Lost

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sally McKee
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Wishful Thinking ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Free People Of Color ◽  
American Black ◽  
Black Man ◽  
Free People ◽  
Creoles Of Color

This chapter discusses how the free people of color in New Orleans pointed to Edmond Dede as an example of what African Americans could achieve if given opportunities like the ones he found in France. To his death, Creoles of color thought Dede was so unusually accomplished for an American black man that they elevated what little they knew about his life in France to the level of drama. Problems for the historian start with the realization that although the reports about his life were certainly exaggerated by his friends and admirers, some of the enhancements came from Dede himself. For those who seek to understand his opportunities and choices within their historical context, the process of separating fact from wishful thinking awakens a sympathy for the man who risked all and mustered the resources to act on his dreams.

Claiborne

2018 ◽  
pp. 78-96
Author(s):  
Jason Berry
Keyword(s):  
New Orleans ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Color Line ◽  
Free People Of Color ◽  
Slave Revolt ◽  
The Status ◽  
The One ◽  
Free People ◽  
White Elite ◽  
The U.S

In the 1790s, as planters sold off land for faubourgs, or neighborhoods, New Orleans branched out. One such neighborhood was founded by Claude Tremé. Antonio de Sedella clashed with the vicar Rev. Patrick Walsh and his replacement Rev. John Olivier. Sedella became the elected pastor of St. Louis Cathedral, leading the one institution where people voluntarily gathered across the color line. Governor William C.C. Claiborne, a lawyer-turned-politician, governed a divided city. Conflicts arose between the French and American cultures, the black militia and white elite, and between Claiborne himself and his opponents. Faced with an influx of Haitian refugees, including whites, free people of color, and slaves, Claiborne faced the challenge of providing for the refugees deemed free while establishing the status of those the refugees considered as slaves. Many refugees who were legally free in Haiti became slaves in New Orleans. A slave revolt, with an estimated 500 rebels, broke out in 1811. Claiborne sent the local militia to put down the insurrection. Close to 100 of the rebels were killed. Advocates for statehood argued that Louisiana should join the U.S., and by admitting Louisiana in 1812, the U.S. cemented itself to a slave economy.

“Your Views Cross the Atlantic”

2021 ◽  
pp. 195-222
Author(s):  
Robert Murray
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
The United States ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Free People Of Color ◽  
Racial Identities ◽  
Ability To Act ◽  
Racially Ambiguous ◽  
Free People

Chapter 5 examines the overwhelming rejection of colonization by free people of color in the United States, the evolution of the colonization societies, and the agency of the settlers in enacting these changes. For the majority of African Americans rejected colonization’s principal arguments. Those few who saw potential in Liberia emphasized the performative possibilities of the colony, the ability to act in ways previously denied to them on account of race. Significantly, the small number of African Americans who willingly chose to emigrate to Liberia were often racially ambiguous. They saw opportunity in the undefined and evolving racial identities offered by moving to Liberia. The chapter also examines the settlers’ roles in changing the colonization societies. For many settlers, there was no difference between abolition and colonization. Settlers worked with colonizationists committed to black uplift and attempted to drive out those who did not favor such reforms; they changed how the societies’ governed their colonies.

Prologue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Milewski
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Legal Rights ◽  
Antebellum South ◽  
Free People Of Color ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Law ◽  
Freedom Suits ◽  
Free People ◽  
Free African Americans

The Prologue traces African Americans’ experiences with the law and the courts in the antebellum South. It shows the ways in which the law upheld the system of slavery and worked to characterize enslaved men and women as property rather than as people. At times, though, slaves could participate in the legal system as criminal defendants or as they litigated freedom suits. Free people of color, too, appealed to the law to challenge the constraints imposed upon them. The experiences of enslaved and free African Americans in the antebellum South gave them an appreciation of the power of the law, leading them to fight to gain full legal rights after the Civil War.

From “Louisians” to “Louisianais”

2019 ◽  
pp. 444-497
Author(s):  
Cécile Vidal
Keyword(s):  
New Orleans ◽  
Racial Formation ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Free People Of Color ◽  
French Empire ◽  
Racial Boundaries ◽  
Saint Domingue ◽  
Two Generations ◽  
Free People ◽  
The City

This chapter traces the emergence of a sense of place among French New Orleans residents of all conditions through the analysis of the uses of ethnic and national categories. It demonstrates that the French Regime did not witness the birth of a single “Creole” identity that united all historical actors across racial boundaries. Racial formation prevented the development of a shared relationship to the city between settlers, slaves, and free people of color. Nevertheless, after the succession of two generations by the end of the 1760s, as the elite fought to keep the colony within the French Empire during the 1768 revolt, New Orleans emerged as a distinctive place in relation to both the metropole and Saint-Domingue.

