Fighting for Freedom

Walking Raddy ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 21-30
Author(s):  
Jessica Marie Johnson
Keyword(s):  
New Orleans ◽  
Black Community ◽  
African Descent ◽  
Community Formation ◽  
Enslaved Women ◽  
History Of ◽  
Women Of African Descent ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
Free Women ◽  
The City

Since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, enslaved and free women of African descent have been central to New Orleans’ culture and black community formation. Enslaved women of African descent who secured manumission—or legal documentation of their freedom—laid the foundation for the vibrant and politically savvy black community that would emerge in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The fight for freedom, however, would be long and winding, with complicated successes and failures reflecting diversity and conflict within and among women of African descent, as well as the changing geopolitical terrain the city was founded on and remained situated in throughout its long history. Recovering the voices of these early, founding women—the political and cultural ancestors of the Baby Dolls—is crucial to developing a history of women of African descent’s defiance and resistance to both racial and gendered oppression across New Orleans history.

Concubine

2020 ◽  
pp. 68-95
Author(s):  
Alexandra J. Finley
Keyword(s):  
New Orleans ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
African Descent ◽  
Reproductive Labor ◽  
History Of ◽  
Women Of African Descent ◽  
The City ◽  
Domestic Slave Trade

This chapter tells the history of Sarah Conner, an enslaved woman sold through the domestic slave trade from Virginia to New Orleans, Louisiana. Conner used money earned through socially reproductive labor to purchase her freedom. Her emancipation was complicated, however, by the man with whom she lived and who legally enslaved her, Theophilus Freeman. Freeman failed to properly register Conner's freedom with the city courts. When Freeman filed for bankruptcy, his creditors attempted to claim Conner's body for payment of his debts, illustrating the ways in which women of African descent, enslaved and free, could be trapped within the sexual economy of slavery. Chapter three also considers the experiences of enslaved concubines more broadly, challenging a sharp divide between accommodation and resistance in their actions and focusing instead on the impossible position in which they found themselves.

The Sisters of the Holy Family and the Veil of Race

2000 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tracy Fessenden
Keyword(s):  
New Orleans ◽  
African Descent ◽  
Religious Order ◽  
Women Of African Descent ◽  
The Veil ◽  
First Time ◽  
The City

In 1872, a young novice, Sister Marie, appeared at the door of the private study of Napoleon Perche, archbishop of New Orleans. This was not Sister Marie's first visit to the archbishop's residence. As a member of the religious order “last in rank” in the city, she was regularly called on to perform housekeeping duties for the archbishop and had worked for him in this capacity first as a postulant and later as a novice. Today, the reason for her visit was different: she appeared before him for the first time in a religious habit, which her order's mother superior, Josephine Charles, had designed and made. Mother Josephine was one of three founders of the Soeurs de Sainte-Famille or Sisters of the Holy Family (SSF), the order lowest in rank in New Orleans because its members were women of African descent.

Review: Urban Latino Cultures: La Vida Latina en LA by Gustavo Leclerc, Raúl Villa, and Michael J. Dear (eds.)

1999 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 126-128
Author(s):  
Catherine S. Ramirez
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
History Of ◽  
Crime Wave ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
The City ◽  
History Of Los Angeles

Throughout the twentieth century (and now the twenty-first), the specter of a Latina/o past, present, and future has haunted the myth of Los Angeles as a sunny, bucolic paradise. At the same time it has loomed behind narratives of the city as a dystopic, urban nightmare. In the 1940s Carey McWilliams pointed to the fabrication of a “Spanish fantasy heritage” that made Los Angeles the bygone home of fair señoritas, genteel caballeros and benevolent mission padres. Meanwhile, the dominant Angeleno press invented a “zoot” (read Mexican-American) crime wave. Unlike the aristocratic, European Californias/os of lore, the Mexican/American “gangsters” of the 1940s were described as racial mongrels. What's more, the newspapers explicitly identified them as the sons and daughters of immigrants-thus eliding any link they may have had to the Californias/os of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries or to the history of Los Angeles in general.

“People Want to See What Happened”

2012 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 213-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynnell L. Thomas
Keyword(s):  
New Orleans ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Media Representation ◽  
Cultural Reproduction ◽  
Theatrical Production ◽  
Expressive Culture ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
Racial Conflict ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

Occupying the space between cultural reproduction and theatrical production, the HBO series Treme offers an important vantage point from which to analyze the intersection of race, class, culture, and media representation animating New Orleans’s post-Katrina tourist identity. Treme illustrates the tension between the welcome recognition and celebration of New Orleans black expressive culture and its spectacularization and commodification. The resuscitation of tourist tropes and an emphasis on jazz and heritage music in the series often render the city’s history of racial conflict and injustice invisible or subordinate to new narratives of cross-racial unity among Katrina survivors and paternalistic actions by white characters uniquely positioned to express the community’s outrage. Treme takes up where the disaster tour leaves off, giving viewers - televisual tourists - access to purportedly authentic places, people, events, and experiences that exist beyond the tourist landscape and that suggest a racial remapping of the city.

