Mixed Race Studies

White By Definition: Social Classification in Creole Louisiana

Rutgers University Press
May 1986
325 pages
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8135-2088-9

Virginia Dominguez, Professor of Anthropology and Latin American and Caribbean Studies
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction
• Part I: The Legal Domain
  • 2. Defining the Racial Structure
  • 3. The Properties of Blood
• Part II: The Political Economy of Labeling
  • 4. Shaping a Creole Identity
  • 5. Racial Polarization
  • 6. Anatomy of the Creole Controversy
• Part III: Manipulating the Practice and the Practice of Manipulating
  • 7. The Criterion of Ancestry
  • 8. The Logic of Deduction
  • 9. Conclusion
• Appendix: Mayors of New Orleans and Governors of Louisiana
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Introduction

The tension between individual choice and social norm emerges as something of a false dichotomy, and might better be represented as a continued negotiation by actors of how to interpret the norms. … It allows us to see rules not merely as a set of constraints upon people, but as something that people actively manipulate to express a sense of their own position in the social world.

—Michael Herzfeld in American Ethnologist, 1982

A recent Louisiana case attracted widespread national attention. In the fall of 1982 Susie Phipps, age forty-eight, went to court to have herself declared white. The headline in the International Herald Tribune read: “Woman Challenges a Race Law: Look at Me, I’m White’; Despite Fair Skin, She is Labeled ‘Colored’ under Louisiana Statute Based on Genealogy” (October 5, 1982).’ In the December 3 People magazine, the headline read: “Raised White, a Louisiana Belle Challenges Race Records That Call Her “Colored.”‘ Even in a small North Carolina paper, the Durham Morning Herald, there was the story and the eye-catching headline: “Woman Files Suit, Says She Is White” (September 15, 1982).

The details of Susie Phipps s life arc noteworthy, but so is the form in which the “facts” were presented to the public. In each of the headlines quoted above, the papers hinted that there may be more than one basis for racial identification. The International Herald Tribune juxtaposed physical appearance to genealogy. People magazine found a contradiction in being raised white and being called colored. The Durham paper suggested a lack of agreement between self-identification and identification by others.

Recognition of the inexactitude of race continued in the body of each article. All report the State Bureau of Vital Statistics’ claim that she is legally colored because her great-great-great-great-grandmother was a Negress and a number of other an cestors mulattoes, quadroons, and octoroons. They note, in addition, that the bureau rested its case on a 1970 Louisiana statute that made 1/32 “Negro blood” the dividing line between white and black. To put it in perspective, they informed the public that Louisiana law traditionally held that any trace of Negro ancestry was the basis for legal blackness.

Both People and the Tribune cited in some detail the expert testimony that anthropologist Munro Edmonson presented in court on Mrs. Phipps’s behalf. According to the Tribune, he testified that there is no such thing as a pure race, no way to determine what percentage of Negro blood Mrs. Phipps’s slave ancestor had and, thus, no way to determine what percentage black Susie Phipps is. In addition, the paper claimed Edmonson called the present law “nonsense” in an interview he granted outside the courtroom. According to People, he testified that the genealogy the bureau prepared to support its case was “impressive, [but that] it says nothing at all about Mrs. Phipps’ race.” He is quoted as saying that genes are “shuffled” before birth, making it at least theoretically possible for a child to inherit all his genes from just two grandparents. Then, as if to appeal to the public at large, the magazine went on to summarize parts of Edmonson’s testimony that, it said, might “elicit a barrage of vigorous objections”: that modern genetic studies show that blacks in the United States average 25 percent white genes and that whites average 5 percent black genes, and that by these statistics, using the 1/32 law, the entire native-born population of Louisiana would be considered black!

