Mixed Race Studies

Households and Neighborhoods Among Free People of Color in New Orleans: A View from the Census, 1850-1860

University of New Orleans
2010-05-14
58 pages

Frank Joseph Lovato

A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the University of New Orleans in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in History

Historians have debated to what extent the free people of color in New Orleans were members of a wealthy privileged elite or part of a middle or working class in the South’s largest antebellum city. This study steps outside the debate to suggest that analysis of the censuses of 1850 and 1860 shows correlations between neighborhoods, household structures, and occupations that reveal a heterogeneous population that eludes simple definitions. In particular this study focuses on mixed-race households to shed light on this segment of the free colored population that is mostly unstudied and generally misrepresented. This study also finds that immediately prior to the Civil War, mixed-race families, for no easily understood reason, tended to cluster in certain neighborhoods. Mostly this study points out that by the Civil War, the free people of color in New Orleans had evolved into a diverse mostly working class population.

Table of Contents

• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Maps
• List of Census Form
• Abstract
• Introduction
• Origins of the Free People of Color in New Orleans
• Historiography of the Free People of Color in New Orleans
• Methodology Used for Data Gathering
• Economic Role of the Free People of Color in Ante-Bellum New Orleans
• Community Organizations
• Neighborhoods and the Free People of Color
• Free People of Color and the Prelude to the Civil War
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Tables
• Maps
• Census Forms
• Vita

List of Figures

• Figure 1 – 4th Ward Mixed-Race Couple Distribution
• Figure 2 – 5th Ward Mixed-Race Couple Distribution
• Figure 3 – New Orleans Population in 1850 & 1860
• Figure 4 – New Orleans Colored Population in 1850 & 1860
• Figure 5 –Population Density of Colored Males in 1850 & 1860

List of Tables

• Table 1 – 1850 New Orleans Census
• Table 2 – 1860 New Orleans Census
• Table 3 – Population Density for Colored, Mulatto and Blacks in the 1850 New Orleans Census
• Table 4 – Population Density for Colored, Mulatto and Blacks in the 1860 New Orleans Census
• Table 5 – Property Values of the Free People of Color in 1850 New Orleans
• Table 6 – Property Values of the Free People of Color in 1860 New Orleans

List of Maps

• MUNICIPALITIES and WARDS 1847
• WARDS 1852
• Neighborhoods in New Orleans

List of Census Forms

• Title Page 1st and 4th Wards (1st Municipality)
• 1st Ward, 1st Municipality – 1850
• 9th Wards -1860

Read the entire thesis here.

People Can Claim One or More Races On Federal Forms

The New York Times
1997-10-30

Steven A. Holmes

The Clinton Administration today adopted new rules for listing racial and ethnic makeup on Federal forms, allowing people for the first time to identify themselves as members of more than one race.

The change, which could affect Government policies like affirmative action and the drawing of legislative districts, is the first revision in the Government’s definition of racial and ethnic groupings since 1977. It means that on Federal forms people can identify themselves in a single racial category or a combination.

The Administration rejected a ”multiracial” classification that would have covered all people of mixed racial heritage…

…But the Administration has yet to say how people who select this option will be counted in studies like the census. The Administration has not decided how to count someone who lists a racial makeup of black and white. More complicated is what to do with people listing themselves as black, white and Asian. Should such a person be counted as black, white or Asian or some combination?

The counting issue is important because Federal policy under measures like the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and aid for bilingual education is based on the percentage of certain racial groups in a given location. For example, legislative districts must be drawn in such a manner to insure that black residents are adequately represented, and block-by-block census counts are essential to the process…

…Officials at the Office of Management and Budget said they would meet with officials from other Federal agencies, interest groups, demographers, planners and social scientists to work out a policy for counting people who list themselves as members of more than one race. The officials said they hoped to put out recommendations on the issue by the fall of 1998.

The fight over how to count people will be arduous. The Association of Multiethnic Americans will argue that mixed-race residents be counted separately, Mr. Fernandez said.

Such a view is bound to raise concerns among some minority critics who have contended all along that the drive for a changing the racial categories was a way to attack affirmative action and other race-based government programs.

”I believe the same people who are against affirmative action are the same people who are pushing this,” said Robert Hill, the director of the Institute of Urban Research at Morgan State University in Baltimore…

Read the entire article here.