City of a Million Dreams

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Berry
Keyword(s):  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Andrew Jackson ◽  
Jazz Music ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Michael White ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Secret Agent ◽  
The City

In 2015, the beautiful jazz funeral in New Orleans for composer Allen Toussaint coincided with a debate over removing four Confederate monuments. Mayor Mitch Landrieu led the ceremony, attended by living legends of jazz, music aficionados, politicians, and everyday people. The scene captured the history and culture of the city in microcosm--a city legendary for its noisy, complicated, tradition-rich splendor. In City of a Million Dreams, Jason Berry delivers a character-driven history of New Orleans at its tricentennial. Chronicling cycles of invention, struggle, death, and rebirth, Berry reveals the city's survival as a triumph of diversity, its map-of-the-world neighborhoods marked by resilience despite hurricanes, epidemics, fires, and floods. Berry orchestrates a parade of vibrant personalities, from the founder Bienville, a warrior emblazoned with snake tattoos; to Governor William C. C. Claiborne, General Andrew Jackson, and Pere Antoine, an influential priest and secret agent of the Inquisition; Sister Gertrude Morgan, a street evangelist and visionary artist of the 1960s; and Michael White, the famous clarinetist who remade his life after losing everything in Hurricane Katrina. The textured profiles of this extraordinary cast furnish a dramatic narrative of the beloved city, famous the world over for mysterious rituals as people dance when they bury their dead.

“Not So Denatured as to Kill Her Child”

2019 ◽  
pp. 96-131
Author(s):  
Sophie White
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Abuse ◽  
Pregnant Woman ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
African Descent ◽  
Work Roles ◽  
Childless Woman ◽  
Illinois Country ◽  
Enslaved Women ◽  
Indian Girl ◽  
Court Appearance

Chapter Three moves to the Illinois Country (Upper Louisiana) in 1748 and explores the contentious relationship between two enslaved women: Marie-Jeanne, a pregnant woman of African descent accused of infanticide after going into labor, and Lisette, a young Indian girl. The chapter explores French views of motherhood, and of enslaved Africans as parents, but also enslaved women’s particular vulnerability to sexual abuse from French men both in the French Atlantic and Indian Oceans (especially Mauritius). Marie-Jeanne and Lisette’s court appearance, in Kaskaskia and then in New Orleans where Marie-Jeanne was sent to be tried, afforded them the possibility of narrating their own stories of loss, and, in the fissures between the lines of questioning and their answers, the childless woman and the motherless child interspersed references to work roles, conflicts over authority, and their conceptions of motherhood.

A Family Long Free

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sally McKee
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
North America ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Emancipation Proclamation ◽  
History Of ◽  
High Level ◽  
Free African Americans ◽  
The City ◽  
And Training

This chapter argues that no family embodies the anomalous history of New Orleans better than the Dede family. Of all the towns and cities in North America with populations of free African Americans, the chapter goes on to argue, New Orleans was the city most likely to have produced a black man like Edmond Dede—possessed of enough talent, ambition, and training to launch himself up to a high level of accomplishment. Only in New Orleans could African American families trace their family's history back beyond 1864, the year the Emancipation Proclamation took effect. Contrary to later reports that Edmond Dede was the son of West Indian refugees, he in fact belonged instead to a long-established family with roots in North America.

Downtown Mardi Gras

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leslie A. Wade ◽  
Robin Roberts ◽  
Frank de Caro
Keyword(s):  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Age And Gender ◽  
Mardi Gras ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The City

After Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the surrounding region in 2005, the city debated whether to press on with Mardi Gras or cancel the parades. Ultimately, they decided to proceed. New Orleans’s recovery certainly has resulted from a complex of factors, but the city’s unique cultural life—perhaps its greatest capital—has been instrumental in bringing the city back from the brink of extinction. Voicing a civic fervor, local writer Chris Rose spoke for the importance of Carnival when he argued to carry on with the celebration of Mardi Gras following Katrina: “We are still New Orleans. We are the soul of America. We embody the triumph of the human spirit. Hell. We ARE Mardi Gras”. Since 2006, a number of new Mardi Gras practices have gained prominence. The new parade organizations or krewes, as they are called, interpret and revise the city’s Carnival traditions but bring innovative practices to Mardi Gras. The history of each parade reveals the convergence of race, class, age, and gender dynamics in these new Carnival organizations. Downtown Mardi Gras: New Carnival Practices in Post-Katrina New Orleans examines six unique, offbeat, Downtown celebrations. Using ethnography, folklore, cultural, and performance studies, the authors analyze new Mardi Gras’s connection to traditional Mardi Gras. The narrative of each krewe’s development is fascinating and unique, illustrating participants’ shared desire to contribute to New Orleans’s rich and vibrant culture.

The Constitution and Black America

1984 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
pp. 23-26
Author(s):  
E. Wally Miles
Keyword(s):  
Black Community ◽  
Black History ◽  
Black America ◽  
Special Collections ◽  
History Of ◽  
Atlanta University ◽  
The University ◽  
The City ◽  
Rich History

During the week of June 20, 1983 twenty-five historians and political scientists gathered for a seminar concerning “The Constitution and Black America.” Most of the participating faculty were very positive in their evaluations of the program; many, in fact, stated that its usefulness exceeded their expectations.The location of the seminar at Atlanta University, in Georgia was described by one of the participants as “perfect” in light of the themes which were to be discussed. The university and the city provided both an appropriate environment and relevant resources for the faculty who attended.The Atlanta University complex has a rich history of contributions to the black community and possesses a repository of special collections concerning black history and the quest for equality.

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