In the wording of these stories, there was a shade of cynicism or disbelief—insinuations that the concept of race contained in the 1970 statute and employed by the Bureau of Vital Statistics was out of date, unscientific, and yet encoded in the law. There were insinuations that this was an issue resurrected from the plaintiff’s zeal, after all, was matched by the bureau’s perseverance—and this in a country where for about a generation there had been official racial equality under the law. The Tribune reported that her story, ‘a story as old as the country, has elements of anthropology and sociology special to this region, and its message, here in 1982 America, is that it is still far better to be white than black.” It went on to say that the 1970 Louisiana statute in question “is the only one in the country that gives any equation for determining a person’s race.” “Elsewhere,” it continued, “race is simply a matter of what the parents tell the authorities to record on the birth certificate, with no questions asked.” The thrust of the argument was the same in the piece in People magazine: “Birth certificates in most states record race for purposes of identification, census, and public health. Most states, and the U.S. States Census Bureau, now follow a self-identification policy in registering race at birth. In Louisiana, however, a 1970 statute still on the books has snared Susie and thousands of others into racial classifications determined by- fractions. … In Susie’s case, . . . the state contended that other ancestors were mulattoes, quadroons, and octoroons—outmoded/expressions denoting mixed blood (December 3, 1982, pp. 135-136; emphasis added). Months later, the New York Times reiterated the theme when it announced the repeal of the 1970 statute late in June 1983. It quoted the New Orleans state representative who wrote the law that replaces the 1970 statute, saying that the state legislature was moved to act “to reflect modern thinking” (June 26, 1983, sect. E, p. 41; emphasis added).

It is clear throughout the media coverage that the case hinges on competing and coexisting perceptions of the nature of racial identity: the possibility of purity, the arbitrariness of calculations, the nature of reproduction, and the mutability of the criteria of identity. But in and of themselves, thesedisputed points are not novel. After three decades of active struggle for equal civil rights, continued advances in human genetics that make talk of “blood” seem primitive or folklorish, and the publication of both scholarly manuscripts and popular books proclaiming the sociocultural basis of our concepts of race, a localized argument about one woman’s racial identity hardly seems newsworthy.

The twist, so to speak, in this case is not racial identity per se, but rather the role of law. Louisiana was singled out by the press because it had a statute with an “operative equation for the determination of race” (New York Times. June 26, 1983, sect. E, p. 41), not because it is the only state in which there are varied, often competing bases for racial identification. The issue became one of constitutionality. Did the 1970 statute infringe on the rights granted citizens by the United States Constitution? Is one of those rights the freedom to choose what one is?

The appealing question is also a nagging one. There is, to begin with, the semblance of a contradiction. To speak of “what one is” is to imply that some identities are fixed, given, unalterable. A change of phrasing makes this clearer. “Freedom to choose what one wants to be” would contain an implicit denial of the fixedness of identity in that it suggests that it might be possible to realize one’s wishes. “Freedom to choose what one is becoming” would convey a similar message. In this case, will and desire seem irrelevant, and extra-individual forces are patently evident in the very phrase “is becoming’; but the words openly assert a process of becoming. The activity would be continuous rather than completed. In both of these alternative forms, there is room for individual choice and action and, thus, room for conceptualizing freedom to choose one’s identity. But how, after all, can we possibly conceive of freedom of choice if we take identities as givens^ And if there is really no choice, how are we to interpret the legal granting of “choice”?

The United States Supreme Court has taken a pragmatic approach to this question in recent years. In 1944 (Korematsu v. United States. 323 U.S. 214)” and again in 1954 (Boiling v. Sharps. 347 U.S. 497), the Court argued that racial classifications must be subject to strict judicial scrutiny because they deny equal protection of the law under the Fourteenth Amendment. And in 1964 (McLaughlin v. Florida. 379 U.S. 184; Anderson v. Martin, 375 U.S. 399), it held that racial classification is “constitutionally suspect.” But in several more recent cases (cf. Shapiro v. Thompson, 394 U.S. 618 [1969]; Sherbert v. Verner, 374 U.S. 398 [ 1963]; Bates v. The Cityof Little Rock, 361 U.S. 516 [ i960]), the Court has sustained statutes that define racial categories when it has deemed such statutes necessary for the purpose of realizing compelling and constitutionally acceptable state interests (cf. Davis 1976: 199-200).

Clearly the civil rights movement of the 1960s increased sensitivity to the existence of prejudice and led to the identification of invidious discrimination. But the issue then was the granting of rights to blacks, not the granting of the right to be white or black. The former had compelling state interest but carried ironic implications. Protecting the rights of blacks required the maintenance of a system for distinguishing blacks from whites, even though the system had come into existence for the purpose of disenfranchising those identified as black.

