Mixed Race Studies

Picturing Black New Orleans: A Creole Photographer’s View of the Early Twentieth Century

University Press of Florida
2012-09-02
152 pages
7×10
Cloth ISBN 13: 978-0-8130-4187-2

Arthé A. Anthony, Professor of American Studies, Emeritus
Occidental College, Los Angeles, California

Florestine Perrault Collins (1895-1988) lived a fascinating and singular life. She came from a Creole family that had known privileges before the Civil War, privileges that largely disappeared in the Jim Crow South. She learned photographic techniques while passing for white. She opened her first studio in her home, and later moved her business to New Orleans’s black business district. Fiercely independent, she ignored convention by moving out of her parents’ house before marriage and, later, by divorcing her first husband.

Between 1920 and 1949, Collins documented African American life, capturing images of graduations, communions, and recitals, and allowing her subjects to help craft their images. She supported herself and her family throughout the Great Depression and in the process created an enduring pictorial record of her particular time and place. Collins left behind a visual legacy that taps into the social and cultural history of New Orleans and the South.

It is this legacy that Arthé Anthony, Collins’s great-niece, explores in Picturing Black New Orleans. Anthony blends Collins’s story with those of the individuals she photographed, documenting the profound changes in the lives of Louisiana Creoles and African Americans. Balancing art, social theory, and history and drawing from family records, oral histories, and photographs rescued from New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Anthony gives us a rich look at the cultural landscape of New Orleans nearly a century ago.

A Unique Slant of Light: The Bicentennial History of Art in Louisiana

University Press of Mississippi
2012-09-20
450 pages
9 1/2 x 11 7/8 inches,
400+ color illustrations, foreword, introduction, bibliography, index of artists
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-61703-690-3
 
Edited By:

Michael Sartisky, President
Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities

J. Richard Gruber, Director Emeritus
Ogden Museum of Southern Art

Associate Editor:

John R. Kemp, Former Deputy Director
Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities

A lushly illustrated celebration of two centuries of creative work from Louisiana

A Unique Slant of Light: The Bicentennial History of Art in Louisiana is a handsome, unprecedented, commemorative hardcover edition limited to approximately 3,000 copies. This large-format volume encompasses 450 color pages featuring approximately 275 artists and photographers. For art collectors and enthusiasts, for followers of Louisiana history, and for keepers of Louisiana pride, this dazzling book is testimony to the state’s vibrant artistic culture.

Coeditors are Michael Sartisky, PhD, president of the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, and J. Richard Gruber, PhD, director emeritus of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art; John R. Kemp, former deputy director of the LEH, is serving as associate editor. Written by scholars from around the country, the entries include all genres (painting, sculpture, photography, folk art, decorative art, furniture) and periods, from colonial to contemporary. Private collections and major archives such as the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the Louisiana State Museum, the Historic New Orleans Collection, and the Louisiana State University Museum of Art, among others, contribute a comprehensive library of images.

Every entry in the book will be linked to fully articulated entries on each artist and genre in KnowLA: The Digital Encyclopedia of Louisiana History and Culture,which also will have the capacity to include a much more extensive image gallery for each artist and genre.

View A Unique Slant of Light in digital format here.

Spectacular Wickedness: Sex, Race, and Memory in Storyville, New Orleans

LSU Press
January 2013
336 pages
6.00 x 9.00 inches
13 halftones, 2 maps
Hardcover ISBN: 9780807150146

Emily Epstein Landau
Department of History
University of Maryland, College Park

From 1897 to 1917 the red-light district of Storyville commercialized and even thrived on New Orleans’s longstanding reputation for sin and sexual excess. This notorious neighborhood, located just outside of the French Quarter, hosted a diverse cast of characters who reflected the cultural milieu and complex social structure of turn-of-the-century New Orleans, a city infamous for both prostitution and interracial intimacy. In particular, Lulu White—a mixed-race prostitute and madam—created an image of herself and marketed it profitably to sell sex with light-skinned women to white men of means. In Spectacular Wickedness, Emily Epstein Landau examines the social history of this famed district within the cultural context of developing racial, sexual, and gender ideologies and practices.

