Edited by Azizi Powell
This pancocojams post presents an excerpt of an online page from a santiago.fandom.com wikipedia page about Louisiana Creole people.
No author or publishing date is given for this page. I retrieved this excerpt on March 7, 2023
The content of this post is presented for historical, socio-cultural, and educational purposes.
All copyrights remains their owners.
Thanks to all who are quoted in this post and thanks to santiago.famdom.com for publishing this page.
-snip-
Click https://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2023/03/the-blue-vein-society-brown-paper-bag.html for a closely related pancocojams post entitled "The Blue Vein Society & The Brown Paper Bag Test: For Light Skinned People Only (YouTube video & comments)".
****
Here's a quote about those terms from https://abcnews.go.com/2020/GiveMeABreak/story?id=548303&page=1 Skin-Deep Discrimination, ABC News, March 4, 2005
."Historians say the friction between blacks of different
shades began during slavery because light-skinned blacks, often the children of
slaves and their white masters, got better treatment.
Lighter skin "began to be associated with privilege and it became associated with beauty," said Marita Golden, author of "Don't Play in the Sun: One Woman's Journey Through the Color Complex."
After slavery, skin color continued to divide blacks. Light-skinned blacks formed exclusive clubs, Golden said.
"These groups of people were called Blue Vein societies, because in order to quote "belong," the test of how light you were was could you see your blue veins through your skin? And if they could, you were in," she said.
Some had to pass the "paper bag test" to get into some churches, fraternities and nightclubs. "The paper bag would be held against your skin. And if you were darker than the paper bag, you weren't admitted," Golden said."...
****
PAGE EXCERPT: LOUISIANA CREOLE PEOPLE
From https://santiago.fandom.com/wiki/Louisiana_Creole_people
"Louisiana Creoles are people descended from the inhabitants
of colonial Louisiana before it became a part of the U.S. during the period of
both French and Spanish rule. As an ethnic group, their ancestry is mainly of
African, French, Spanish and/or Native American origin. German, Irish, and Italian immigrants also
married into these groups. Louisiana Creoles share cultural ties such as the
traditional use of the French, Spanish, and Louisiana Creole languages and
predominant practice of Catholicism.[2]
The term Créole was originally used by French settlers to distinguish people born in Louisiana from those born elsewhere, thus drawing a distinction between Europeans (such as the French and Spanish) and Africans born in the Old World from their Creole descendants native to the New World.[2][3][4] The word is not a racial label, and people of fully European descent, fully African descent, or of any mixture therein (including Native American admixture) may be Creole.
People of any race can and have identified as Creoles, and it is a misconception that créolité—the quality of being Creole—implies mixed racial origins. In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, the free people of color in Louisiana became increasingly associated with the term Creole and further identification with mixed race took place during the interwar period in the 20th century. One historian has described this period as the "Americanization of Creoles," including an acceptance of the American binary racial system that divided Creoles into those who identified as mostly white and others as mostly black. (See Creoles of color.)
Créole was used casually as an identity in the 18th century in Louisiana. Starting in the very early 19th century in Louisiana, after the United States acquired this territory in the Louisiana Purchase, the term "Creole" began to take on a more political meaning and identity, especially for those people of Latinate culture. These generally Catholic French speakers had a culture that contrasted with the Protestant English-speaking and Anglo culture of the new American settlers from the Upper South and the North.
In the early 19th century, amid the Haitian Revolution, thousands of refugees, both Europeans and free Africans from Saint-Domingue (affranchis or gens de couleur libres), arrived in New Orleans, often bringing enslaved Africans with them. So many refugees arrived that the city's population doubled. As more refugees were allowed in Louisiana, Haitian émigrés who had first gone to Cuba also arrived. These groups had strong influences on the city and its culture. Half of the white émigrė population of Haiti settled in Louisiana, especially in the greater New Orleans area. Later 19th-century immigrants to New Orleans, such as Irish, Germans and Italians, also married into the Creole groups. Most of the new immigrants were also Catholic.
There was also a sizable German Creole group of full German descent, centering on the parishes of St. Charles and St. John the Baptist. (It is for these settlers that the Côte des Allemands, literally "The German Coast", is named.) Over time, many of these groups assimilated, in part or completely, into the dominant francophone Creole culture, often adopting the French language and customs. Creoles of African descent exerted a strong influence on Louisianian culture (and vice versa), affecting local music, cuisine, and religious practices.
