday. He grew up in this north Baton Rouge neighborhood known as Scotlandville.

Just outside the university gates, Kutt’N Korners barbershop is also busy. There’s a person in every chair, and the conversation is about how local residents feel treated by local police, a force on which 400 of the more than 600 officers are white males.

Celeste Coleman gives Jace Noah a hair cut at Kutt’N Korners barbershop in the Scotlandville neighborhood of Baton Rouge. Photograph: Bryan Tarnowski

Celeste Coleman, who goes by Cee, said she constantly got stopped by cops for a variety of small driving violations – most recently a $150 fine for having windows that are too tinted. The 32-year-old barber said the real reason she gets pulled over is because she has “dreads”.

“On this side of town, they harass you,” she said. “On the other side of town you can drive free.”

Racial divisions are not new in Baton Rouge, a town that is 55% black. Just ask soon-to-be 82-year-old former public school vice-principal Ted Poydras.

“Baton Rouge was always a pretty racist town,” said Poydras, who chuckled a little after making that statement. He thinks back to growing up in the early 1950s, when Baton Rouge was the site of the first civil rights bus boycott in the country. Poydras said his grandparents taught him how to stay out of trouble, and not just with police.

“Anybody, storekeeper, anybody who was caucasian could get you in trouble,” he said.

Trouble could ensue after everything from “being too friendly with white girls” to walking through a white neighborhood where he liked to fish after dark.



Ted and Helen Poydras inside their home. Photograph: Bryan Tarnowski/The Guardian

Poydras and his wife, Helen, whose children grew up to be a lawyer, teacher, doctor, and pastor, met as undergrads at Southern University. They live in a ranch-style home on a wooded border area of north Baton Rouge, rural enough that Poydras can have horses on his property. In addition to working in local public schools, Poydras also started the first black-owned pest control business in the area, a job he still does. “I never dreamed of leaving,” he said. “I’m so Baton Rouge it’s in my DNA.”

A few minutes drive from Poydras’ house sits the Triple S convenience store, where Sterling was shot and killed. A few blocks away, 19-year-old Tyler Ventress takes a walk in his neighborhood, which most people call Fairfield. A soon-to-be sophomore at Southeastern Louisiana University in nearby Hammond, Louisiana, Ventress is home for the summer, working for his grandfather’s lawn-care business.



Tyler Ventress walks down the street in the Fairfield neighborhood, a few blocks from where Sterling was killed. Photograph: Bryan Tarnowski/The Guardian

Ventress said he was getting home from a date when he heard gunshots about two weeks ago just after midnight – Sterling was killed by a police officer. Ventress said gunfire was a once-a-month affair. “I’ll be doing homework, or drawing, and you just hear ‘pow pow pow pow’. Sometimes you just don’t get to sleep after that.”

Ventress calls the area he grew up in, and the area Sterling died in, “the hood”. But it’s a “quiet hood”, he said. Friends from other, more dangerous neighborhoods come to his house to hang out in a safer environment. Ventress said it had been interesting to get international attention over the past few weeks.

What does he want the world to know about north Baton Rouge?

“I don’t want people to think you come here and you’re supposed to be in fear,” he said. “You have crazy stuff happen every once in while. It’s not bad every day.”