Storyville’s founding was envisioned as a reform measure, an effort by the city’s business elite to curb and contain prostitution—namely, to segregate it. In 1890, the Louisiana legislature passed the Separate Car Act, which, when challenged by New Orleans’s Creoles of color, led to the landmark Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896, constitutionally sanctioning the enactment of “separate but equal” laws. The concurrent partitioning of both prostitutes and blacks worked only to reinforce Storyville’s libidinous license and turned sex across the color line into a more lucrative commodity.

By looking at prostitution through the lens of patriarchy and demonstrating how gendered racial ideologies proved crucial to the remaking of southern society in the aftermath of the Civil War, Landau reveals how Storyville’s salacious and eccentric subculture played a significant role in the way New Orleans constructed itself during the New South era.

The Color Question Like Banquo’s Ghost

The Indianapolis Recorder: A Weekly Newspaper Devoted the to Best Interest of the Negroes
Saturday, 1910-05-07
page 1, column 3
Source: Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis: University Library: Program of Digital Scholarship

There Is Virtue In Being a Full Blood Negro—Louisiana Supreme Court Makes Important Ruling.

According to a decision handed down by the Louisiana supreme court on Monday, April 25, when the law says “Negroes” it designates people of full African descent and does not include “persons of color”—octoroons, quadroons or even mulattoes. In holding thus the court puts an end to several prosecutions of men accused of violating state laws, passed after a long educational campaign, for the purpose of preventing miscegenation and the consequent deterioration of the white race. The decision will therefore be regarded as of great importance as well as of great interest not only in Louisiana, but all through the south, in every part of which the disastrous results of racial mingling, in and out of marriage, have of late been the subject of much and serious attention.

The decision of the court is, of course, a practical repeal or making void of such legislation as has already been passed with a view to keeping the white and  black  races apart, and equally, of course. It is in direct contradiction of the long established theory that any recognizable fraction of Negro blood fixes the status of the person in whose veins it flows. This was the invariable rule in slavery days, and it has survived emancipation in the drawing of social lines no less in the north than in the south. It is indeed a little humiliating to Caucasian pride that an eighth, a quarter or a half of black blood should count for more than a half, three-quarters or seven-eighths of white blood.

Anti-Miscegenation Movement

Columbus Enquirer-Sun
Columbus, Georgia
1886-09-24
page 5, column 3

Source: Digital Library of Georgia

Organization In Louisiana to Prevent the Intermarriage of Whites and Blacks

New Orleans. September 20.—A practical movement has been inaugurated in Bossier parish, in this state, for the abolition of miscegenation. There have been during the past year or so several spasmodic efforts in this direction, both in Louisiana and Mississippi. Self-constituted vigilance committees have warned white men with negro wives and mistresses to leave them and lead a regular life, and when this failed have ridden through the parish, severely whipping both men and women who disobeyed this order.  In Mississippi there were several arrests, convictions and sentences for violation of the law prohibiting intermarriages between the races, and in Louisiana one man was severely cut in a scrimmage arising from this movement. But these anti-miscegenation raids were spasmodic, the freaks of a few wild young men. The present movement is more serious and more general, and is a thorough and practical organization, like that of the prohibitionist, to break up miscegenation.

The first meeting was held in Bossier parish in July, whore the subject was generally discussed, and adjourned over to this month to find the drift of public opinion. It was found that public sentiment among the whites was well nigh unanimous on the subject. The recent meeting held at Cottage Grove, in the upper portion of Bossier parish, was the result. There was no secrecy or mystery about it. It was an open mass meeting, in which all the people of the neighborhood—farmers, clergymen and others—assembled. The meeting was opened with prayer and presided over by a clergyman. The resolutions were of the strongest character. Those guilty of miscegenation were threatened with social boycott, and warned that they were insulting the race feelings and moral principles of the community. But the gist of the meeting was the appointment of a vigilance committee of nineteen to serve notices on these white men living with negro women—the vigilants were not instructed as to what they should if this warning is unheeded—and the appointment of another committee to assist in the organization of anti-miscegenation societies in other parishes in the state.