Although Cajuns are often presented in the twenty-first century as a group distinct from the Creoles, many historical accounts exist wherein people with Acadian surnames either self-identify or are identified by others as being Creole, and some nineteenth century sources make specific references to "Acadian Creoles". As people born in colonial Louisiana, people of Acadian ancestry could and can be referred to as Creole, and until the early-mid twentieth century Cajuns were considered a subcategory of Louisiana Creole rather than a wholly separate group. Today, however, some Louisianians who identify as Cajun reject association as Creole, while others may embrace both identities.
Creoles of French descent, including those of Québécois or Acadian lineage, have historically made up the majority of white Creoles in Louisiana. Louisiana Creoles are mostly Catholic in religion. Throughout the 19th century, most Creoles spoke French and were strongly connected to French colonial culture.[5] The sizeable Spanish Creole communities of Saint Bernard Parish and Galveztown spoke Spanish. The Malagueños of New Iberia spoke Spanish as well. The Isleños and Malagueños were Louisiana-born whites of Creole heritage. (Since the mid-20th century, however, the number of Spanish-speaking Creoles has declined in favor of English speakers, and few people under 80 years old speak Spanish.) They have maintained cultural traditions from the Canary Islands, from where their immigrant ancestors came.[1] The different varieties of Louisiana's Creoles shaped the state's culture, particularly in the southern areas around New Orleans and the plantation districts. Louisiana is known as the Creole State.[5]
While the sophisticated Creole society of New Orleans has historically received much attention, the Cane River area in northwest Louisiana, populated chiefly by Creoles of color, also developed its own strong Creole culture. Other enclaves of Creole culture have been located in south and southwest Louisiana: Frilot Cove, Bois Mallet, Grand Marais, Palmetto, Lawtell, Soileau and others. These communities have had a long history of cultural independence.
New Orleans also has had a significant historical population of Creoles of color as well, a group that was mostly free people of color, of mixed European, African, and Native American descent. Most of these Creoles of Color have since assimilated into Black Culture through a shared history of slavery in the United States, while some have chosen to remain a separate yet inclusive subsection of the African American ethnic group.[6][7][8] Another area where many Creoles can be found is within the River Parishes: St. Charles, St. John, and St. James. However, most Creoles are found in the greater New Orleans region or in Acadiana.
HISTORY
[...]
The French colony [of Louisiana] was ceded to Spain in the secret Treaty of
Fontainebleau (1762), in the final stages of the Seven Years' War, which took
place on two continents. The Spanish were slow and reluctant to fully occupy
the colony, however, and did not do so until 1769. That year Spain abolished
Native American slavery. In addition, Spanish liberal manumission policies
contributed to the growth of the population of Creoles of Color, particularly
in New Orleans.
[…]
The mixed-race Creole descendants, who developed as a third
class of Creoles of color (Gens de Couleur Libres), particularly in New
Orleans, were strongly influenced by the French Catholic culture. By the end of
the 18th century, many mixed-race Creoles had gained education and tended to
work in artisan or skilled trades; a relatively high number were property and
slave owners. The Louisiana Creole language developed primarily from the
influence of French and African languages, enabling slaves from different
tribes and colonists to communicate.
2nd French period and Louisiana Purchase
Spain ceded Louisiana back to France in 1800 through the
Third Treaty of San Ildefonso. Napoleon sold Louisiana (New France) to the
United States in the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, following defeat of his forces
in Saint-Domingue. He had been trying to regain control of the island colony
following a multi-year slave rebellion.
Thousands of refugees from the revolution, both whites and affranchis or Gens de Couleur Libres, arrived in New Orleans, often bringing their African slaves with them. These groups had a strong influence on the city, increasing the number of French speakers, Africans with strong traditional customs, and Creoles of Color. The Haitian Revolution ended in the slaves gaining independence in 1804, establishing the second republic in the Western Hemisphere and the first republic led by black people. While Governor Claiborne and other officials wanted to keep out additional free black men, the French Creoles wanted to increase the French-speaking population. As more refugees were allowed in Louisiana, Haitian émigrés who had first gone to Cuba also arrived.[12] Many of the white Francophones had been deported by officials in Cuba in retaliation for Bonapartist schemes in Spain.[13] After the Purchase, many Americans were also migrating to Louisiana. Later European immigrants included Irish, Germans, and Italians.
During the antebellum years, the major commodity crops were sugar and cotton, cultivated on large plantations along the Mississippi River outside the city with slave labor. Plantations were developed in the French style, with narrow waterfronts for access on the river, and long plots running back inland.
