Download or read book The Free People of Color of New Orleans written by Mary Gehman and published by . This book was released on 2009-02-10 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Antebellum New Orleans was home to thousands of urbane, educated and well to do free blacks. The French called them les gens de couleur libre, the free people of color; after the Civil War they were known as the Creoles of color, shortened today to simply Creoles. Theirs was an ambiguous status, sharing the French Language, Catholic religion and European education of the elite whites, but also keeping African and indigenous American influences from their early heritage. This is their story, rarely mentioned in conventional histories, and often misunderstood today, even by some of their descendants. The book is an easy read that lays out the chronology of events, laws and circumstances that formed the unique racial mix of New Orleans and much of Louisiana. Includes end notes, suggested bibliography, index, and a listing of family names of free people of color that appear in the early years of the Louisiana Territory. A must-have for genealogists, historians, and students of African-American history.
Download or read book The Free People of Color of New Orleans written by Mary Gehman and published by . This book was released on 1994-01-01 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Antebellum New Orleans was home to thousands of urbane, educated and well to do free blacks. The French called them "les gens de couleur libre", the free people of color; after the Civil War they were known as the Creoles of color, shortened today to simply Creoles. Theirs was and ambiguous status, sharing the French language, Catholic religion and European education of the elite whites, who were often blood relatives, but also keeping African and indigenous American influences from their early heritage. - back cover.
Download or read book Beyond Slavery s Shadow written by Warren Eugene Milteer Jr. and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2021-09-15 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the eve of the Civil War, most people of color in the United States toiled in bondage. Yet nearly half a million of these individuals, including over 250,000 in the South, were free. In Beyond Slavery's Shadow, Warren Eugene Milteer Jr. draws from a wide array of sources to demonstrate that from the colonial period through the Civil War, the growing influence of white supremacy and proslavery extremism created serious challenges for free persons categorized as "negroes," "mulattoes," "mustees," "Indians," or simply "free people of color" in the South. Segregation, exclusion, disfranchisement, and discriminatory punishment were ingrained in their collective experiences. Nevertheless, in the face of attempts to deny them the most basic privileges and rights, free people of color defended their families and established organizations and businesses. These people were both privileged and victimized, both celebrated and despised, in a region characterized by social inconsistency. Milteer's analysis of the way wealth, gender, and occupation intersected with ideas promoting white supremacy and discrimination reveals a wide range of social interactions and life outcomes for the South's free people of color and helps to explain societal contradictions that continue to appear in the modern United States.
Download or read book Making Race in the Courtroom written by Kenneth R. Aslakson and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2014-09-26 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No American city’s history better illustrates both the possibilities for alternative racial models and the role of the law in shaping racial identity than New Orleans, Louisiana, which prior to the Civil War was home to America’s most privileged community of people of African descent. In the eyes of the law, New Orleans’s free people of color did not belong to the same race as enslaved Africans and African-Americans. While slaves were “negroes,” free people of color were gens de couleur libre, creoles of color, or simply creoles. New Orleans’s creoles of color remained legally and culturally distinct from “negroes” throughout most of the nineteenth century until state mandated segregation lumped together descendants of slaves with descendants of free people of color. Much of the recent scholarship on New Orleans examines what race relations in the antebellum period looked as well as why antebellum Louisiana’s gens de couleur enjoyed rights and privileges denied to free blacks throughout most of the United States. This book, however, is less concerned with the what and why questions than with how people of color, acting within institutions of power, shaped those institutions in ways beyond their control. As its title suggests, Making Race in the Courtroom argues that race is best understood not as a category, but as a process. It seeks to demonstrate the role of free people of African-descent, interacting within the courts, in this process.