Racial classifications in the US census: 1890–1990

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 16, Issue 1 (1993)
pages 75-94
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.1993.9993773

Sharon M. Lee, Adjunct Professor of Sociology
University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

This article examines racial classifications on United States population census schedules between 1890 and 1990 to provide insights on the changing meanings of race in US society. The analysis uses a sociology of knowledge perspective which assumes that race is an ideological concept that can be interpreted most productively by relating its definition and measurement to the larger social and political context. Four themes are identified and discussed: (i) the historical and continuing importance of skin colour, usually dichotomized into white and non‐white, in defining race and counting racial groups; (ii) a belief in ‘pure’ races that is reflected in a preoccupation with categorizing people into a single or ‘pure’ race; (iii) the role of census categories in creating pan‐ethnic racial groups; and, (iv) the confusing of race and ethnicity in census racial classifications. Each theme demonstrates the potential or actual role of official statistics, exemplified by census racial data, in reflecting and guiding changes to the meaning and social perceptions of race. A detailed examination of racial classifications from the 1980 and 1990 Censuses shows that the influence of political interests on racial statistics is particularly important. The article concludes with a discussion of whether official statistical recorders such as population censuses should categorize and measure race, given the political motivations and non‐scientific character of the classifications used.

Read or purchase the article here.

American Indians in Chicago struggle to preserve identity, culture and history

Chicago Tribune
2012-08-13

Dahleen Glanton, Reporter

Recession, social service funding cuts hinder efforts

Susan Kelly Power was 17 when she boarded a train to Chicago, a place that seemed a world away from the Indian reservation she grew up on in North and South Dakota.

In the 70 years since she left her family’s home on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, Power has carved out a distinctive place for herself in Chicago’s youthful American Indian community. The oldest Native American in Chicago, she is the memory keeper in a community where history is sacred.

From the controversial Battle of Fort Dearborn, which marks its 200th anniversary this week, to Chief Illiniwek, the University of Illinois mascot who was forced into retirement five years ago, activists such as Power have made it their mission to set the historical record straight. While the Battle of Fort Dearborn is considered a pivotal part of the city’s history, American Indians living in Chicago have become, for the most part, an invisible population that is struggling.

With few financial resources and no political muscle, the community of about 49,000 American Indians in the Chicago area has struggled to find a voice in a region where they are outnumbered by almost every ethnic group. Once tucked away in Uptown and now scattered throughout the city and suburbs, they could virtually go unnoticed if not for a small but vocal group of elders who refuse to back down from a good fight…

…Wiese said the economic condition of American Indians is more dire than the 2010 census indicates, largely because she believes the figures are skewed. The census form allows anyone to identify themselves as American Indian, whether they have official tribal papers or not, she said. Without those who identified themselves as mixed race, the number of American Indians in Chicago would be cut in half, to just over 13,337, the census shows.

East Indians, whites, African-Americans and Hispanics who do not have tribal documentation are identifying themselves as Native American, Wiese said, driving up the economic status of Indians to artificial levels. Meanwhile, an equal number of tribal-recognized Indians, who like many poor people living with multiple families in a residence, were not counted in the census, she said.

“We call them ‘box checkers,’ the thousands of people who say they are American Indian” but don’t have legal status, said Wiese, whose agency provides educational services for children and adults. “It hurts us when the demographics look higher than they are.”…

Read the entire article here.

Time to drop racial categories in census

The Chicago Tribune
2012-08-16

Arthur Caplan, Director of Division of Medical Ethics
Department of Population Health
New York University

The U.S. Census Bureau announced that it wants to make a number of changes in how it counts membership in a race. The change is based on an experiment the bureau conducted during the last census in which nearly 500,000 households were given forms with the race and ethnicity questions worded differently from the traditional categories. The results showed that many people who filled out the traditional form did not feel they fit within the five government-defined categories of race: white, black, Asian, Pacific Islander and American Indian/Alaska Native. If Congress approves, the bureau says it plans to stop using the word “Negro” as part of a question asking if a person was “black, African-American or Negro.” There are a number of other changes planned for counting Hispanics and Arab-Americans.

These changes may seem like improvements. They are not. The bureau and Congress ought to be considering a more radical overhaul of the census — dropping questions about race entirely. There are a lot of reasons why.

First, the concept of “race” makes no biological sense. None. The classifications Americans use to divide people into groups and categories have nothing to do with genetics or biology…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Susan Graham Discusses Project RACE

Mixed Race Radio
2012-08-15, 17:00Z (12:00 EDT, 09:00 PDT)

Tiffany Rae Reid, Host

Susan Graham, Executive Director
Project RACE

Project RACE (Reclassify All Children Equally) members are the national advocates for multiracial children, teens, adults, and our families. Project RACE was started in 1990, so we are in our 22nd year! Susan Graham, the mother of two multiracial children and Chris Ashe, the mother of a multiracial child began Project RACE because of their own frustration with their own children being forced to pick only one race on forms in America. That meant, very simply, that a child had to choose to be her mother’s race or her father’s race. Susan and Chris planned to start a grassroots movement to pass State legislation, mandate the US Census Bureau and federal agencies to add the term “multiracial” to forms, or in some way accommodate the needs of multiracial people.