Nearly 90 percent of early 19th century immigrants to the territory settled in New Orleans. The 1809 migration from Cuba brought 2,731 whites; 3,102 Gens de Couleur Libres; and 3,226 enslaved people of African descent, which in total doubled the city's population. The city became 63 percent black in population, a greater proportion than Charleston, South Carolina's 53 percent.[12]
The transfer of the French colony to the United States and
the arrival of Anglo-Americans from New England and the South resulted in a
cultural confrontation. Some Americans were reportedly shocked by aspects of
the culture and French-speaking society of the newly acquired territory: the
predominance of the French language and Roman Catholicism, the free class of
mixed-race people, and the strong African traditions of enslaved peoples. They
pressured the United States' first governor of the Louisiana Territory, W.C.C.
Claiborne, to change it.
Particularly in the slave society of the South, slavery had become a racial caste. Since the late 17th century, children in the colonies took the status of their mothers at birth; therefore, all children of enslaved mothers were born into slavery, regardless of the race or status of their fathers. This produced many mixed-race slaves over the generations. Whites classified society into whites and blacks (the latter associated strongly with slaves). Although there was a growing population of free people of color, particularly in the Upper South, they generally did not have the same rights and freedoms as Creoles of Color in Louisiana under French and Spanish rule, who held office in some cases and served in the militia.
[…]
Ethnic blend and race
Colonists referred to themselves and enslaved Black people
who were native-born as Creoles to distinguish them from new arrivals from
France and Spain as well as Africa.[2] Native Americans, such as the Creek
people, intermixed with Creoles also, making three races present in the ethnic
group.
Like "Cajun," the term "Creole" is a popular name used to describe cultures in the southern Louisiana area. "Creole" can be roughly defined as "native to a region," but its precise meaning varies according to the geographic area in which it is used. Generally, however, Creoles felt the need to distinguish themselves from the influx of American and European immigrants coming into the area after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. "Creole" is still used to describe the heritage and customs of the various people who settled Louisiana during the early French colonial times. In addition to the French Canadians, the amalgamated Creole culture in southern Louisiana includes influences from the Chitimacha, Houma and other native tribes, enslaved West Africans, Spanish-speaking Isleños (Canary Islanders) and French-speaking gens de couleur libres from the Caribbean.[16]
As a group, mixed-race Creoles rapidly began to acquire education, skills (many in New Orleans worked as craftsmen and artisans), businesses and property. They were overwhelmingly Catholic, spoke Colonial French (although some also spoke Louisiana Creole), and kept up many French social customs, modified by other parts of their ancestry and Louisiana culture. The Creoles of Color often married among themselves to maintain their class and social culture. The French-speaking mixed-race population came to be called "Creoles of color". It was said that "New Orleans people of color were far wealthier, more secure and more established than freed unmixed Black Creoles and Cajuns elsewhere in Louisiana."[4]
Under the French and Spanish rulers, Louisiana developed a three-tiered society, similar to that of Haiti, Cuba, Brazil, Saint Lucia, Martinique, Guadeloupe and other Latin colonies. This three-tiered society included white Creoles; a prosperous, educated group of mixed-race Creoles of European, African and Native American descent; and the far larger class of African and Black Creole slaves. The status of mixed-race Creoles of color (Gens de Couleur Libres) was one they guarded carefully. By law they enjoyed most of the same rights and privileges as white Creoles. They could and often did challenge the law in court and won cases against white Creoles. They were property owners and created schools for their children. In many cases though, these different tiers viewed themselves as one group, as other Iberoamerican and Francophone ethnic groups commonly did. Race did not play as central a role as it does in Anglo-American culture: oftentimes, race was not a concern, but instead, family standing and wealth were key distinguishing factors in New Orleans and beyond.[2]
[…]
After the United States acquired the area in the Louisiana
Purchase, mixed-race Creoles of Color resisted American attempts to impose
their binary racial culture. In the American South slavery had become virtually
a racial caste, in which most people of any African descent were considered to
be lower in status. The planter society viewed it as a binary culture, with
whites and blacks (the latter including everyone other than whites, although
for some years they counted mulattos separately on censuses).[2]
In 1799, Greek immigrant Andrea Dimitry married Marianne Céleste Dragon, a woman of African, French, and Greek ancestry. Andrea Dimitry's children were upper-class, elite Creoles. They were mostly educated at Georgetown University. Their son Alexander Dimitry was the first person of color to represent the United States as Ambassador to Costa Rica and Nicaragua.[18][19][20]
While the American Civil War promised rights and opportunities for the enslaved, many Creoles of Color who had long been free before the war worried about losing their identity and position. The Americans did not legally recognize a three-tiered society; nevertheless, some Creoles of Color such as Thomy Lafon, Victor Séjour and others, used their position to support the abolitionist cause.[21] One Creole of Color, Francis E. Dumas, emancipated all of his slaves and organized them into a company in the Second Regiment of the Louisiana Native Guards.[22] Alexander Dimitry was one of the few people of color to take on a leadership role within the Confederate Government. His son, John Dimitry, fought for the color company of the Crescent City Native Guards.