Re-Visiting the Creole Myth: Race and Ethnicity on the New Orleans Stage

2021 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-60
Author(s):  
Juliane Braun
Keyword(s):  
New Orleans ◽  
Race And Ethnicity ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Free People Of Color ◽  
Political Work ◽  
Cultural Integrity ◽  
Antebellum Period ◽  
The Status ◽  
Free People

Scholars who have studied the contested meaning of “creole” in Louisiana have typically maintained that the “Creole myth,” that is the strategic redefinition of the term “creole” to refer to the white descendants of Louisiana’s original French and Spanish settlers, emerged during or shortly after the Civil War. Drawing on a newspaper article and two case studies related to the New Orleans theatre, this essay proposes a new periodization for the emergence of the “Creole myth” and a re-evaluation of the cultural and political work it was doing. I want to suggest that conceiving of the Creole myth as an antebellum phenomenon (rather than examining it in the context of the postbellum era) allows us to see that its creation was not just motivated by French Louisianian concerns about cultural integrity and ethnic survival but also by this population’s anxiety about race and the status and mobility of free people of color. As a rhetorical tool that gained traction in the 1830s, the strategic redefinition of “creole” to exclude all people of African descent operated in tandem with other attempts to curtail the rights of free people of color, preventing their social, economic, and political ascent during the antebellum period. Ceux qui ont étudié le sens contesté du terme « créole » en Louisiane ont typiquement maintenu que le « mythe créole », c’est-à-dire, la redéfinition stratégique du terme « créole » à ne comprendre que les descendants blancs des colons d’origine française ou espagnole est apparu pendant ou peu après la guerre de Sécession. S’appuyant sur un article de journal et sur deux études de cas du théâtre à la Nouvelle-Orléans, cet article propose une nouvelle périodisation de l’émergence du « mythe créole » ainsi qu’une réévaluation du travail politique et culturelle qu’il exerçait. Je veux suggérer qu’en concevant le mythe créole comme phénomène d’avant la guerre de Sécession (plutôt que de l’examiner dans le contexte de l’après-guerre), nous comprenons que sa création a été motivé non seulement par des préoccupations d’intégrité culturelle et de survie ethnique de la part des Franco-louisianais, mais aussi par leur anxiété raciale par rapport à la mobilité des gens de couleur libres. Comme outil rhétorique qui a gagné du terrain dans les années 1830, la redéfinition stratégique de « créole » afin d’exclure tous ceux d’ascendance africaine fonctionnait en combinaison avec d’autres tentatives à restreindre les droits des gens de couleur libres, empêchant leur ascension sociale, économique et politique pendant l’ère d’avant la guerre de Sécession.

Becoming Mobile in the Age of Segregation

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Black People ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Equal Access ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Free People Of Color ◽  
The North ◽  
Historical Developments ◽  
Free People

Between the 1780s and the 1850s, two separate and interconnected historical developments led to segregation as a method of social control. The first was black emancipation in the North, the result of a prolonged and uneven process that lasted decades. In light of African American freedom, white northerners began to imagine black people as people, although nominally free, in need of regulation. As a result, whites scrutinized the travel of free people of color with a level of suspicion previously reserved for slaves. Thus, a process best thought of as the criminalization of black mobility emerged. This was highly deleterious to African Americans because it fostered antiblack vigilantism in public space. At the same time, advances in technology brought on a “transportation revolution.” As an elite cohort of newly freed African Americans sought equal access to public vehicles, transportation proprietors and white passengers in the North viciously guarded the thresholds of stagecoaches, steamships, and railroads. Colored travelers fought back against exclusion in a variety of ways that highlight the importance of travel in their conceptions of citizenship. The protest strategies of these earliest activists planted the seeds of the nineteenth-century equal rights movement.

scholarly journals Paper Thin: Freedom and Re-enslavement in the Diaspora of the Haitian Revolution

2011 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 1061-1087 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca J. Scott
Keyword(s):  
New Orleans ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Free People Of Color ◽  
Saint Domingue ◽  
National Convention ◽  
Women And Children ◽  
Vieux Carre ◽  
The Haitian Revolution ◽  
Free People

In the summer of 1809 a flotilla of boats arrived in New Orleans carrying more than 9,000 Saint-Domingue refugees recently expelled from the Spanish colony of Cuba. These migrants nearly doubled the population of New Orleans, renewing its Francophone character and populating the neighborhoods of the Vieux Carré and Faubourg Marigny. At the heart of the story of their disembarkation, however, is a legal puzzle. Historians generally tell us that the arriving refugees numbered 2,731 whites, 3,102 free people of color, and 3,226 slaves. But slavery had been abolished in Saint-Domingue by decree in 1793, and abolition had been ratified by the French National Convention in 1794. In what sense and by what right, then, were thousands of men, women, and children once again to be held to be “slaves”?

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