To redress a legal injustice, then, the Court permits racial classification by institutions. The question is whether the Courts pragmatic concern of protecting the rights of a sector of the population that has historically been subjected to systematic discrimination infringes on the rights of individuals to opt not to be racially classified and to identify themselves racially according to their own criteria of classification…

Exiles at Home: The Struggle to Become American in Creole New Orleans (review)

Journal of Interdisciplinary History
Volume 41, Number 4, Spring 2011
pages 661-663
E-ISSN: 1530-9169, Print ISSN: 0022-1953

Mary Niall Mitchell, Associate Professor of History
New Orleans University

Shirley Elizabeth Thompson. Exiles at Home: The Struggle to Become American in Creole New Orleans. Boston: Harvard University Press, 2009. 400 pages, Hardcover ISBN: 9780674023512.

The people who inhabit the pages of this book—New Orleans’s nineteenth-century Creoles of color—make difficult, yet fascinating, subjects of historical and cultural study. They are difficult for two reasons: (1) Their story, which is complicated and unfamiliar to most readers, requires Thompson to explain the precarious yet prosperous existence of a group of French-speaking free people of color, with ties to Europe and the Caribbean, in the midst of a U.S. slave society; (2) although most were well educated, and many of them were writers and intellectuals, few of their personal papers are stored in archives (most of those that have survived remain in private hands). Scholars, therefore, must look to a variety of sources to piece together the history of Creoles of color. In the book under review, this array of documentation includes legal and property records, Romantic poetry, newspaper editorials, and evidence of the built environment. To address such disparate sources, Thompson wields a number of methodological tools, from theories of urban space to literary criticism, historiography, and legal analysis.

The fundamental problem that frames this book, according to the…

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Miscegenation and competing definitions of race in twentieth-century Louisiana

Journal of Southern History
Volume 71, Number 3 (August, 2005)
pages 621-659

Michelle Brattain, Associate Professor of History
Georgia State University

MARCUS BRUCE CHRISTIAN, AN AUTHOR AND PROFESSOR AT DILLARD University, observed in the mid-nineteen-fifties that while New Orleans might be known for “gumbo, jambalaya, lagniappe, poor boy sandwiches, pralines, Mardi Gras and Creoles,” it also has “another claim to distinction which has not been bruited about very loudly. ” New Orleans is a place, he wrote, where family lines “waver back and forth across color-lines like wet wash in a high March wind.” The city has given to America “more ‘passer pour blanches’ [people who pass for white] than any other city in our country.” A poet and scholar of black history, Christian anticipated much of the current academic interest in race as a social construction. (1) His meticulous histories of eighteenth—and nineteenth-century families recreated an era when racial lines were more fluid and southern society accepted—or at least expected—interracial sex. In the latter half of Christian’s career, as a civil rights struggle charged with anxieties about interracial contact swirled around him, his interests broadened to include the progeny of those early families. Among thousands of newspaper clippings that Christian saved over his lifetime—documenting New Orleans history from the protracted fight over school desegregation to the debate over stereotypical and degrading representations of Africans in Mardi Gras–one finds dozens of society photographs, wedding announcements, and obituaries that he compiled, seemingly in an attempt to discover a similar secret interracial history of the twentieth century. In the margins, he sometimes annotated genealogies, alternate spellings, or anecdotes about similar names encountered on the other side of the color line. In 1959, for example, he noted, and documented, the strange coincidence of a death notice for a man he thought was a “Negro,” who had died at an “all white” hospital, and speculated on the dead man’s familial relationship to a realtor listing a “colored” apartment a couple of weeks later. Of the family name in question, he later wrote to himself, “Joubert? What about the white family that says it spells its name ‘Jau’ and not ‘Jou’ [?]” Christian often wrote simply, as he did on a 1960 photograph of a couple cutting their fiftieth-anniversary cake, the word miscegenation. (2) The basis for such judgments was rarely explained. Perhaps it was a distant memory, a rumor, or merely Christian asserting his ability as a black man to spot passer pour blanches. Unfortunately he never published his side of these stories…