Download or read book North Carolina s Free People of Color 1715 1885 written by Warren Eugene Milteer Jr. and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2020-07-01 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In North Carolina’s Free People of Color, 1715–1885, Warren Eugene Milteer Jr. examines the lives of free persons categorized by their communities as “negroes,” “mulattoes,” “mustees,” “Indians,” “mixed-bloods,” or simply “free people of color.” From the colonial period through Reconstruction, lawmakers passed legislation that curbed the rights and privileges of these non-enslaved residents, from prohibiting their testimony against whites to barring them from the ballot box. While such laws suggest that most white North Carolinians desired to limit the freedoms and civil liberties enjoyed by free people of color, Milteer reveals that the two groups often interacted—praying together, working the same land, and occasionally sharing households and starting families. Some free people of color also rose to prominence in their communities, becoming successful businesspeople and winning the respect of their white neighbors. Milteer’s innovative study moves beyond depictions of the American South as a region controlled by a strict racial hierarchy. He contends that although North Carolinians frequently sorted themselves into races imbued with legal and social entitlements—with whites placing themselves above persons of color—those efforts regularly clashed with their concurrent recognition of class, gender, kinship, and occupational distinctions. Whites often determined the position of free nonwhites by designating them as either valuable or expendable members of society. In early North Carolina, free people of color of certain statuses enjoyed access to institutions unavailable even to some whites. Prior to 1835, for instance, some free men of color possessed the right to vote while the law disenfranchised all women, white and nonwhite included. North Carolina’s Free People of Color, 1715–1885 demonstrates that conceptions of race were complex and fluid, defying easy characterization. Despite the reductive labels often assigned to them by whites, free people of color in the state emerged from an array of backgrounds, lived widely varied lives, and created distinct cultures—all of which, Milteer suggests, allowed them to adjust to and counter ever-evolving forms of racial discrimination.
Download or read book Slavery s Metropolis written by Rashauna Johnson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-07 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New Orleans is an iconic city, which was once located at the crossroads of early America and the Atlantic World. New Orleans became a major American metropolis as its slave population exploded; in the early nineteenth century, slaves made up one third of the urban population. In contrast to our typical understanding of rural, localized, isolated bondage in the emergent Deep South, daily experiences of slavery in New Orleans were global, interconnected, and transient. Slavery's Metropolis uses slave circulations through New Orleans between 1791 and 1825 to map the social and cultural history of enslaved men and women and the rapidly shifting city, nation, and world in which they lived. Investigating emigration from the Caribbean to Louisiana during the Haitian Revolution, commodity flows across urban-rural divides, multiracial amusement places, the local jail, and freedom-seeking migrations to Trinidad following the War of 1812, it remaps the history of slavery in modern urban society.
Download or read book Becoming Free Remaining Free written by Judith Kelleher Schafer and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2003-05-01 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Louisiana state law was unique in allowing slaves to contract for their freedom and to initiate a lawsuit for liberty. Judith Kelleher Schafer describes the ingenious and remarkably sophisticated ways New Orleans slaves used the legal system to gain their independence and find a voice in a society that ordinarily gave them none. Showing that remaining free was often as challenging as becoming free, Schafer also recounts numerous cases in which free people of color were forced to use the courts to prove their status. She further documents seventeen free blacks who, when faced with deportation, amazingly sued to enslave themselves. Schafer’s impressive detective work achieves a rare feat in the historical profession—the unveiling of an entirely new facet of the slave experience in the American South.
Download or read book Bounded Lives Bounded Places written by Kimberly S. Hanger and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1997-03-13 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines Louisiana's history during the Spanish colonial period of the late eighteenth century, describing economic, political, and military conditions, along with the social conditions and rights granted to the antebellum population of freed slaves that lived in New Orleans under Spanish rule.
Download or read book Creole written by Sybil Kein and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2000-08-01 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who are the Creoles? The answer is not clear-cut. Of European, African, or Caribbean mixed descent, they are a people of color and Francophone dialect native to south Louisiana; and though their history dates from the late 1600s, they have been sorely neglected in the literature. Creole is a project that both defines and celebrates this ethnic identity. In fifteen essays, writers intimately involved with their subject explore the vibrant yet understudied culture of the Creole people across time—their language, literature, religion, art, food, music, folklore, professions, customs, and social barriers.
Download or read book Economy Hall written by Fatima Shaik and published by . This book was released on 2021-03 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Economy Hall: The Hidden History of a Free Black Brotherhood tells the story of the Sociâetâe d'Economie et d'Assistance Mutuelle, a New Orleans mutual aid society founded by free men of color in 1836. The group was one of the most important multiethnic, intellectual communities in the US South: educators, world-traveling merchants, soldiers, tradesmen, and poets who rejected racism and colorism to fight for suffrage and education rights for all. The author drew on the meeting minutes of the Sociâetâe d'Economie as well as census and civil records, newspapers, and numerous archival sources to write a narrative stretching from the Haitian Revolution through the early jazz age"--
Download or read book Race Sex and Social Order in Early New Orleans written by Jennifer M. Spear and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2009-06-15 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, 2009 Kemper and Leila Williams Prize in Louisiana History, The Historic New Orleans Collection and the Louisiana Historical Association A microcosm of exaggerated societal extremes—poverty and wealth, vice and virtue, elitism and equality—New Orleans is a tangled web of race, cultural mores, and sexual identities. Jennifer M. Spear's examination of the dialectical relationship between politics and social practice unravels the city’s construction of race during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Spear brings together archival evidence from three different languages and the most recent and respected scholarship on racial formation and interracial sex to explain why free people of color became a significant population in the early days of New Orleans and to show how authorities attempted to use concepts of race and social hierarchy to impose order on a decidedly disorderly society. She recounts and analyzes the major conflicts that influenced New Orleanian culture: legal attempts to impose racial barriers and social order, political battles over propriety and freedom, and cultural clashes over place and progress. At each turn, Spear’s narrative challenges the prevailing academic assumptions and supports her efforts to move exploration of racial formation away from cultural and political discourses and toward social histories. Strikingly argued, richly researched, and methodologically sound, this wide-ranging look at how choices about sex triumphed over established class systems and artificial racial boundaries supplies a refreshing contribution to the history of early Louisiana.