Play in your default player here.

Capturing complexity in the United States: which aspects of race matter and when?

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 35, Issue 8, 2012
Special Issue:Accounting for ethnic and racial diversity: the challenge of enumeration
pages 1484-1502
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2011.607504

Aliya Saperstein, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Stanford University

The experience of race in the United States is shaped by both self-identification and ascription. One aspect reflects personal history, ancestry, and socialization while the other draws largely on appearance. Yet, most data collection efforts treat the two aspects of race as interchangeable, assuming that the relationship between each and an individual’s life chances will be the same. This study demonstrates that incorporating racial self-identification and other-classification in analyses of inequality reveals more complex patterns of advantage and disadvantage than can be seen using standard methods. These findings have implications for how racial data should be collected and suggest new directions for studying racial inequality in the United States and around the world.

It is templing to assume there are clear distinctions that identify a person as being a particular race or ethnicity. Though the characteristics that define racial or ethnic difference vary across societies, it is nevertheless common for people to maintain thai their country’s ‘others’ are easily singled out e.g., by face, accent, name, or dress. Indeed, in recent years, governments around the world have begun to mandate the collection of data to monitor racial/ethnic discrimination as if the information needed were obvious. In the United States, official racial data has been collected since at leasl 1790, and how it
should be gathered was rarely questioned because, according to commonsense belief, racial differences were ‘unmistakable’. Today, the assumption of measurement agreement can take on a different tone as racial data is put to different purposes: why quibble over…

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Census to Change Categories on Race

The Associated Press
2012-08-09

The Census Bureau wants to make broad changes to its surveys to keep pace with changing notions of race. The changes would drop use of the term “Negro,” leaving a choice of “black” or “African-American.” It would count Hispanics as separate from blacks and whites. It would also add write-in categories that would allow Middle Easterners and Arabs to specifically identify themselves. The census director, Robert M. Groves, says research during the 2010 census found that making these changes increased response rates and improved accuracy. The government currently defines Latino as an ethnicity. Census forms now instruct people to indicate if they have Hispanic origin and then check a race box such as “white” or “black.”

Will new age of mixed-race identities loosen the hold of race or tie it up in tighter knots?

Newhouse News Service
2000-04-20

Jonathan Tilove

Ward Connerly, who describes himself as a roughly equal mix of French Canadian, Choctaw, African and Irish ancestry and who is married to a white woman, spent much of the last decade campaigning to end race-based affirmative action. Susan Graham, a white woman married to a black man, has spent that same decade working tirelessly as the founder of Project RACE (Reclassify All Children Equally) so that her two children and others like them could be counted in official statistics as “multiracial.”

For the first time in American history, respondents to the decennial census are able to identify themselves by as many races as they see fit. The tabulated results will yield 63 different categories and combinations—or 126 considering that each of those 63 could also be either Hispanic or non-Hispanic. And that does not take into account the limitless possibilities for writing in some race of one’s own devising.

But when the 2000 census is completed, all the folks at both the Connerly and Graham households will be assigned the race of their nearest neighbors. Why? Because both Connerly and Graham, for their own very different reasons, refused to check any of the boxes on the race question.

As America embarks on a new, more complicated era of racial counting, a look at how some of those close to the issue chose to answer the census race question presents a puzzle: Is this dawning age of mixed-race identities likely to loosen the hold of race on the American mind, or merely tie it up in tighter knots?

“It is progress,” said G. Reginald Daniel, a sociologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara. “Whether people understand it or not, we’re undoing 300 years of racial formation. We have yet to see the after-effect, but it will be radical.”

Daniel, who grew up black in Kentucky, said he has been thinking about his racial identity since Dec. 2, 1955, when his first-grade teacher reported that Rosa Parks had been arrested for refusing to let a white passenger have her seat on the bus. “It’s time we colored people stood up for our rights,” the teacher told her students.

Daniel was puzzled. He raised his hand and asked the teacher who “colored” people were. “Everyone in this school,” the teacher, startled, replied. But, Daniel persisted, what color are they? “We’re brown! We’re Negroes!” the teacher replied…

But Daniel’s skin was tan, a blend of white and brown, and when he asked his mother about it she explained that while they were a mix of African, Irish, English, French, American Indian, Asian Indian and maybe even German-Jewish, they were still members of the “Negro race.”

