Mixed Race Studies

Free Soldiers of Color

The New York Times
2012-02-17

Donald R. Shaffer, Lecturer in History
Upper Iowa University
and blogger at Civil War Emancipation

On Feb. 15, 1862, Louisiana dissolved all its militia units as part of a military reorganization law. Among the organizations disbanded was a militia unique in the Confederacy, the 1st Louisiana Native Guards. What made the New Orleans unit special was that it was composed of African-Americans.

It was natural that the only black militia regiment in the Confederacy would be found in Louisiana, and more specifically in New Orleans, which boasted French, Spanish and African roots. The Crescent City was a cosmopolitan metropolis, by far the largest in the antebellum South, with an 1860 population of over 168,000 people (in contrast, the runner-up, Charleston, S.C., had just 40,000).

A distinctive group in the diverse city was the French-speaking gens de couleur libre, or “free people of color.” The progeny of European men and women of African descent, this group carved out a place in Louisiana society somewhere between the white population and the more purely African-descended slaves. Their position largely was as an inheritance of French and Spanish rule in Louisiana, which exhibited greater toleration for mixed-raced persons. Indeed, many gens de couleur libre owned property (some even owned slaves), worked at skilled or professional occupations, and embraced the cultural trappings of respectable society. Yet as hard as they tried to gain acceptance as a third caste, the gens de couleur libre still found many whites hostile on account of their obvious if muted African ancestry. If their position was better than that of most Southern blacks, it was by no means equal to that of Louisiana whites…

Read the entire essay here.

Opinion: What does Blackness look like?

Cable News Network (CNN)
In America: You define America. What defines you?
2012-01-21

Yaba Blay, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies
Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Editor’s note: Yaba Blay, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of Africana studies who teaches courses at Lafayette College. Her research focuses on black identity, with specific attention to skin color and hair politics. She is the recipient of a 2010 Leeway Foundation Art and Change Grant through which she embarked upon the book project, (1)ne Drop: Conversations on Skin Color, Race, and Identity.

I always thought I could spot a Black person anywhere. My eyes were trained in New Orleans—home to a historically preeminent group of folks who self-identify as “Creoles.”   Many of them would make it a point to announce that they are different—not White, not Black, but “Creole.”  A mix of African, Native American, French, and sometimes Spanish heritage, some Creoles are light-skinned enough to be mistaken for—or “pass”—for White people. We call them “passé blanc.”

One of my favorite pastimes as a youth in New Orleans was “picking out Black people” – people whom everyone else might have thought were White or “something else,” but whom I knew for a fact were Black. Somehow. Without even knowing it at the time, I had blindly accepted the “one-drop rule,” the early 1900’s law turned social rule that held that anyone with 1/32 of “African Black blood” was Black. And somehow I made it my mission to identify that “one-drop” any chance I could get. Maybe it was my way of retaliating against those who didn’t want to be associated with my kind – those whom I felt were somehow rejecting their own kind.

In my limited experiences, it seemed that people whose physical appearance gave them the “option” to be something else, chose to be something else.  So in my adult life, when I left New Orleans and began to meet people who were very adamant about their black identity, even though they could have easily identified as “mixed” or “Latino” or “Creole” or could have even “passed” for white, I found myself intrigued. On one particular occasion, I was on a panel hosted by the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI); and for as “learned” and as well-versed as (I thought) I was in global skin color politics, I found myself somehow taken aback each time either of my co-panelists, whom I would have identified as “Latino/a,” self-identified as “Black” and “African.”  In that moment, I felt ashamed of myself for questioning their identities based upon the stereotypical visions of “Blackness” that lived in my head. Afterwards, as I continued to struggle with myself, I knew that I wanted to do something with my feelings that could be useful to others like myself. I wanted to explore the “other” sides of Blackness.

So began my journey into the (1)ne Drop project…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans

Johns Hopkins University Press
2009
352 pages
7 halftones
Hardback ISBN: 9780801886805

Jennifer M. Spear, Associate Professor of History
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada

Winner, 2009 Kemper and Leila Williams Prize in Lousiana History, The Historic New Orleans Collection and the Louisiana Historical Association

A microcosm of exaggerated societal extremes—poverty and wealth, vice and virtue, elitism and equality—New Orleans is a tangled web of race, cultural mores, and sexual identities. Jennifer Spear’s examination of the dialectical relationship between politics and social practice unravels the city’s construction of race during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Spear brings together archival evidence from three different languages and the most recent and respected scholarship on racial formation and interracial sex to explain why free people of color became a significant population in the early days of New Orleans and to show how authorities attempted to use concepts of race and social hierarchy to impose order on a decidedly disorderly society. She recounts and analyzes the major conflicts that influenced New Orleanian culture: legal attempts to impose racial barriers and social order, political battles over propriety and freedom, and cultural clashes over place and progress. At each turn, Spear’s narrative challenges the prevailing academic assumptions and supports her efforts to move exploration of racial formation away from cultural and political discourses and toward social histories.

