Mixed Race Studies

The Louisiana Metoyers

American Visions
June, 2000

Elizabeth Shown Mills

Gary B. Mills (1944-2002)

The Metoyer family of Louisiana provides an intriguing ample of the degree to which class, race and economic lines were blurred in early America. The Metoyers were both slaves and masters; in that regard, they were not unique. They were singular in the degree of their success. In the pre-Civil War South, they were, as a family unit, the wealthiest of all free families of color in the nation. After the war, they endured generations of poverty but preserved a rich store of oral history, much of which has been documented at Melrose Plantation in Melrose, La. The Metoyer family has been nationally conspicuous since 1975–the year that Melrose, the last of at least a dozen pillared, two-story “mansion houses” that they built on their plantations, was declared a National Historic Landmark.

On January 8, 1736, Francoise (a slave belonging to Chevalier Louis Juchereau de St. Denis) and Marie Francoise were married in Natchitoches, La. The only clues indicating the origins of this African couple are the names of four of their children: Dgimby, Choera, Yandon and Coincoin. These names can be attributed to the Ewe linguistic group of the Gold Coast-Dahomey region of Africa. Although Catholic custom required all baptized Christians to bear a saint’s name, popular custom among the French permitted a variety of nicknames, or dits, as the French called them. The custom extended to the slave population as well, and a number of slaves are identified in official records by the African name that French masters permitted them to retain.

The pronunciation of Coincoin is close to that of Ko-kwe, a name given to all second-born daughters by those who speak the Glidzi dialect of the Ewe language. Marie Therese dite Coincoin, the second daughter born to Francois and Marie Francoise, was baptized at the Natchitoches Post on August 24, 1742. Colonial Louisiana’s Code Noir (Black Laws), which did not permit the separation by sale of a husband and wife or of a child under 14 from its mother, kept the family of Francois and Marie Francoise together as a stable unit until April 18, 1758, when the couple died together in an epidemic that also killed their mistress…

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What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America

Harvard University Press
October 2008
384 Pages
Hardcover ISBN 13: 978-0-674-03130-2; ISBN 10: 0-674-03130-X
Paperback ISBN 13: 978-0-674-04798-3; ISBN 10: 0-674-04798-2

Ariela J. Gross, John B. and Alice R. Sharp Professor of Law and History
University of Southern California

• Co-Winner 2009 James Willard Hurst Prize, Law and Society Association
• Co-Winner 2009 Lillian Smith Book Awards, the Southern Regional Council and the University of Georgia
• Winner of the 2009 American Political Science Association Award for the Best Book on Race, Ethnicity and Politics

Is race something we know when we see it? In 1857, Alexina Morrison, a slave in Louisiana, ran away from her master and surrendered herself to the parish jail for protection. Blue-eyed and blond, Morrison successfully convinced white society that she was one of them. When she sued for her freedom, witnesses assured the jury that she was white, and that they would have known if she had a drop of African blood. Morrison’s court trial—and many others over the last 150 years—involved high stakes: freedom, property, and civil rights. And they all turned on the question of racial identity.

Over the past two centuries, individuals and groups (among them Mexican Americans, Indians, Asian immigrants, and Melungeons) have fought to establish their whiteness in order to lay claim to full citizenship in local courtrooms, administrative and legislative hearings, and the U.S. Supreme Court. Like Morrison’s case, these trials have often turned less on legal definitions of race as percentages of blood or ancestry than on the way people presented themselves to society and demonstrated their moral and civic character.

Unearthing the legal history of racial identity, Ariela Gross’s book examines the paradoxical and often circular relationship of race and the perceived capacity for citizenship in American society. This book reminds us that the imaginary connection between racial identity and fitness for citizenship remains potent today and continues to impede racial justice and equality.

Louisiana Creoles: Cultural Recovery and Mixed-Race Native American Identity

Lexington Books an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
December 2006
Cloth: 0-7391-1896-X / 978-0-7391-1896-2
Paper: 0-7391-1897-8 / 978-0-7391-1897-9

Andrew J. Jolivétte, Associate Professor of American Indian Studies
San Francisco State University

Foreword by Paula Gunn Allen

Louisiana Creoles examines the recent efforts of the Louisiana Creole Heritage Center to document and preserve the distinct ethnic heritage of this unique American population. Dr. Andrew Jolivétte uses sociological inquiry to analyze the factors that influence ethnic and racial identity formation and community construction among Creoles of Color living in and out of the state of Louisiana. By including the voices of contemporary Creole organizations, preservationists, and grassroots organizers, Jolivétte offers a comprehensive and insightful exploration of the ways in which history has impacted the ability of Creoles to self-define their own community in political, social, and legal contexts. This book raises important questions concerning the process of cultural formation and the politics of ethnic categories for multiracial communities in the United States. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina the themes found throughout Louisiana Creoles are especially relevant for students of sociology and those interested in identity issues.

Table of Contents

• Foreword: Paula Gunn Allen
• Introduction: Who Is White?
• The Reconfiguring of Creole-Indian Identity in Louisiana: Situating the Other in Social Discourse
• Including Native Identity in the Creole of Color Movement: Ethnic Renewal and Cultural Revival within a Black-Indian Population
• Migratory Movement: The Politics of Ethnic Community (Re)Construction Among Creoles of Color, 1920-1940
• Examining the Regional and Multi-Generational Context of Creole and American Indian Identity
• Conclusion: (Re)Imagining and (Re)Writing Racial Categories

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

Harvard University Press
2009
400 pages
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
19 halftones in 20 p mock insert
Hardcover ISBN: 9780674023512

Shirley Elizabeth Thompson, Associate Professor in American Studies
University of Texas, Austin

New Orleans has always captured our imagination as an exotic city in its racial ambiguity and pursuit of les bons temps.  Despite its image as a place apart, the city played a key role in nineteenth-century America as a site for immigration and pluralism, the quest for equality, and the centrality of self-making.

In both the literary imagination and the law, creoles of color navigated life on a shifting color line. As they passed among various racial categories and through different social spaces, they filtered for a national audience the meaning of the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution of 1804, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and de jure segregation.

Shirley Thompson offers a moving study of a world defined by racial and cultural double consciousness. In tracing the experiences of creoles of color, she illuminates the role ordinary Americans played in shaping an understanding of identity and belonging.