Mixed Race Studies

Creoles of Color of the Gulf South

University of Tennessee Press
1996
208 pages
Paper ISBN: 0-87049-917-3

Edited by:

James H. Dormon, Alumni Distinguished Professor of history and American Studies
University of Southwestern Louisiana

Consisting of eight original essays by noted scholars, this volume examines the history and culture of a unique population—those peoples in the Gulf region who descended from the colonial and antebellum free persons of color and who represent the middle ground in the region’s “tri-racial” social order.
 
Although the book begins with an analysis of the Creole population’s origins in the New Orleans area, the subsequent essays focus on the Creole communities outside that city. Throughout the volume the contributors demonstrate the persistence of the Creole ethnic identity. Included are examinations of Creole populations in the cities of Pensacola and Mobile, as well as those in the bayou and prairie regions of Louisiana. In addition to dealing with sociohistorical aspects of the Creole experience, the book features essays that examine language, music, and folklore. The concluding essay, which cuts across several disciplines, covers the late-twentieth-century revitalization of the Gulf Creole communities.

With its multidimensional, cross-disciplinary emphasis, Creoles of Color of the Gulf South constitutes an especially notable contribution to the current scholarly interest in ethnic minorities and racial dynamics in American history and culture.

Contributors: Barry Jean Ancelet, Carl A. Brasseaux, James H. Dormon, Virginia Meacham Gould, Kimberly S. Hanger, Loren Schweninger, Nicholas R. Spitzer, Albert Valdman.

Creoles of Color in the Bayou Country

University Press of Mississippi
1994
192 pages
Paper ISBN: 0878059490, ISBN 13: 9780878059492

Carl A. Brasseaux, Professor of History and Director of the Center for Cultural and Eco-Tourism
University of Louisiana, Lafayette

Claude F. Oubre

Keith P. Fontenot

Creoles of Color are rightfully among the first families of south-western Louisiana. Yet in both antebellum and postbellum periods they remained a people considered apart from the rest of the population. Historians, demographers, sociologists, and anthropologists have given them only scant attention.

This probing book, focused on the mid-eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, is the first to scrutinize this multiracial group through a close study of primary resource materials.

During the antebellum period they were excluded from the state’s three-tiered society–white, free people of color, and slaves. Yet Creoles of Color were a dynamic component in the region’s economy, for they were self-compelled in efforts to become and integral part of the community.