Strikingly argued, richly researched, and methodologically sound, this wide-ranging look at how choices about sex triumphed over established class systems and artificial racial boundaries supplies a refreshing contribution to the history of early Louisiana.

Table of Contents

• Ackowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Indian Women, French Women, and the Regulation of Sex
• 2. Legislating Slavery in French New Orleans
• 3. Affranchis and Sang-Mêlé
• 4. Slavery and Freedom in Spanish New Orleans
• 5. Limpieza de Sangre and Family Formation
• 6. Negotiating Racial Identities in the 1790s
• 7. Codification of a Tripartite Racial System in Anglo-Louisiana
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Glossary
• Essay on Sources
• Index

The “Quadroon-Plaçage” Myth of Antebellum New Orleans: Anglo-American (Mis)interpretations of a French-Caribbean Phenomenon

Journal of Social History
Published Online: 2011-11-13
DOI: 10.1093/jsh/shr059

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

Although Thomas Jefferson’s likely affair with his slave, Sally Hemmings, has sparked controversy since James Callender first made it public in 1802, no place has attracted more attention with regard to miscegenation than Louisiana, and particularly its chief city of New Orleans. The general consensus holds that the inhabitants of New Orleans were unusually open about interracial relationships (or at least heterosexual ones in which the man was white), due to the cultural influence of the French and Spanish, and nothing epitomized this more than the city’s famed “quadroon balls,” dances open to young free women of mixed ancestry and white gentlemen of means. According to lore, the “lovely and refined” quadroon woman came to the ball “dressed in the most fashionable gown and chaperoned by her mother” looking for a wealthy white gentleman. “After dancing with a man, if the girl were attracted, he would be allowed to speak with her mother to make ‘arrangements’… [which] would include a furnished home that [the woman of color] would own and financial arrangements for her and any children.” The relationship thus established was called plaçage and the woman une placée. The relationship was temporary and ended when the man took a white wife. Nevertheless, a woman of color greatly benefitted from the patronage of an elite white man and often used the money bestowed upon her to establish herself in business “usually as a dressmaker, milliner, or by operating a boarding house.” Thus, the “quadroon balls” and plaçage relationships “provided a comfortable lifestyle for the quadroon ladies who had very limited options during the period.”

While this story of the quadroon balls and plaçage is enticing, it is based on scanty evidence, and, therefore, this paper will refer to it as the quadroon-plaçage myth. To be sure, something like the…

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Oscar James Dunn: A Case Study in Race & Politics in Reconstruction Louisiana

University of New Orleans
December 2011
296 pages

Brian Mitchell

A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the University of New Orleans in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Urban Studies

The study of African American Reconstruction leadership has presented a variety of unique challenges for modern historians who struggle to piece together the lives of men, who prior to the Civil War, had little political identity. The scant amounts of primary source data in regard to these leaders’ lives before the war, the destruction of many documents in regard to their leadership following the Reconstruction Era, and the treatment of these figures by historians prior to the Revisionist movement have left this body of extremely important political figures largely unexplored. This dissertation will examine the life of one of Louisiana’s foremost leaders, Lt. Governor Oscar James Dunn, the United States’ first African American executive officeholder.
 
Using previously overlooked papers, Masonic records, Senate journals, newspaper articles and government documents, the dissertation explores Dunn’s role in Louisiana politics and chronicles the factionalization of the Republican Party in Reconstruction New Orleans. Born a slave and released from bondage at an early age, Oscar J. Dunn was able to transcend the stigma which was often attached to those who had been held in slavery. A native of New Orleans, born to Anglo-African parents, he was also able to transcend the language barrier that often excluded Anglo-Africans from social acceptability in Afro-Creole society. Although illiterate, Dunn’s parents made critical strides in securing his social mobility by providing him with both a formal education and a trade apprenticeship. Those skills propelled Dunn forward within his Anglo-African community wherein he became a key figure in the community’s two most important institutions, the York Rite Masonic Lodge and the African Methodist Episcopal church.
 