Over time, Daniel came to identify himself as multiracial. He became a leading intellectual adviser, at one point to Project RACE and on a continuing basis to the Association for MultiEthnic Americans (AMEA)—the largest of the organizations that pressed for a multiracial category on the census. The federal Office of Management and Budget rejected that possibility but in 1997, after four years of deliberation, announced that on the 2000 census respondents would be able to check as many races as apply…

…But to Susan Graham, the form felt like one step forward and two steps back. Graham had wanted a separate multiracial category so that children like hers would not have to choose between their parents’ racial identities, or end up some unclassifiable “other.”…

…“I’m not about to have my children check more than one box only to be relegated back to the black category,” said Graham, who now lives in Tallahassee, Fla. She left the race question blank.

But the census cannot permit blanks, so, by a statistical method known as “hot deck imputation,” Graham’s family will be assigned races that blend best with their closest neighbors—the assumption being that most people live in neighborhoods that match them racially. And, in Graham’s case that is true, with immediate neighbors black, white and interracial.

Rainier Spencer, a professor of Afro-American studies at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, has studied the multiracial movement in his book, “Spurious Issues: Race and Multiracial Identity Politics in the United States.” He faults Graham’s logic.

In Spencer’s view, Graham and others in the multiracial movement deploy their distaste with the one-drop rule selectively. If they truly want its repeal, they must recognize that virtually all African-Americans are multiracial.

To him, the whole notion of a multiracial identity depends on an assumption that racial identity is real. And as Spencer told some 100 students at the Pan-Collegiate Conference on the Mixed-Race Experience, held recently at Harvard University and Wellesley College, “All racial identity is bogus, no matter whether the prefix is mono, multi or bi.”

The “insurgent idea” of multiraciality can undermine the racial order by “demonstrating the absurdity of fixed and exclusive racial categories,” he writes in his book. But the moment multiracial becomes an official category—a box to be checked—it no longer undermines the existing racial paradigm, but expands it.

Moreover, Spencer said, while race may not truly exist, racism does, and OMB acted quite appropriately in ordering the racial data collapsed back into traditional categories for civil rights purposes…

Read the entire article here.

New Americans: Rise of the Multiracials: A Documentary

A Work-In-Progress Documentary

Eli Steele, Producer

With more Americans marrying across the color line today than before, it is inevitable that the racial makeup of America’s face will forever change. Of the nine million individuals that identified themselves as multiracial on the 2010 census, more than 50 percent were under 18 years of age, including filmmaker Eli Steele’s two children, Jack and June. By 2050, they and their multiracial peers are expected to account for 25% of the total population.
 
This fate was long predicted by early Americans such as James Madison and Frederick Douglass who knew the color line could not keep the races apart for eternity. And now that this fate is upon us, what does it mean for a country that has shed so much blood in the name of race?

With this question on his mind, Filmmaker Eli Steele, who is multiracial himself, has embarked on a journey through America to explore various aspects of the American landscape for clues to what the future holds. So far, he has encountered individuals ranging from a U.S. Army soldier who refuses to self identify his race to a radio host who identifies as Black American despite a white mother and black father. Aside from interviews, Steele plans to explore the role of multiracial individuals in key moments in American history, the ongoing demographic shifts that are rapidly redefining once firm racial boundaries, and pockets of resistance to the multiracial baby boom.
 
Steele also plans to journey into the history of his family for to be multiracial is a fate that is at once deeply personal and political. Why did the ancestors of his children make the decisions to cross the color line, especially at times where there were no societal advantages in doing so? By learning more about the world they came from and the decisions they made, Steele hopes to provide his children with a better understanding of the world and people they come from. 
 ​
To date, Steele has discovered there are two Americas at odds with one another. There is the private America of individuals has advanced race relations to the point that 85 percent of 18 to 29 year olds and 73 percent of 30 to 49 year olds would consider marriage to another race. On the other side, there is the public America of government institutions and corporations that continue their race policies despite an obvious absurdity: if an individual is more than one race, then what is race? Will America reconcile its race policies with the irreversible trends of private America or will there always be a disconnect?

The outcome of this new front on the culture war around race will determine whether America continues its legacy of racial strife or finally looks past skin color to the person’s content of character. At the end of his journey, Steele hopes to return to his two children, Jack and June, with a better and realistic understanding of how to prepare them for the America they will live in 2050.

Interview subjects include Clay Cane, Jennifer Ceci, Jen Chau, Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Eric ‘Charles’ Jaskolski, Angela Mckee, Farzana Nayani, Jared Sexton, and Ken Tanabe.

For more information, click here.