This plan of operation is warmly supported by the press. The Bossier Banner declares that race purity must be preserved at all hazards, the line must be sharply and distinctly drawn, and those who cross it must pay the penalty. The Robeline Reporter of Natchitoches, edited by the father of the present attorney-general of the state, approves the idea.

As this sentiment prevails in most of the neighboring parishes, it is thought that the present organization, by giving a start to the anti-miscegenation sentiment, which in this part of the state is now stronger than the anti-liquor sentiment, it will spread through north Louisiana if not into the neighboring states of Mississippi, Texas and Arkansas. There is no law in Louisiana against the intermarriage or cohabitation of f[r]aces, this prohibition, which was strongly urged by many persons, being voted down in the late constitutional convention, but miscegenation is growing rarer every day, in deference to the strong public sentiment on this point.

New Orleans and the African Diaspora

American Historical Association
From the Suppliment to the 127th Annual Meeting
2012-12-23

Laura Rosanne Adderley, Associate Professor of History
Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana

Many people conceptualize the study of the “African diaspora” as focused on black experience beyond or separate from “African American” experience in the United States. But black experience in the United States fits fully within the wider African diaspora. Similarly, while black populations in New Orleans shared many—perhaps even most—of their experiences with the rest of the United States, they also lived through distinctive waves of multiple European colonizers and black and white emigration, with the concomitant rise of locally specific cultural production, social experience, and racial norms.

Africans in Early New Orleans

The city’s distinctive place in the development of African diaspora history and culture in the Americas began with the arrival of over 5,000 enslaved Africans in the first decade after the city’s founding in 1718. Legal enslavement of Africans and their descendants would continue in the city until the Civil War a century and a half later. Over the course of that period, people of African descent, both free and enslaved, regularly made up one third or more of the city’s population. A second large influx of new African arrivals came in the 1780s, halfway through the period from 1763 to 1802 when the city fell under Spanish rule. The relatively high percentage of enslaved people of African descent in the city and its environs, their critical role in building many of the city’s oldest neighborhoods (including the French Quarter), and generally making colonial life and commerce possible, has led historian Larry Powell to note that “France may have founded Louisiana as we know it, but it was [enslaved people] from Senegal and Congo who laid the foundation.” The legacy of the labor of enslaved Africans literally surrounds every visitor to the city…

…Racial Patterns and Racial Politics

Another distinctive aspect of New Orleans’s black diaspora developed in the late 18th century as Spanish legal practices increased the population of free people of color through much more liberal rules allowing masters to manumit or free enslaved people. Many, although by no means all, of those manumitted were people of mixed race. The presence of this large population of sometimes white-appearing mulattoes, looked similar to patterns in parts of the Caribbean, and contributed to New Orleans’s often-exaggerated reputation as a city of widespread racial mixture and greater racial tolerance than elsewhere in the United States. As several scholars have noted, ideas about what the mulattoes and quadroons of New Orleans signified were much more powerful in shaping perceptions of the city than knowledge of the day-to-day lives of people of mixed race, which could be alternately prosperous or relatively impoverished, comparatively privileged or fraught with racial and social uncertainty, and many steps in between. For all the significance of the large population of people of mixed race, most residents of the city continued to fit generally into communities defined largely as black or white, in ways similar to racial experience elsewhere in North America. Also, for all the comparisons with Caribbean slave societies, most parts of Louisiana—with notable exceptions in some sugar plantation areas in the 19th century—did not have slavery-era population ratios comparable to the overwhelming black majorities that existed in many Caribbean islands…

Read the entire article here.