Following the Union victory in the Civil War, the Louisiana three-tiered society was gradually overrun by more Anglo-Americans, who classified everyone by the South's binary division of "black" and "white". During the Reconstruction era, Democrats regained power in the Louisiana state legislature by using paramilitary groups like the White League to suppress black voting. The Democrats enforced white supremacy by passing Jim Crow laws and a constitution near the turn of the 20th century that effectively disenfranchised most blacks and Creoles of color through discriminatory application of voter registration and electoral laws. Some white Creoles, such as the ex-Confederate general Pierre G. T. Beauregard, advocated against racism, and became proponents of Black Civil Rights and Black suffrage, involving themselves in the creation of the Louisiana Unification Movement that called for equal rights for blacks, denounced discrimination and the abandonment of segregation.[23][24]
The US Supreme Court ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 supported the binary society and the policy of "separate but equal" facilities (which were seldom achieved in fact) in the segregated South.[2] Some white Creoles, heavily influenced by white American society, increasingly claimed that the term Creole applied to whites only.
[…]
Sybil Kein suggests that, because of the white Creoles
struggle for redefinition, they were particularly hostile to the exploration by
the writer George Washington Cable of the multi-racial Creole society in his
stories and novels. She believes that in The Grandissimes, he exposed white
Creoles' preoccupation with covering up blood connections with Creoles of
Color. She writes:
In the 1930s, populist Governor Huey Long satirized such Creole claims, saying that you could feed all the "pure white" people in New Orleans with a cup of beans and a half a cup of rice, and still have food left over![26] The effort to impose Anglo-American binary racial classification on Creoles continued, however. In 1938, in Sunseri v. Cassagne—the Louisiana Supreme Court proclaimed traceability of African ancestry to be the only requirement for definition of colored. And during her time as Registrar of the Bureau of Vital Statistics for the City of New Orleans (1949–1965), Naomi Drake tried to impose these binary racial classifications. She unilaterally changed records to classify mixed-race individuals as black if she found they had any black (or African) ancestry, an application of hypodescent rules, and did not notify people of her actions.[27]
Among the practices Drake directed was having her workers check obituaries. They were to assess whether the obituary of a person identified as white provided clues that might help show the individual was "really" black, such as having black relatives, services at a traditionally black funeral home, or burial at a traditionally black cemetery—evidence which she would use to ensure the death certificate classified the person as black.[28] Not everyone accepted Drake's actions, and people filed thousands of cases against the office to have racial classifications changed and to protest her withholding legal documents of vital records. This caused much embarrassment and disruption, finally causing the city to fire her in 1965.[29]
In the wake of the "Cajun Renaissance" of the
1960s and 1970s, the (often racialized) Creole identity has traditionally
received less attention than its Cajun counterpart. However, the late 2010s
have seen a minor but notable resurgence of the Creole identity among
linguistic activists of all races,[30] including among white people whose
parents or grandparents identify as Cajun or simply French.[31][32]
Contemporary French-language media in Louisiana, such as Télé-Louisiane or Le
Bourdon de la Louisiane, often use the term Créole in its original and most
inclusive sense (i.e. without reference to race), and some English-language
organizations like the Historic New Orleans Collection have published articles
questioning the racialized Cajun-Creole dichotomy of the mid-twentieth
century.[33] Documentaries such as Nathan Rabalais' Finding Cajun examine the
intersection and impact of Creole culture on what is commonly described as
Cajun,[34] likewise questioning the validity of recent racialization."
-snip-
This santiago.fandom.com page continues with these sections about Louisiana Creoles: Culture, Language, New Orleans Mardi Gras, and Creole Places.
The section on Creole Places include surnames that are found in those particular places (such
as surnames associated with Cane River Creoles.)
Santiago.fandom.com also has this page on notable Louisiana Creole people: https://santiago.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Louisiana_Creoles
That page indicates that "To be included in this list, the person must have a Wikipedia
article showing they are Louisiana Creoles or must have references showing they
are Louisiana Creoles and are notable."
That list is divided into the following sections:
1.1 Arts,
culture, and entertainment
1.2 Business
1.3 Education
1.4 Journalism
1.5 Law and
politics
1.6 Literature
1.7 Military
1.8 Religion
1.9 Science
and technology
1.10 Sports
1.11 Other
****
Thanks for visiting pancocojams.
Visitor comments are welcome.
No comments:
Post a Comment