…Two striking conclusions emerge from an analysis of these records. First, Louisianans held much more complicated and historically contingent views of race than the statutes and court decisions alone would suggest. The legal adjudication of race in the twentieth century, as Pascoe has argued, historically had a complex, interdependent relationship with popular and scientific beliefs about race. This essay examines one aspect of that tension. By necessity, politics and the courts represented abstract law that could recognize only black and white, but the people who entered the courts worked with a more practical understanding that was also born of necessity. Most noteworthy about the testimony of people brought into Louisiana courts by miscegenation law is the fluidity and contextual nuance with which many people viewed race. In spite of the mid-twentieth century’s increasingly rigid lines of demarcation with regard to race, many ordinary Louisiana citizens instinctively understood and accepted the essentially social nature of racial definitions, and they worked with these definitions in the most private areas of their lives…

…Second, though miscegenation law frequently failed to prevent sex across the race line, it served another equally significant function in the twentieth century: a tool to monitor racial boundaries. Louisiana state law had often been able to tame and contain the contradictions of black and white, but by the mid-twentieth century, the demands of massive resistance increasingly brought about more ideological and less practical applications of jurisprudence. Official public records associated with essentially private and gendered actions such as birth and marriage became a gatekeeping mechanism for maintaining segregation in Louisiana schools, sports, and public conveyances. Government-employed bureaucrats carried out increasingly stringent investigations of once-routine applications for marriage licenses, death certificates, and birth certificates in order to police the boundaries of race and expose those who in the past might have “passed” as white or married across race lines. These private points of individual connection with the state, therefore, took on a substantial burden in the maintenance of racial boundaries, the punishment of miscegenation, and the defense of whiteness. The objective of anti-miscegenation law was ostensibly to discourage and punish sex across the race line, but it also permitted the state to use gender and private life to control the same boundary. In doing so, it made significant contributions to the redefinition of miscegenation and race itself.

Incidents of “race mixture” and white attempts to control such encounters have a long and infamous history in the South. Although prohibition of interracial sex was typically legislators’ stated objective, recent scholarship also underscores the deeply contextual nature of the statutes’ various incarnations. In colonial Virginia, where the earliest legislation on interracial liaisons appeared in 1662, the law reflected first the English conception of broadly defined racial hierarchy and later the social and economic dominance of explicitly racial slavery. At all times, colonial law addressed the reality of ongoing racial mixing, even as it represented what A. Leon Higginbotham Jr. and Barbara K. Kopytoff have aptly described as “attempts to patch holes in the fabric of the system.” (10)

The solution, as Peter W. Bardaglio puts it, was a legal attempt “not so much to eliminate interracial sexual contacts as to channel them” in directions that bolstered the slave system and existing racial and gender hierarchies. (11) While the specific definitions of the crime and punishment varied, as Charles Robinson notes, “In each colony a violation of the law required some party, man, woman, and/or child, to make restitution by sacrificing freedom.” Doubling the fine for interracial fornication, Virginia’s assembly, for example, declared in 1662 that an interracial child’s status would follow that of the mother. This ruling insured that the most common transgression of the color line–between black women and white men–would not undermine a social system increasingly based on a dichotomy between black slaves and free white persons. Maryland’s 1664 anti-miscegenation law did not proscribe marriage, but it declared that a white woman who married a slave would serve that slave’s master for the remainder of the husband’s life and that any offspring would be required to labor for the parish for thirty-one years. After 1692 in Maryland and 1725 in Pennsylvania, free black men who married white women were sentenced to a lifetime of slavery. In the first half of the eighteenth century, Massachusetts, North Carolina, South Carolina, Delaware, and Georgia enacted provisions similar to those of Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. (12) Colonial officials also singled out white women who had sex with black men for special punishment, a double standard that reflected, among other concerns, a perceived need both to control white female sexuality and to eliminate the threat that interracial offspring posed to the institution of slavery…

…In the early nineteenth century, as moral reformers encouraged the spread of anti-miscegenation laws throughout the United States, Louisiana law continued to reflect a greater preoccupation with racial hierarchy and property than with sex. In 1825, for example, the legislature revised the civil code to outlaw the legitimization of biracial children by white fathers, prohibit children of color from claiming paternity from white fathers, and make it more difficult for biracial children to receive an inheritance by disallowing all but formal legal acknowledgement as a basis for establishing paternity. Through such measures Louisianans eliminated the old French laws governing support of children born within placage and protected the interests of white heirs from siblings of color. Interracial marriage remained illegal in the sense that it was legally invalid, but the law did not prescribe punishment for violators…

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In Census, Young Americans Increasingly Diverse

The New York Times
2011-02-04

Sabrina Tabernise

WASHINGTON — Demographers sifting through new population counts released on Thursday by the Census Bureau say the data bring a pattern into sharper focus: Young Americans are far less white than older generations, a shift that demographers say creates a culture gap with far-reaching political and social consequences.