Rosa Mahier’s Freedom: Identity and the Maintenance of Liberty in Antebellum Louisiana

127th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association
New Orleans, Louisiana
2013-01-03 through 2013-01-06

Saturday, 2013-01-05: 14:50 CST (Local Time)
Chamber Ballroom I (Roosevelt New Orleans)
Paper in AHA Session 220: Manipulating Freedom: Liberty, Enslavement, and the Quest for Power in the Southwestern Borderlands (2013-01-05: 14:30-16:30 CST)

Johanna Lee Davis Smith
Tulane University

Rosa Mahier had lived her whole life in Mulatto Bend, a little community located a short distance from Baton Rouge.  Born a slave in 1813 and legally freed in 1827, Rosa was a familiar member of a network of free people of color which had lived and worked within and throughout the larger white population of the area since the 1780s.  Most of the inhabitants – black as well as white, Rosa included – were descended from local families of longue durée, and the free people of color in the community carefully cultivated their identity in order to perpetuate the security of their free status.  Rosa Mahier had been legally free for twenty years when Fergus Mahier, the white nephew of the man who once owned her, took legal action in an attempt to re-enslave her and her freeborn children.

Fergus Mahier did not ultimately prevail in his lawsuit, but his petition is as compelling for what he did not demand as for what he did.  Mahier did not attempt to re-enslave Rosa’s two brothers or her grandmother, all of whom had been manumitted at the same time and in the same way as Rosa, nor did he include Rosa’s mother Agnes, who also had been owned and freed by the Mahier family.  Therefore, the brief record of the case offers the opportunity to weigh the roles of identity, status, gender, wealth, and power as factors in the successful maintenance of liberty among free people of color in antebellum Louisiana.  Mahier’s motivation for the suit and the individual characteristics of the people involved present a trenchant illustration of the hair’s breadth that separated slavery and freedom, as well as the continuous efforts of aspiring slaveowners to breach that line.

Life Stories, Local Places, and the Networks of Free Women of Color in Early North America

127th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association
New Orleans, Louisiana
2013-01-03 through 2013-01-06

AHA Session 72
Friday, 2013-01-04: 08:30-10:00 CST (Local Time)
Preservation Hall, Studio 7 (New Orleans Marriott)

Chair: Daina Ramey Berry, University of Texas, Austin

Papers:

• “Life Stories, Local Knowledge, and the Law in Eighteenth-Century North America” / Terri L. Snyder, California State University, Fullerton
• “‘Refugee from St. Domingue Living in This City’: The Geography of Social Networks in Testaments of Refugee Free Women of Color in New Orleans” / Elizabeth Neidenbach, College of William and Mary
• “The Power of Priscilla’s Upper Room: Gender and the African American Public Sphere in the 1830s” / Sharon E. Wood, University of Nebraska, Omaha

Comment: Anthony S. Parent, Wake Forest University

The three papers included in this panel share several themes significant to new directions in the history of women of color in North America and the Caribbean.

First, all three papers are concerned with the importance of networks, and the relationship between networks and localities.  In these papers, networks sustain women’s claims to freedom, and networks are closely associated with places.  Terri Snyder finds, for example, that Jane Webb and her daughter Elisha strengthened their positions in 18th century courtrooms–rarely hospitable to women of color–by drawing on local knowledge to support their claims to justice.  For Elisha, her mother’s networks in Virginia eventually intervened to secure her freedom in New Hampshire.  Elizabeth Neidenbach’s research in the wills of refugees from St. Domingue uncovers women’s networks expressed in the streets and neighborhoods of New Orleans–networks that reach back to the island home left behind.  Not only did these networks help refugee women survive, they played a significant role in shaping the culture of the city.  Finally, Sharon Wood’s research underscores the importance of African American-controlled space to the emergence of a black public sphere.  Property in Illinois owned by Priscilla, a former slave, became the meeting place when leading white men of St. Louis sought to suppress African American organizing by shutting off their access to space.  

