History of Free People of Color in New Orleans

Slavery in the French and Spanish New Orleans was still slavery. But the French and Spanish had been slaveholders in the Caribbean and other parts of the New World far longer than Americans had been. They brought a different approach to the endeavor. The authorities did not outlaw individual owner’s endeavors to educate their slaves or to hire out skilled slave craftsmen, which allowed a measure of autonomy to the slaves provided they returned what they earned to their masters. And there was a large community of free colored whose ancestors had either been given their freedom, bought their freedom or was free through contract via birth from a colored mistress of a white man.  Some were artists, and craftsmen who had been expelled from Haiti after the failed revolution.              

Louisiana was claimed by France in 1682 and the city of New Orleans was founded in 1718. Because it was a Roman Catholic society, the city attracted new immigrants from Ireland and Italy and Canadians of French ancestry who had been thrown out of Nova Scotia by the English. Even during the years of Spanish occupation, the city was still a purely French society and didn’t feel the pressure of change until the territory was invaded by the “Kaintocks”, American frontiersmen who descended on the city of New Orleans selling goods and disrupting society with their demanding ways in 1800. By 1803, the territory had been sold to America.

Slaves were first imported to New Orleans and the rest of the territory in 1727 at the same time the Sisters of Ursuline came to establish a convent to care for orphans, operate a school, free hospital and instruct slaves for baptism. New Orleans “held a uniquely free black community because of the city's French and Spanish heritage, long history of racial mixing, and the property-based power of many of its free black members. These Creole blacks included a significant number of light skinned, wealthy men and women who participated fully in a rich, black cultural life that included literary clubs, opera, churches, and the theater. Free blacks and slaves in New Orleans lived in a world far different from the rest of the urban or rural South, although there was no question about the strict limits the law imposed upon enslaved blacks as property.” (Davis)

Rodolphe Lucien Desdunes' Nos Hommes et Notre Histoire, states, “These Creoles of color with Latin blood, and certain other free blacks, made up a group known collectively as gens de couleur libres. This caste seems to have existed from the first introduction of slaves, and the gens de couleur were a part of the population from the beginning of Louisiana history: they are specifically named in the Black Code issued by Bienville in 1724. The Haitian descendants excelled as musicians, artists, teachers, writers, doctors, and in all major professions. Some amassed considerable fortunes and educated their children in France or in unsegregated schools. They were an integral part of southern Louisiana life and maintained their own social status with rigidity as strong as that found among the whites.” The Free People had a rich society mirroring, but separate from the whites, which included their own shops, schools, hospitals and benevolent societies. Their young men and women were either sent to colleges or finishing schools in the North or to France. They had an active life of social entertainment which includes boxes in the second tier at the Opera, their own Theater and Balls in the winter and spring. Wealthy Free Black families had country homes to escape to in the summer during the mosquito and yellow fever season as did the whites. By the mid 1830’s, the free blacks owned $2.5 million in property in New Orleans. According to FrenchCreoles.com, “Kinship ties to white persons, as well as patronage, gave some free people of color added economic leverage. Some white fathers publicly acknowledged their free black consorts and offspring and donated personal and real property to them.” And, during the period of Spanish occupation of the city of New Orleans, “A society stratified by race and class such as prevailed in Spanish New Orleans primarily operated according to parentela (extended family) and clientela (patron/client) relationships. Advantages accrued to those free blacks who were linked by kin and patronage to leading white families.” So although skilled free blacks tended to only occupy the skilled laborer type of jobs such as shoemaker, carpenter, cabinetmaker, seamstress, they could excel and achieve middle-class wealth with the patronage of kin. The exceptions to full parity with white men were that they could not vote, hold public office or marry a white person. And all free blacks had to carry legal papers documenting their freedom.

The purchase of the Louisiana Territory inflicted American laws of slavery and segregation on New Orleans Society. Where the city affairs had been conducted on a European model, the arrival of the Americans brought distaste for the Creole way of life. New Orleans was invaded and seized by the Union Army early in the Civil War and the occupation created hardships for all, white and black. After the surrender of Lee at Appomattox and the end of slavery, floods of refugees came into the city which included poor whites which created competition for free black businessmen. And competition heightened hostility between poor whites and more well-to-do blacks. This led to the Jim Crow era of restrictions beginning in about 1877. Jim Crow was basically a racial caste system which started as a set of rules but became a way of life when the laws were enacted in 1910. The mindset that justified the institution of slavery in the south now became a legitimization of anti-Black racism, which taught the belief that Blacks were biologically and intellectually inferior to Whites;” that Whites were superior to Blacks in all important ways including intelligence, morality, and civilized behavior: sexual relations between Blacks and Whites would produce a mongrel race which would destroy America.” And that social interaction and any activity that might suggest equality might encourage interracial sexual relations and violence, if necessary, must be used to keep Blacks at the bottom of the hierarchy.