Mississippi, Virginia, New Jersey and Louisiana all had declines in their populations of white residents ages 18 and under, according to the bureau’s first detailed report on the 2010 Census.

…Growth in the number of white youths slowed sharply in the 1990s, up by just 1 percent in the decade, as the number of white women of childbearing age fell, according to Kenneth M. Johnson, a demographer at the University of New Hampshire.

More recently, it has dipped into a decline. The number of whites under the age of 20 fell by 6 percent between 2000 and 2008, Mr. Johnson said, citing countrywide census estimates.

Instead, growth has come from minorities, particularly Hispanics, as more Latino women enter their childbearing years. Blacks, Asians and Hispanics accounted for about 79 percent of the national population growth between 2000 and 2009, Mr. Johnson said.

The result has been a changed American landscape, with whites now a minority of the youth population in 10 states, including Arizona, where tensions over immigration have flared, said William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution…

…Even in Virginia, a largely suburban state whose white adult population rose considerably over the decade, the young white population registered a decline.

In contrast, the number of mixed-race children doubled, Hispanic children doubled, and Asian children were up by more than two-thirds, according to Mr. Johnson…

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History and Current Status of the Houma Indians

Midcontinent American Studies Journal
Volume 6, Number 2 (Fall 1965)
pages 149-163

Ann Fischer
Tulane University

Brewton Berry, in Almost White, reports that there are some 200 groups of “racial orphans” in the United States. Among these, those who have some claim to Indian ancestry are known as “so-called Indians.” This term is apt, for these peoples have a tenuous racial status. Although so called Indians are of mixed ancestry, they emphasize their Indian identity. Mulatto groups, on the other hand, consider their own status to be midway between white and Negro. Both Mulatto and so-called Indian groups may be found today in Louisiana, living in separate, isolated social units. In these Indian groups in Louisiana, there has been consistent strong resistance to identification with Negroes. Whites, Indians and Negroes agree that as a result of this resistance the Indian groups are more deprived than Negroes who live in the same areas. The racial status of these people varies from parish to parish, and migration can often overcome the problems of racial identity.

The so-called Indians of Louisiana live in settlements which are isolated from the Negro settlements of the same area. Negroes work in the cane fields and usually live in identical unpainted houses in rows perpendicular to the road, surrounded by sugar cane fields. Indians live in houses, often run-down, along the levees in the typical line villages of the bayou country. In many parts of this region white and Indian houses maybe mixed in the line villages, due to the movement of the whites down the line. Negro and Indian housing, on the other hand, is never mixed in the situations which I have observed. Many Indians know no Negroes, and when they compare themselves to any other group it is usually to the white French. They reject the white judgment that they are sexually immoral, pointing out, probably accurately, that the same sexual patterns are common to both groups. It is in sexual behavior and the differences in the standard of living that Indians compare themselves to others. When Indians improve their economic circumstances and these improvements become visible, they feel that the whites resent their successes and think they are not entitled to them…

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French110s: From Haiti to New Orleans

John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute
Duke University
Fall 2010

Deborah Jenson

Haiti Lab: Undergraduate Opportunities

The first Humanities Laboratory at Duke, one of the key goals of the Haiti Lab is to bring innovative, interdisciplinary research more fully into the undergraduate experience at Duke and, indeed, to invite undergraduates to participate as researchers themselves.

