The Free People of Color of New Orleans

The Free People of Color of New Orleans PDF Author: Mary Gehman
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780692390412
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
Antebellum New Orleans was home to thousands of urbane, educated and well to do free blacks. The French called them les gens de couleur libre, the free people of color; after the Civil War they were known as the Creoles of color, shortened today to simply Creoles. Theirs was an ambiguous status, sharing the French Language, Catholic religion and European education of the elite whites, but also keeping African and indigenous American influences from their early heritage. This is their story, rarely mentioned in conventional histories, and often misunderstood today, even by some of their descendants. The book is an easy read that lays out the chronology of events, laws and circumstances that formed the unique racial mix of New Orleans and much of Louisiana. Includes end notes, suggested bibliography, index, and a listing of family names of free people of color that appear in the early years of the Louisiana Territory. A must-have for genealogists, historians, and students of African-American history.

The Free People of Color of New Orleans

The Free People of Color of New Orleans PDF Author: Mary Gehman
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780692390412
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
Antebellum New Orleans was home to thousands of urbane, educated and well to do free blacks. The French called them les gens de couleur libre, the free people of color; after the Civil War they were known as the Creoles of color, shortened today to simply Creoles. Theirs was an ambiguous status, sharing the French Language, Catholic religion and European education of the elite whites, but also keeping African and indigenous American influences from their early heritage. This is their story, rarely mentioned in conventional histories, and often misunderstood today, even by some of their descendants. The book is an easy read that lays out the chronology of events, laws and circumstances that formed the unique racial mix of New Orleans and much of Louisiana. Includes end notes, suggested bibliography, index, and a listing of family names of free people of color that appear in the early years of the Louisiana Territory. A must-have for genealogists, historians, and students of African-American history.

The Free People of Color of New Orleans

The Free People of Color of New Orleans PDF Author: Mary Gehman
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780961637729
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 152

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Book Description
Antebellum New Orleans was home to thousands of urbane, educated and well to do free blacks. The French called them "les gens de couleur libre", the free people of color; after the Civil War they were known as the Creoles of color, shortened today to simply Creoles. Theirs was and ambiguous status, sharing the French language, Catholic religion and European education of the elite whites, who were often blood relatives, but also keeping African and indigenous American influences from their early heritage. - back cover.

Beyond Slavery's Shadow

Beyond Slavery's Shadow PDF Author: Warren Eugene Milteer Jr.
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469664402
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
On the eve of the Civil War, most people of color in the United States toiled in bondage. Yet nearly half a million of these individuals, including over 250,000 in the South, were free. In Beyond Slavery's Shadow, Warren Eugene Milteer Jr. draws from a wide array of sources to demonstrate that from the colonial period through the Civil War, the growing influence of white supremacy and proslavery extremism created serious challenges for free persons categorized as "negroes," "mulattoes," "mustees," "Indians," or simply "free people of color" in the South. Segregation, exclusion, disfranchisement, and discriminatory punishment were ingrained in their collective experiences. Nevertheless, in the face of attempts to deny them the most basic privileges and rights, free people of color defended their families and established organizations and businesses. These people were both privileged and victimized, both celebrated and despised, in a region characterized by social inconsistency. Milteer's analysis of the way wealth, gender, and occupation intersected with ideas promoting white supremacy and discrimination reveals a wide range of social interactions and life outcomes for the South's free people of color and helps to explain societal contradictions that continue to appear in the modern United States.

Making Race in the Courtroom

Making Race in the Courtroom PDF Author: Kenneth R. Aslakson
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814724868
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
No American city’s history better illustrates both the possibilities for alternative racial models and the role of the law in shaping racial identity than New Orleans, Louisiana, which prior to the Civil War was home to America’s most privileged community of people of African descent. In the eyes of the law, New Orleans’s free people of color did not belong to the same race as enslaved Africans and African-Americans. While slaves were “negroes,” free people of color were gens de couleur libre, creoles of color, or simply creoles. New Orleans’s creoles of color remained legally and culturally distinct from “negroes” throughout most of the nineteenth century until state mandated segregation lumped together descendants of slaves with descendants of free people of color. Much of the recent scholarship on New Orleans examines what race relations in the antebellum period looked as well as why antebellum Louisiana’s gens de couleur enjoyed rights and privileges denied to free blacks throughout most of the United States. This book, however, is less concerned with the what and why questions than with how people of color, acting within institutions of power, shaped those institutions in ways beyond their control. As its title suggests, Making Race in the Courtroom argues that race is best understood not as a category, but as a process. It seeks to demonstrate the role of free people of African-descent, interacting within the courts, in this process.

Slavery's Metropolis

Slavery's Metropolis PDF Author: Rashauna Johnson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316720837
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
New Orleans is an iconic city, which was once located at the crossroads of early America and the Atlantic World. New Orleans became a major American metropolis as its slave population exploded; in the early nineteenth century, slaves made up one third of the urban population. In contrast to our typical understanding of rural, localized, isolated bondage in the emergent Deep South, daily experiences of slavery in New Orleans were global, interconnected, and transient. Slavery's Metropolis uses slave circulations through New Orleans between 1791 and 1825 to map the social and cultural history of enslaved men and women and the rapidly shifting city, nation, and world in which they lived. Investigating emigration from the Caribbean to Louisiana during the Haitian Revolution, commodity flows across urban-rural divides, multiracial amusement places, the local jail, and freedom-seeking migrations to Trinidad following the War of 1812, it remaps the history of slavery in modern urban society.