This dissertation argues that Dunn’s political ascent was linked to the political enfranchisement of antebellum Anglo-Africans in Louisiana, Dunn’s involvement in Anglo-African institutions (particularly the York Rite Masonic Lodge and the African Methodist Episcopal church) and Dunn’s ability to find middle ground in the racially charged arguments that engulfed Reconstruction New Orleans’s political arena.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• LIST OF TABLES
• LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
• ABSTRACT
• CHAPTER I: Introduction
  • Understanding the complexities of Ethnicity and Class in Reconstruction New Orleans
• CHAPTER II: Literature Review
  • Specific Literature in Regard to Oscar James Dunn
• CHAPTER III: Methodology
  • The Problem
  • My Hypothesis
• CHAPTER IV: Giving Roots to the Rootless: The Origin of Oscar James Dunn (1822-1865)
  • Dunn’s Parents
  • Oscar James Dunn’s Youth
  • Dunn the Music Teacher
  • A Plasterer Again
  • Dunn the Mason
  • Dunn the Soldier
  • What a Difference a Place Makes: Geography in Dunn‘s Early Life
  • Reaching a Consensus on Dunn’s Origin
• CHAPTER V: Oscar J. Dunn’s Political Ascension
  • Outside of the Political Arena
  • Civil Rights and the Riot of 1866
  • White Lodge, Black Lodge
  • Cracks in the Foundation
• CHAPTER VI: The Negro Lieutenant Governor and the Republican Schism (1868-1869)
  • The Reluctant Candidate
  • The Test Oath Imbroglio
  • Dunn‘s Inauguration
  • The Metropolitan Police Bill
  • The Civil Rights Bill
  • There and Back again: The First Black Political Junket
  • A Homecoming of Sorts
  • Ending the French Masonic Invasion
  • The Lieutenant Governor‘s New Home
• CHAPTER VII: No Greater Divide (1870-1871)
  • The Masquerade Misadventure
  • Back in the Slammer Again
  • The Voodoo Exorcism
  • Airing Their Dirty Laundry in the Winds of Change
  • Warmoth‘s Presidential Visit
  • The Failed Coup: While the Cat was Away
  • The Two Conventions
  • The Longest Second Line
  • Hard Times and Fond Memories
• CHAPTER VIII: Dunn-Forgotten Hero
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• APPENDIX A: John Parson’s Biography of Dunn
• APPENDIX B: J. Henri Burch’s Masonic Eulogy of Oscar J. Dunn
• APPENDIX C: Dryden’s Biography of Dunn
• APPENDIX D: Dunn’s Inaugural Address
• APPENDIX E: Louisiana’s Civil Rights Bill
• APPENDIX F: Lieut. Gov. Dunn’s Letter to Horace Greeley
• APPENDIX G: Oscar J. Dunn Commemoration ( J. Morris Chester’s Speech)
• VITA:

LIST OF TABLES

• Table 1. Attackers of James Dunn
• Table 2. Discrepancies in the Eureka Lodge‘s Roll and the First Regiment‘s Service
• Table 3. Dunn‘s Addresses and Dates of Residence
• Table 4. Black Voter Registration Sites in the City of New Orleans in 1865
• Table 5. First Ballot: Dunn‘s nomination for Lt. Governor
• Table 6. Second Ballot: Dunn‘s nomination for Lt. Governor

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

• Figure 1. The American Theater (The Old Camp)
• Figure 2. Freedmen Voting in New Orleans (1867)
• Figure 3. First Vote
• Figure 4. The President Leaving the Willard Hotel (March 4,1853)
• Figure 5. Lieutenant Governor Dunn. 137
• Figure 6. Metropolitan Hotel (1863)
• Figure 7. Canal Street above Claiborne Street circa 1860-1870
• Figure 8. Lt. Governor Dunn and Family
• Figure 9. Sketch of Dunn in Formalwear
• Figure 10. Krewe of Comus Ball
• Figure 11. Currier & Ives Image

Read the entire dissertation here.

Resistance, Silence, and Placées: Charles Bon’s Octoroon Mistress and Louisa Picquet

American Literature
Volume 79, Number 1 (March 2007)
pages 85-112
DOI: 10.1215/00029831-2006-072

Stephanie Li, Assistant Professor of English
University of Rochester

In 1850, Mary Walker, a free woman of color, filed a petition in the Fourth District Court of New Orleans to enslave herself and her nine-year-old daughter to George Whittaker. Commenting on a similar case involving the voluntary enslavement of another free woman of color, the New Orleans Daily Picayune asserted that Amelia Stone “preferred” the liberty, security, and protection of slavery here, to the degradation of free niggerdom among the Abolitionists at the North, with whom she would be obliged to dwell, and in preference to which, she has sought the ‘chains’ of slavery.” With only this specious rationale, a political barb aimed at antislavery Northerners, there exists no historical record to explain Stone’s and Walker’s drastic choice. Nevertheless, we can offer some conjectures concerning the motives of women of color who sought enslavement. Throughout the nineteenth century, free people of color living in New Orleans were subjected to waves of discrimination that culminated in the ratification of laws restricting their mobility and basic liberties. They were required to carry proof of their freedom at all times, and their right of assembly was severely limited. An 1842 law required recently arrived free blacks to leave Louisiana. Had Walker been new to the state, enslavement would have been the only way for her to remain. Even if she had been born in Louisiana, she might have preferred the stability of enslavement to the troubles and insecurities of freedom.