The Haitian Revolution  (1791-1804) was a successful revolution against slavery, leading to the defeat of the French armies of Napoleon Bonaparte and the establishment of the first black republic in the New World. During the revolution, many Creole planters (white and of mixed race) and their households, including slaves, sought refuge elsewhere; by 1809, the population of New Orleans actually doubled with this “Haitian” influx. How did the culture and literature of nineteenth century New Orleans reflect Haitian influences? We will read fascinating Francophone New Orleans literature about the socio-racially complex cultures of slavery, the bourgeoisie, and the planters’ “aristocracy” in Louisiana. Did you know you could learn about the U.S. Civil War through French-language New Orleans novels that also integrate Creole poetry from colonial Saint-Domingue? Or that the first African-American short story was written in French, about Haiti? We will read about the drama of the historical Haitian maroon slave and poisoner Macandal, and about the Haiti-influenced libertine culture that bound together white men and women of color in the common law structure of plaçage. Students will do cultural research projects on subjects such as the cultural roots of Creole and Cajun cuisine, the Quadroon Balls, or the “voodoo queen” Marie Laveaux. In this course on French literature in our own historical and regional “backyard,” students will also explore the Haitian inspiration of Durham’s historic black “Hayti” neighborhood. Course taught in French.

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The “Sabines”: A Study of Racial Hybrids in a Louisiana Coastal Parish

Social Forces
Volume 29, Number 2 (December, 1950)
pages 148-154

Vernon J. Parenton

Roland J. Pellegrin

Read before the thirteenth annual meeting of the Southern Sociological Society, Biloxi, Mississippi, April 15, 1950.

Historically, the position of the racial and  cultural  hybrid in rural American society has received but little attention from sociologists. Beginning with the twentieth century, however, and especially since 1930, a number of social scientists have centered their investigations on such marginal groups. The acculturative processes associated with the formation of hybrid groups are as difficult to analyze as they are sociologically interesting. Nevertheless the complexity of these processes may be viewed as a challenge rather than as a barrier to social investigations.

Among those areas of the United States where hybrid groups arc found, Louisiana constitutes an interesting socio-cultural laboratory for such research. Partly because of the heterogeneous racial and ethnic character of the state’s population, with its concomitant diversity of cultures, and partly because of its geographical position, Louisiana contains a number of racial and cultural “islands,” the inhabitants oi which range in color from brown to near white. This paper is a preliminary report on a tri-racial group, derisively called the “Sabines,” who inhabit the marshy fringe of a Louisiana parish bordering the Gulf of Mexico. These persons, of mixed white, Indian, and Negro ancestry, have a unique history.

Historical Background

The first white men to explore the Gulf Coast found several Indian tribes inhabiting the area. These tribes may be classified into five linguistic groups: the Muskhogean, Natchez, Tunican, Chitimachan, and Atakapan. In Louisiana the most important group was the Muskhogean, which was, composed of a variety of tribes, including the Houma, Washa, Chawasha, Bayogoula, Chakchiuma, and several others.  The Indian element present in the Sabines of today is derived from a variety of these Muskhogean tribes, but principally from the Houmas…

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The People of Frilot Cove: A Study of Racial Hybrids

The American Journal of Sociology
Volume 57, Number 2 (September 1951)
pages 145-149

J. Hardy Jones, Jr.

Vernon J. Parenton

Frilot Cove is a color-conscious, semi-isolated rural community of 302 persons with an ante bellum cultural background, who, though they approximate Nordic and Mediterranean types, are classified as Negroes. Criteria of upper-class status are light skin, income, and family background. Discrimination by whites draws them to the Negro, but their concern is not with their personal, but with their group, situation.

This paper summarizes certain findings of a more comprehensive studyI which analyzed some sociologically important elements of a hybrid racial community of St. Landry Parish, Louisiana. The purpose of that study was to analyze social organization and social change in a semi-isolated hybrid rural community: Its historical origin; its population characteristics; its social, cultural, and economic characteristics; and the attitudes of its inhabitants to race. The principal sources of data were schedules, interviews, informal conversation, personal observations, attitude inventories, written materials obtained directly from community members, microfilm copies of old United States census records, and pertinent published materials.

The history of this community, Frilot Cove, is part of the long and interesting history of the state of Louisiana. The first explorers in Louisiana were the Spaniards, who were seeking riches; but they failed to establish themselves permanently in the country of the great Mississippi. Francewas the first to succeed in establishing colonies. Through the efforts of such men as De la Salle, D’Iberville, and De Bienville, Louisiana became an important part of the New World, Although Louisiana was returned to Spain for about forty years (prior to 1803, when the territory became a part of the United States), the French culture was predominant and is still much in evidence in the southern parts of the state.

