Search Results

This chapter is divided into three parts. The first part explores how when limiting black people to a specific geographical space, they continue to remain contained in the “raced” space to the exclusion of the larger society. It looks at how the Creoles, the Louisiana people of mixed races, created fluid, less segregated spaces. The cultural movement and primary destination for Creoles of Color in the nineteenth century, was France. The chapter then narrates how the 1896 Plessy ruling maintained segregation rules. The chapter also discusses the work of Louisiana poet Brenda Marie Osbey, who takes recourse to the past to rewrite history.

This chapter analyzes Ernest Gaines’s portrayal of Louisiana plantation society and the structures of racial control that had been inherited from the systems of law, including the 1685 Code Noir, 1724 Code Noir, the Digest of 1808, and the Civil Code of 1825. Catherine Carmier (1964)and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1973) both portray interracial relationships and the complex patterns of policing regulating the interactions of various race and class groups, including the white planter class, white Cajuns, Creoles of color, and black community—a multidirectional self-policing occurring at all levels of society. Creoles of color remained a distinct racial group in many communities, in spite of the shift towards a binary classification system legally instituted by the black codes following the Civil War. This chapter investigates the shift in racial construction that occurred in Louisiana during this period, as illustrated by the novels.

Chapter 6 examines the contemporary experience of Creoles of African descent. Changing conceptions of blackness during and after the civil rights and Black Power movements challenged Creole identity and made it more difficult for many Creoles of color to see themselves as distinct from other black Americans. These tensions are explored by examining the stories of Creoles of color as gathered from interviews and participant observation with Creole cultural organizations. These stories show three different responses Creoles of color have had to the pressures to assimilate to the binary US racial system: (1) adopt a black American identity; (2) pass as white; or (3) resist the categories of black and white. The chapter concludes by considering similarities between Louisiana’s Creoles of color and Latino immigrants of color who have experienced many of the same tensions and misunderstandings as they have struggled with Anglo-American conceptions of whiteness and blackness.

Chapter 4 examines the experience of St. Domingue refugees of color across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The focus is on refugees and their descendants who were free people of color. As was the case with white Creoles, Creoles of color faced intense pressure with the rise of Jim Crow to take a stand on one side or the other of the starkly drawn black/white border. Although they were officially categorized with black Anglo-Americans, Creoles of color in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries continued in many ways to operate according to a Latinized racial system that allowed them to differentiate themselves socially from Anglo-blacks. In contrast to the white Creoles who blended into white Anglo-American society, many Creoles of color saw a benefit in preserving their Creole identity because it provided a way of resisting the degrading racial effects of the Anglo-American racial system.

This chapter explores black Mobilians’ hard struggle for the African American education after Confederate defeat. Intense white opposition led by Josiah Nott, arson, and antagonisms with Creoles of Color threatened their goal of becoming a literate people. Black Mobilians overcame these challenges and proved that they were no longer slaves. By remaining steadfast in purpose, this chapter argues that black Mobilians and their partnerships with the Freedmen’s Bureau and American Missionary Association remade the postwar landscape to include the African American schoolhouse in Mobile and firmly embedded African American education as a state constitutional right of citizenship.

Chapter 5 examines the experience of white Louisiana Creoles in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries where many have blended into the mainstream white Louisiana community. Although most white Louisianans fully lost the connection to their Creole identity, some were able to hold on to it, and others are beginning to rediscover it. Even in these cases, however, the racial cloud of Anglo-American assumptions about Creoles’ racial impurity continues to hang over them so that few would call themselves Creole unless they were with others who understood exactly what they meant. The stories in this chapter emerge from rich interview data with white St. Domingue/Haiti descendants and from oral histories with white Creoles.