These social rules, according to the Ferris State University Museum of Racist Memorabilia, itemize the Jim Crow Laws:

a. A Black male could not offer his hand (to shake hands) with a White male because it implied being socially equal. Obviously, a Black male could not offer his hand or any other part of his body to a White woman, because he risked being accused of rape.

b. Blacks and Whites were not supposed to eat together. If they did eat together, Whites were to be served first, and some sort of partition was to be place between them.

c. Under no circumstance was a Black male to offer to light the cigarette of a White female—that gesture implied intimacy.

d. Blacks were not allowed to show public affection toward one another in public, especially kissing, because it offended Whites.

e. Jim Crow etiquette prescribed that Blacks were introduced to Whites, never Whites to Blacks. For example: “Mr. Peters (the White person), this is Charlie (the Black Person), that I spoke to you about.”

f. Whites did not use courtesy titles of respect when referring to Blacks, for example, Mr., Mrs., Miss., Sire, or Ma’am. Instead, Blacks were called by their first names. Blacks had to use courtesy titles when referring to Whites, and were not allowed to call them by their first names.

g. If a Black person rode in a car driven by a White person, The Black person sat in the back seat, or the bed of the truck.

h. White motorists had the right-or-way at all intersections.

This was Jim Crow Etiquette; Jim Crow Laws began in 1877 with the election of Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, and Southern and Border States began to restrict the rights of Blacks. Although the 13^th, 14^th and 15^th Amendments to the Constitution guaranteed the same rights of Whites to Blacks, the Federal Supreme Court upheld the Jim Crow laws and discrimination and segregation of Blacks in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case. In 1890, Louisiana passed the “Separate Car Law, which made it illegal for Blacks to sit in seats reserved for Whites, and Whites could not sit in seats reserved for Blacks. Homer Plessy, who was seven-eighth white and one-eighth black, therefore black (according to the “One Drop Rule” which decreed that if you had just one drop of black blood, or one ancestry who was black, you were black), decided to test the law by sitting in a White only railroad coach. He was arrested. His lawyer argued that the state could not label one citizen as White and another black for the purposes of restricting their rights and privileges. The Supreme Court decided that as long as state governments provided legal process and legal freedoms for Blacks equal to Whites, they could maintain separate institutions. The Court by 7-2 upheld the law. Jim Crow signs were place above water fountains, restroom and other public facilities. There were separate schools, hospitals, prisons, cemeteries.

The most effective attack on Jim Crow and was in 1954, 1955 by Thurgood Marshall in Brown v. Board of Education, arguing that segregation was inherently unconstitutional and that it denied an entire race the equal protection guaranteed by 14^th Amendment. Chief Justice Earl Warren and the Court ruled that, “ ‘separate but equal’ “ has not place” in public schools. This struck the death knell of Jim Crow and the beginning of the struggle of equal rights.

Works Cited:

Gateway New Orleans, The Louisiana Purchase and New Orleans-The Crescent City, Web 1994 to 2008. http://www.gatewayno.com/history/history.html

Slavery in America.org, Slavery in America: Historical Overview, By Ronald L. F. Davis, Ph. D. California State University, Northridge, http://www.slaveryinamerica.org/history/hs_es_overview.htm

Desdune, Rodolphe Lucien, Nos Hommes et Notre Histoire, translation 1973, by McCants, Sister Dorothea Olga. Reprinted in African Americans in New Orleans: Les Gens de Couleur Libres http://nutrias.org/~nopl/exhibits/fmc/fmc.htm

Brasseaux, Carl A.; Fontenot, Keith P. and Oubre, Claud F.,  Gens de Couleur Libre, web Frenchcreoles.com Source Creoles of Color in the Bayou Country, http://www.frenchcreoles.com

Les Gens de Couleur Libres: The Free People of color of New Orleans, History. Web source 2002 Hammond, Louisiana. http://www.creolehistory.com/history3.html

Pilgrim, Dr. David, Professor of Sociology, Ferris State University, Sept., 2000, Web site: Jim Crow, Ferris State University Museum of Racist Memorabilia http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/what.htm

Tafari, Tasahai, Jim Crow: A National Struggle, The Supreme Court, Important U.S. Supreme Court cases in the battle for civil rights. Source website: PBS. org http://www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcrow/struggle_court.html