Louisiana Creole People - Race

Race

Colonists had referred to enslaved blacks who were native-born as creole, to distinguish them from new arrivals from Africa. Over time, the black Creoles and Africans created a French and West African hybrid language called Creole French or Louisiana Creole French. In some circumstances it was used by slaves, planters and free people of color alike. It was still spoken by some in Central Louisiana well into the 20th century. Creole French is typically not spoken in New Orleans any more, but certain words and phrases are still used. Creole people and culture are distinct from the Cajun people and culture, who are descended from French-speaking refugees forcibly resettled by the British from Acadia in Canada to Louisiana in the 18th century.

As in the French or Spanish Caribbean and Latin American colonies, the Louisiana territory developed a mixed-race class, of whom there were numerous free people of color. In the early days they were descended mostly from European men and enslaved or free black or mixed-race women. French men took African women as mistresses or common-law wives, and sometimes married them.

Later, wealthy young white Creole men often took free or enslaved mixed-race women as mistresses or consorts before, or in addition to, their legal marriages, in a system known as plaçage. The young women's mothers often negotiated a form of dowry or property settlement to protect their futures. The men would often transfer social capital to their mistresses and children, including freedom for those who were enslaved, and education or apprenticeships. Mixed-race sons of wealthy men were sent to France for education, while daughters were educated in the local convent schools.

As a group, the mixed-race Creoles rapidly began to acquire education, skills (many in New Orleans worked as craftsmen and artisans), businesses and property. They were overwhelmingly Catholic, spoke Colonial French (although some also spoke Louisiana Creole French), and kept up many French social customs, modified by other parts of their ancestry and Louisiana culture. The free people of color married among themselves to maintain their class and social culture. The French-speaking mixed-race population came to be called "Creoles of color". "New Orleans persons of color were far wealthier, more secure, and more established than blacks elsewhere in Louisiana."

Under the French and Spanish rulers, Louisiana developed a three-tiered society, similar to that of Brazil, Cuba, Haiti, St.Lucia, Mexico, and other Latin colonies. This three-tiered society included a prosperous, educated group of mixed-race Creoles. Their identity as free people of color was one they had worked diligently towards and guarded carefully. By law they enjoyed most of the same rights and privileges as whites. They could and often did challenge the law in court and won cases against whites (Hirsch; Brasseaux; Mills; Kein etc.). They were property owners and created schools for their children. There were some free blacks in Louisiana, but most free people of color were of mixed race. They acquired education, property and power within the colony, and later, state.

After the Civil War, mixed-race Creoles of Color resisted American attempts to impose their binary racial culture, which split the population into white and black (the latter including everyone other than whites). While the American Civil War promised rights and opportunities for the enslaved, it caused anxiety for the free persons of color. They knew the United States did not legally recognize a three-tiered society, and were the prospects of emancipation for thousands of slaves in Louisiana. It posed a considerable threat to the identity and position of the free people of color.

Following the Union victory in the Civil War, the Louisiana three-tiered society was gradually overrun by more European Americans, who classified everyone by the South's binary division of "black" and "white". Following Reconstruction, when white Democrats regained power in the state legislature, they passed Jim Crow laws and a constitution that effectively disfranchised most blacks and people of color, through discriminatory application of voter registration and electoral laws. The US Supreme Court ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 supported the binary society and the policy of "separate but equal" facilities (which were seldom achieved in fact) in the segregated South.

Whites increasingly claimed that the term Creole was to apply to whites only, and supported their views in "numerous articles, statements, speeches, and book inserts". According to Virginia Dominguez,

"Charles Gayarré ... and Alcée Fortier ... led the unspoken though desperate defense of the Creole. As bright as these men clearly were, they still became engulfed in the reclassification process intent on salvaging white Creole status. Their speeches consequently read more like sympathetic eulogies than historical analysis."

She suggests that, because of their struggle for redefinition, the white Creoles of European descent were particularly hostile to the exploration by the writer George Washington Cable of multiracial Creole society in his stories and novels. She thinks that in The Grandissimes, he exposed the Creoles' preoccupation with covering up blood connections with the free people of color and slaves. She writes,

"There was a veritable explosion of defenses of Creole ancestry. The more novelist George Washington Cable engaged his characters in family feuds over inheritance, embroiled them in sexual unions with blacks and mulattoes, and made them seem particularly defensive about their presumably pure Caucasian ancestry, the more vociferously the white Creoles responded, insisting on purity of white ancestry as a requirement for identification as Creole."

New Orleans was a city divided geographically between Latin (French Creole) and Anglo-American populations until well into the late 19th century (Hirsch & Logsdon). Those of Latin European descent lived east of Canal Street, in what became known as the French Quarter; the new American migrants settled west ("Uptown") of it. The Esplanade became the center of the Irish Channel, Irish Catholic immigrants in the mid-nineteenth century.

People of the French Colonies of Louisiana were not citizens until 1924 - They became citizens of the United States by the Indian citizenship act of 1924.