In 1765 a military and trading post was established at Opelousas. The fertile prairie land surrounding the post soon attracted many settlers. In 1807, St, Landry Parish was formed and Opelousas became the seat of parish government. According to the United States marshal of the Western District, which included St. Landry Parish, there were 532 free colored persons and 4,680 white persons in this area in 1840. The census shows that there were among the free colored only thirty-three males to fifty-nine females in the twenty-four- to thirty-six-year age group. On the other hand, in the white group from twenty to forty years of age there were 835 males to 295 females—an extreme shortage of females. Under these circumstances it is not surprising that some of the white men took their wives from the free colored class.

By the end of the nineteenth century the parish had a population of 52,170 inhabitants, slightly over half of whom were counted as Negroes. This increase of the Negro population came about largely as a result of the many cotton plantations throughout the area.

Among these Negroes were many mulattoes, primarily the descendants of white men and colored women. Of the parents of these people, many were “free men of color” during ante bellum days and owned plantation…

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Cast From Their Ancestral Home, Creoles Worry About Culture’s Future

New York Times
2005-10-11

Susan Saulny, National Correspondent

NATCHITOCHES PARISH, La., Oct. 9 – It is peaceful here on the Cane River, beyond the fluffy tops of high cotton and towering magnolia trees, but it is not home. For the New Orleans Creoles living in exodus here and elsewhere around Louisiana, their city was far more than home – it was homeland, the capital of an ethnic nation unique in this country.

“New Orleans was our womb and for most of us, it was going to be our grave,” said Timothy Bordenave, who is living in a cottage here, a five-hour drive away from the city, describing the deep sense of lifelong connection felt to New Orleans by many of the city’s Creoles, the population of mixed-race families who trace their roots to the city’s French and Spanish colonial era…

…Many Creoles trace their roots to immigrants and slaves from the former French and Spanish colonies in the Caribbean, particularly Cuba and what is now Haiti. Historians say it was New Orleans’s position as a crossroads and port town that allowed for the easy mingling of races and nationalities that in turn gave birth, in the 18th century, to a part-European, part-Afro-Caribbean society that grew to an estimated 20,000 people in Louisiana by the mid-1800’s.

The Creole culture that developed over generations—known for a distinctive cuisine, language and music—contributed to New Orleans’s singular identity and helped define Louisiana to the world. Before Hurricane Katrina, experts estimated that 10 to 20 percent of black people in New Orleans—30,000 to 60,000 people—considered themselves Creole by way of ancestry, but even more lived lives influenced by the culture because of their proximity to it…

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Making Race: The Role of Free Blacks in the Development of New Orleans’ Three-Caste Society, 1791-1812

University of Texas, Austin
May 2007
219 pages

Kenneth Randolph Aslakson, Assistant Professor of History
Union College, Schenectady, New York

Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May, 2007

“Making Race: The Role of Free Blacks in the Development of New Orleans’ Three-Caste Society, 1791-1812” excavates the ways that free people of African descent in New Orleans built an autonomous identity as a third “race” in what would become a unique racial caste system in the United States. I argue that in the time period I study, which encompasses not only the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, but also the rise of plantation slavery and the arrival of over twelve thousand refugees from the revolution torn French West Indies, New Orleans’s free blacks took advantage of political, cultural and legal uncertainty to protect and gain privileges denied to free blacks elsewhere in the South. The dissertation is organized around three sites in which free blacks forged and articulated a distinct collective identity: the courtroom, the ballroom, and the militia. This focus on specific spaces of racial contestation allows me to trace the multivalent development of racial identity. “Making Race” brings together the special dynamism of the Atlantic world in the Age of Revolution with the ability of individuals to act within structures of power to shape their surroundings. I show that changing political regimes (in the time period I study New Orleans was ruled by the Spanish, the French and the Americans) together with the socio-economic, ideological and demographic impact of the Haitian Revolution created opportunities for new social and legal understandings of race in the Crescent City. More importantly, however, I show how members of New Orleans’s free black community, strengthened numerically and heavily influenced by thousands of gens de couleur refugees of the Haitian Revolution, shaped the racialization process by asserting a collective identity as a distinct middle caste, contributing to the creation of a tri-racial system.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
  • Free Blacks in Slave Societies
  • Race and Revolution in the Atlantic World
  • The Laws and Legal Systems in Racially Based Slave Societies
  • Organization of the Dissertation
• Chapter 1 Racial Identity Formation in a Burgeoning Port City
• Chapter 2 “When the Question is Slavery or Freedom:” The Legal Construction of Three Races in Early New Orleans
  • New Orleans in the Age of Slavery and Revolution
  • Making Slavery: The Precariousness of Freedom
  • Making Freedom: Status Suits in the New Orleans City Court
  • Making Race: The Legal Resolution of the Slave-Free Paradox
  • Conclusion
• Chapter 3 The Power of Weakness: Free Black Women in the New Orleans City Court
  • Black Litigation in Spanish Louisiana and the Impact of the Louisiana Purchase
  • Escape From Marriage Law: The Litigiousness of Free Women of African Descent
  • The Power of Weakness: Fraud and Assault Cases in the New Orleans City Court
  • The New Racial Order: Changing Color and Changing Laws
  • Conclusion
• Chapter 4 The Politics of Dancing: Control, Resistance, and Identity in the Early New Orleans Ballroom
  • Fear of Black Dancing and the Origins of the Public Ball
  • Vice, Violence, and the Origins of the (Tri-) Colored Balls
  • The Great Purchase, Immigration, and the Segregation of Dancing Centers
  • Control, Resistance, Identity and the Origins of the Quadroon Balls.143
  • Conclusion
• Chapter 5 “We Shall Serve with Fidelity and Zeal:” The Citizen-Soldiers of the Free Colored Militia
  • The Demographics of Defense: Free Colored Militias in New World Slave Societies
  • Fear and Opportunity: the Free Colored Militia in Spanish Louisiana During the Age of Revolution
  • “Free Citizens of Louisiana:” The Free Colored Militia in Territorial New Orleans
  • The Militia’s Swansong: Andrew Jackson and the Battle of New Orleans
  • Conclusion
• Conclusion “In [and Outside] the Eye of Louisiana Law:” Creole of Color Identity Before and After Plessy
• Bibliography
• Vita

Introduction

In October of 2003, having recently arrived in New Orleans to do research for this dissertation, I attended the “Creole Studies Consortium” held at Tulane University. Most of the people attending this gathering (which was part academic conference, part genealogical convention, and part family reunion) called themselves “Creoles of color” or simply “Creoles,” though it soon became clear to me that there was some disagreement as to the precise meaning of this term. For some, a Creole is someone whose ancestors were free people of color when slavery still existed in Louisiana. For others, the European ancestors of Creoles must have been of Spanish or (preferably) French descent. The most exclusive definition holds that a true Creole can trace his or her French and African ancestry back to the colonial period in Louisiana before the Louisiana Purchase. Nevertheless, all agreed that a Creole is a person whose ancestors were free and of mixed European and African descent with roots in pre-Civil War Louisiana. While they do not deny their partial African ancestry, most of Louisiana’s present day Creoles do not self identify as “black” or even “African-American,” even though most people from outside of the state Louisiana (and many within) would consider them to be such.

This dissertation examines the origins of the distinct racial identity of the group of people who today call themselves Louisiana “Creoles” (or “Creoles of Color”) by excavating the ways in which free people of color in early New Orleans built an autonomous identity as a third “race” in what would become a unique racial caste system rise of plantation slavery and the arrival of over twelve thousand refugees from the revolution-torn French West Indies, New Orleans’s free people of color took advantage of political, cultural and legal uncertainty to protect and gain privileges denied to free blacks elsewhere in the South. I show that changing political regimes (in this time period New Orleans was ruled by the Spanish, the French and the Americans), a transforming economy, and the ideological and demographic impact of the Haitian Revolution combined to create opportunities for new cultural and legal understandings of race in the Crescent City. More importantly, however, I show how members of New Orleans’s free colored community, strengthened numerically and heavily influenced by thousands of gens de couleur refugees, shaped the racialization process by asserting a collective identity as a distinct middle caste, contributing to the creation of a tri-racial system. In other words, the emergence of a three tiered racial caste system in the Crescent City was not the necessary product of global structures. Rather, the free people of color of New Orleans made their own distinct racial identity, and protected the relative rights and privileges that went with it.

Read the entire dissertation here.