In giving up her liberty, Walker made one final independent choice; she chose George Whitaker as her master. Perhaps she had some knowledge of his character and social position that led her to entrust her life and that of her daughter to him. He may have been her former…

Read or purchase the article here.

A Free Man of Color

Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
October 2011
112 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/4
Paperback ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-4566-6

John Guare

John Guare’s new play is astonishing, raucous, and panoramic. A Free Man of Color is set in boisterous New Orleans prior to the historic Louisiana Purchase. Before law and order took hold and class, racial, and political lines were drawn, New Orleans was a carnival of beautiful women, flowing wine, and pleasure for the taking. At the center of this Dionysian world is the mulatto Jacques Cornet, who commands men, seduces women, and preens like a peacock. But it is 1801 and the map of New Orleans is about to be redrawn. The Louisiana Purchase brings American rule and racial segregation to the chaotic, colorful world of Jacques Cornet and all that he represents, turning the tables on freedom and liberty.

Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition in Louisiana

Lousiana State University Press
2004-10-30
344 pages
6.00 x 9.00 inches / 8 halftones, 3 maps
ISBN-10: 0807130265; ISBN-13: 978-0807130261

Caryn Cossé Bell, Professor of History
University of Massachusetts, Lowell

Jules and Frances Landry Award

With the Federal occupation of New Orleans in 1862, Afro-Creole leaders in that city, along with their white allies, seized upon the ideals of the American and French Revolutions and images of revolutionary events in the French Caribbean and demanded Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité. Their republican idealism produced the postwar South’s most progressive vision of the future. Caryn Cossé Bell, in her impressive, sweeping study, traces the eighteenth-century origins of this Afro-Creole political and intellectual heritage, its evolution in antebellum New Orleans, and its impact on the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• 1. Revolution and the Origins of Dissent
• 2. The Republican Cause and the Afro-Creole Militia
• 3. The New American Racial Order
• 4. Romanticism, Social Protest, and Reform
• 5. French Freemasonry and the Republican Heritage
• 6. Spiritualism’s Dissident Visionaries
• 7. War, Reconstruction, and the Politics of Radicalism
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Membership in Two Masonic Lodges and Biographical Information
• Bibliography
• Index

I Am What I Say I Am: Racial and Cultural Identity among Creoles of Color in New Orleans

University of New Orleans
2009-05-15
62 pages

Nikki Dugar

A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the University of New Orleans in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in History

This paper examines the generational changes in the culture and racial self-identification of Creoles of Color of New Orleans. This study argues that the key to understanding Creole culture is the role that isolationism has played in its history. While White ethnics pursued a path of assimilation, Creoles of Color pursued a path of isolationism. This path served them well during the Jim Crow era, but it suddenly became undesirable during the Black Power era. Now, however, new values of multiculturalism have resurrected Creole identity as a cultural asset.

Table of Contents

• List of Figures
• Abstract
• Introduction
• Historiography
• Early Debate
• Distinctly Creole
• Passing
• Light Skin With Good Hair
• Civil Rights Creoles
• Contemporary Creoles
• American Racial Policy and Ideology
• Multiracial Chic
• Conclusion
• Epilogue
• Vita

List of Figures

• Figure 1. Map depicting the proximity of traditional Creole institutions to each other
• Figure 2. Plan of New Orleans, 1872
• Figure 3. Geographic Distributions and Shifts of the Creole Population in New Orleans, 1800-2000
• Figure 4. North Claiborne Avenue before the construction of Interstate Highway 10, 1966
• Figure 5. North Claiborne Avenue after the construction of Interstate Highway 10, 2009

Introduction

“I‟m too white to be black and too black to be white,” remarked Ronald Ricard, a New Orleans Creole of Color, in an interview in the New Orleans Times-Picayune in 1977. Ricard was expressing a sentiment that many Creoles of Color continue to have about themselves. The feeling of not quite belonging to one race or the other has been an issue for many since the antebellum period. Since that time, the Creole community has gone through many political and social changes, which have affected not only the community‟s structure but also ideas about its racial identity. This study will focus particularly on three generations of Creoles: those who came of age before World War II, here called “Traditional Creoles” (born during the colonial period up to the 1930s); those who matured in the post war years, designated “Civil Rights Creoles” (born between 1940s and 1960s); and “Contemporary Creoles” (born in the 1970s to present day). In comparing these pre- and post-war groups, this study will explore how generational differences exist in how Creoles racially identify themselves.