Finally, all three papers are concerned with methodologies of doing history and biography at the intersections of race and gender in early North America. Focusing on relatively ordinary women of color, each paper aims to recover the lives of particular women and integrate them into history. Until very recently, it has been a truism that the life stories of unlettered, enslaved, and free women of color of the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries must remain unwritten because the sources to uncover their lives did not exist. Yet each of these papers, by imaginative use of primary sources and diligent linking of records across national, colonial, and state borders, challenges that claim, giving voice and flesh to women whose lives would otherwise remain fragmented among scattered documents.

This session addresses audiences interested in the histories of women, slavery and freedom, and geographical and biographical approaches to history.

Carnival, Convents, and the Cult of St. Rocque: Cultural Subterfuge in the Work of Alice Dunbar-Nelson

Georgia State University
2012-08-09
57 pages

Sibongile B. N. Lynch

A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in the College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University 2012

In the work of Alice Dunbar-Nelson the city and culture of 19th century New Orleans figures prominently, and is a major character affecting the lives of her protagonists. While race, class, and gender are among the focuses of many scholars the eccentricity and cultural history of the most exotic American city, and its impact on Dunbar-Nelson’s writing is unmistakable. This essay will discuss how the diverse cultural environment of New Orleans in the 19th century allowed Alice Dunbar Nelson to create narratives which allowed her short stories to speak to the shifting identities of women and the social uncertainty of African Americans in the Jim Crow south. A consideration of New Orleans’ cultural history is important when reading Dunbar-Nelson’s work, whose significance has often been disregarded because of what some considered its lack of racial markers.

Read the entire thesis here.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1. “CREOLES OF ANY COLOR”
• 2. CARNIVAL AND CULTURAL SUBTERFUGE
• 3. CONVENTS AND CULTS
• CONCLUSION
• BIBLIOGRAPHY

Mulatto Bend: Free People of Color in Rural Louisiana, 1763-1865

Tulane University
2012-04-02
307 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3519906
ISBN: 9781267512932

Johanna Lee Davis Smith

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED ON THE SECOND DAY OF APRIL 2012 TO THE DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS OF THE SCHOOL OF LIBERAL ARTS OF TULANE UNIVERSITY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

This dissertation examines community and identity formation among free people of color in rural Louisiana between 1763 and 1865. The group studied here used the family, community, and financial benefits available to them as the mixed-race descendants of European and African ancestors in order to set themselves apart from the larger enslaved community and to avoid possible re-enslavement. Atlantic World influences played a key part in the establishment of Mulatto Bend, a small community of white and free black residents located on the Mississippi River in close proximity to Baton Rouge. Ideas of race and the paternalism of the French period resulted in a group of mixed-race offspring of French men and African women who were freed by their fathers and sometimes received financial assistance from them. Spanish control of Louisiana resulted in the even more relaxed environment in which authorities hungry to find settlers suitable to populate and guard their colony freely granted land to free people of color as well as whites. The community which developed was constituted of free mixed-race individuals who were property-owning Catholics, who intermarried, lived in a single geographical area, and cooperated in almost all facets of social, legal, and economic life in order to maintain their identity as a group. The records of the Spanish government of West Florida, parish probate documents, church parish sacramental records, and census records provide the major sources of information regarding the community. While quite successful during the Spanish period, the community began to decline in size by the 1830s as a result of financial stress brought on by general economic malaise and the sociopolitical hardening of the American period. Finally, emancipation removed the major difference between free people of color and slaves, forcing the former to search for ways to maintain their pre-emancipation social and economic status, most of which had been eroded by the depredations of war. This study will add to the body of knowledge regarding the lives of free people of color in the Gulf South who did not live in the more intensely studied city of New Orleans.

Purchase the dissertation here.