Becoming Free, Remaining Free

Becoming Free, Remaining Free PDF Author: Judith Kelleher Schafer
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807128800
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
Louisiana state law was unique in allowing slaves to contract for their freedom and to initiate a lawsuit for liberty. Judith Kelleher Schafer describes the ingenious and remarkably sophisticated ways New Orleans slaves used the legal system to gain their independence and find a voice in a society that ordinarily gave them none. Showing that remaining free was often as challenging as becoming free, Schafer also recounts numerous cases in which free people of color were forced to use the courts to prove their status. She further documents seventeen free blacks who, when faced with deportation, amazingly sued to enslave themselves. Schafer’s impressive detective work achieves a rare feat in the historical profession—the unveiling of an entirely new facet of the slave experience in the American South.

Caribbean New Orleans

Caribbean New Orleans PDF Author: Cécile Vidal
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 146964519X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 552

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Book Description
Combining Atlantic and imperial perspectives, Caribbean New Orleans offers a lively portrait of the city and a probing investigation of the French colonists who established racial slavery there as well as the African slaves who were forced to toil for them. Casting early New Orleans as a Caribbean outpost of the French Empire rather than as a North American frontier town, Cecile Vidal reveals the persistent influence of the Antilles, especially Saint-Domingue, which shaped the city's development through the eighteenth century. In so doing, she urges us to rethink our usual divisions of racial systems into mainland and Caribbean categories. Drawing on New Orleans's rich court records as a way to capture the words and actions of its inhabitants, Vidal takes us into the city's streets, market, taverns, church, hospitals, barracks, and households. She explores the challenges that slow economic development, Native American proximity, imperial rivalry, and the urban environment posed to a social order that was predicated on slave labor and racial hierarchy. White domination, Vidal demonstrates, was woven into the fabric of New Orleans from its founding. This comprehensive history of urban slavery locates Louisiana's capital on a spectrum of slave societies that stretched across the Americas and provides a magisterial overview of racial discourses and practices during the formative years of North America's most intriguing city.

North Carolina’s Free People of Color, 1715–1885

North Carolina’s Free People of Color, 1715–1885 PDF Author: Warren Eugene Milteer Jr.
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807173789
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
In North Carolina’s Free People of Color, 1715–1885, Warren Eugene Milteer Jr. examines the lives of free persons categorized by their communities as “negroes,” “mulattoes,” “mustees,” “Indians,” “mixed-bloods,” or simply “free people of color.” From the colonial period through Reconstruction, lawmakers passed legislation that curbed the rights and privileges of these non-enslaved residents, from prohibiting their testimony against whites to barring them from the ballot box. While such laws suggest that most white North Carolinians desired to limit the freedoms and civil liberties enjoyed by free people of color, Milteer reveals that the two groups often interacted—praying together, working the same land, and occasionally sharing households and starting families. Some free people of color also rose to prominence in their communities, becoming successful businesspeople and winning the respect of their white neighbors. Milteer’s innovative study moves beyond depictions of the American South as a region controlled by a strict racial hierarchy. He contends that although North Carolinians frequently sorted themselves into races imbued with legal and social entitlements—with whites placing themselves above persons of color—those efforts regularly clashed with their concurrent recognition of class, gender, kinship, and occupational distinctions. Whites often determined the position of free nonwhites by designating them as either valuable or expendable members of society. In early North Carolina, free people of color of certain statuses enjoyed access to institutions unavailable even to some whites. Prior to 1835, for instance, some free men of color possessed the right to vote while the law disenfranchised all women, white and nonwhite included. North Carolina’s Free People of Color, 1715–1885 demonstrates that conceptions of race were complex and fluid, defying easy characterization. Despite the reductive labels often assigned to them by whites, free people of color in the state emerged from an array of backgrounds, lived widely varied lives, and created distinct cultures—all of which, Milteer suggests, allowed them to adjust to and counter ever-evolving forms of racial discrimination.

Becoming Free, Becoming Black

Becoming Free, Becoming Black PDF Author: Alejandro de la Fuente
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108480640
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
Shows that the law of freedom, not slavery, determined the way that race developed over time in three slave societies.

Creole

Creole PDF Author: Sybil Kein
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807126011
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
Who are the Creoles? The answer is not clear-cut. Of European, African, or Caribbean mixed descent, they are a people of color and Francophone dialect native to south Louisiana; and though their history dates from the late 1600s, they have been sorely neglected in the literature. Creole is a project that both defines and celebrates this ethnic identity. In fifteen essays, writers intimately involved with their subject explore the vibrant yet understudied culture of the Creole people across time—their language, literature, religion, art, food, music, folklore, professions, customs, and social barriers.