To complicate matters further, Contemporary Creoles do not share a monolithic racial identity, for older and younger members of this category view certain issues very differently. This is to be expected, because identity is a constantly evolving phenomenon influenced by many external factors. Rather than gloss over their differences, this study will examine them closely in search of trends and patterns that will illuminate the entire history of Creoles of Color in New Orleans.

Primary sources used in this study include newspaper and magazine articles, maps, census data, and interviews conducted by the author. The latter were comprised of written questionnaires and follow-up oral interviews administered between Spring 2008 and Spring 2009. The sixteen interviewees were Creoles of Color, meaning people of mixed French-, African-, Spanish-, and Native-American ancestry, most of whom reside in or have familial ties to Louisiana. On the questionnaires, respondents supplied background information on themselves and family members including name, age, gender, current and previous neighborhood residences, and schools attended. They were then asked their opinions regarding Creoles of Color in New Orleans: what traits define the group, what racial and cultural differences separate Creoles from other African Americans, and what racial identity they and their families claim. After completing the questionnaires, participants were invited to contribute additional details, stories, and comments. These interviews, combined with other primary materials noted above, constitute the core of this research endeavor.

An array of secondary sources also informs this study. Secondary sources include works that examine the development of Creole culture. Sources on New Orleans history are used to place the different generations of Creoles within a historical context. Sources on multiculturalism, American popular culture, and Whiteness studies were also used to discuss the generations of Contemporary Creoles.

On the basis of the aforementioned primary and secondary sources, this study argues that the key to understanding Creole culture is the role that isolationism has played in its history. While White ethnics pursued a path of assimilation, Creoles of Color pursued a path of isolationism. This path served them well during the Jim Crow era, but it suddenly became undesirable during the Black Power era. Now, however, new values of multiculturalism have resurrected Creole identity as a cultural asset…

Read the entire thesis here.

Plessy and Ferguson unveil plaque today marking their ancestors’ actions

New Orleans Times-Picayune
2009-02-11

Katy Reckdahl

Today, Plessy versus Ferguson becomes Plessy and Ferguson, when descendants of opposing parties in the landmark U.S. Supreme Court segregation case stand together to unveil a plaque at the former site of the Press Street Railroad Yards.

Standing behind Keith Plessy and Phoebe Ferguson will be a large group of students, scholars, officials and activists who worked for years to honor the site where in 1892, Tremé shoemaker Homer Plessy, a light-skinned black man, was arrested for sitting in a railway car reserved for white people.

People often think that his ancestor held some responsibility for the legalized segregation known as “separate but equal, ” said Keith Plessy, 52, a longtime New Orleans hotel bellman whose great-grandfather was Homer Plessy’s first cousin. In actuality, Homer Plessy boarded that train as part of a carefully orchestrated effort to create a civil-rights test case, to fight the proliferation of segregationist laws in the South…

…Plessy, born in 1863 on St. Patrick’s Day, grew up at a time when black people in New Orleans could marry whomever they chose, sit in any streetcar seat, and attend integrated schools, Medley said. But as an adult, those gains from the Reconstruction era eroded.
 
On any other day in 1892, Plessy could have ridden in the car restricted to white passengers without notice. According to the parlance of the time, he was classified “7/8 white.”
 
In order to pose a clear test to the state’s 1890 separate-car law, the Citizens’ Committee in advance notified the railroad—which had opposed the law because it required adding more cars to its trains.
 
On June 7, 1892, Plessy bought a first-class ticket for the commuter train that ran to Covington, sat down in the car for white riders only and the conductor asked whether he was a colored man, Medley said. The committee also hired a private detective with arrest powers to take Plessy off the train at Press and Royal streets, to ensure that he was charged with violating the state’s separate-car law.
 
Everything the committee plotted went as planned—except for the final court decision, in 1896. By then the composition of the U.S. Supreme Court had gained a more segregationist tilt, and the committee knew it would likely lose. But it chose to press the cause anyway, Medley said. “It was a matter of honor for them, that they fight this to the very end.”…

…”You don’t know American history until you know Louisiana history, ” Plessy said…

Read the entire article here.