Download or read book Black Life in Old New Orleans written by Keith Weldon Medley and published by Pelican Publishing Company. This book was released on 2020-11-02 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: African Americans, their city, and their past. Capturing 300 years of history and focusing on African American communities' social, cultural, and political pasts, this book captures a significant portion of the diversity that is New Orleans. Author Keith Weldon Medley's research encompasses Congo Square, Old Treme, Louis Armstrong, Fannie C. Williams, Mardi Gras, and more in this groundbreaking work. He creates a comprehensive history of New Orleans and the black experience.
Download or read book Becoming Free Becoming Black written by Alejandro de la Fuente and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-16 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shows that the law of freedom, not slavery, determined the way that race developed over time in three slave societies.
Download or read book The Strange History of the American Quadroon written by Emily Clark and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2013-04-22 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exotic, seductive, and doomed: the antebellum mixed-race free woman of color has long operated as a metaphor for New Orleans. Commonly known as a "quadroon," she and the city she represents rest irretrievably condemned in the popular historical imagination by the linked sins of slavery and interracial sex. However, as Emily Clark shows, the rich archives of New Orleans tell a different story. Free women of color with ancestral roots in New Orleans were as likely to marry in the 1820s as white women. And marriage, not concubinage, was the basis of their family structure. In The Strange History of the American Quadroon, Clark investigates how the narrative of the erotic colored mistress became an elaborate literary and commercial trope, persisting as a symbol that long outlived the political and cultural purposes for which it had been created. Untangling myth and memory, she presents a dramatically new and nuanced understanding of the myths and realities of New Orleans's free women of color.
Download or read book The Forgotten People written by David Connell Rankin and published by . This book was released on 1976 with total page 668 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Black New Orleans 1860 1880 written by John W. Blassingame and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-09-15 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reissued for the first time in over thirty years, Black New Orleans explores the twenty-year period in which the city’s black population more than doubled. Meticulously researched and replete with archival illustrations from newspapers and rare periodicals, John W. Blassingame’s groundbreaking history offers a unique look at the economic and social life of black people in New Orleans during Reconstruction. Not a conventional political treatment, Blassingame’s history instead emphasizes the educational, religious, cultural, and economic activities of African Americans during the late nineteenth century. “Blending historical and sociological perspectives, and drawing with skill and imagination upon a variety of sources, [Blassingame] offers fresh insights into an oft-studied period of Southern history. . . . In both time and place the author has chosen an extraordinarily revealing vantage point from which to view his subject. ”—Neil R. McMillen, American Historical Review
Download or read book Caribbean New Orleans written by Cécile Vidal and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2019-04-23 with total page 552 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Combining Atlantic and imperial perspectives, Caribbean New Orleans offers a lively portrait of the city and a probing investigation of the French colonists who established racial slavery there as well as the African slaves who were forced to toil for them. Casting early New Orleans as a Caribbean outpost of the French Empire rather than as a North American frontier town, Cecile Vidal reveals the persistent influence of the Antilles, especially Saint-Domingue, which shaped the city's development through the eighteenth century. In so doing, she urges us to rethink our usual divisions of racial systems into mainland and Caribbean categories. Drawing on New Orleans's rich court records as a way to capture the words and actions of its inhabitants, Vidal takes us into the city's streets, market, taverns, church, hospitals, barracks, and households. She explores the challenges that slow economic development, Native American proximity, imperial rivalry, and the urban environment posed to a social order that was predicated on slave labor and racial hierarchy. White domination, Vidal demonstrates, was woven into the fabric of New Orleans from its founding. This comprehensive history of urban slavery locates Louisiana's capital on a spectrum of slave societies that stretched across the Americas and provides a magisterial overview of racial discourses and practices during the formative years of North America's most intriguing city.
