Les Gens De Couleur Libres, The Free People of Color in New Orleans

Saint John the Baptist Parish, Louisiana was established by a group of Germans on March 31, 1807. The parish was named after Saint John the Baptist and is also called the heart of the River Parishes and the German Coast. The settling and intermingling of the French and Spanish emigrants caused the culture and demographics of the parish to diversify by creating new ethnicities such as Creoles and Acadians. St. John the Baptist Parish (St. John Parish) is the fifth smallest parish in Louisiana and one of the 19 original parishes which made up the Territory of Orleans which later became the state of Louisiana. St. John Parish is bisected by the Mississippi River which separates the parish into a northern (East St. John Parish) and southern part (West St. John Parish). The parish John is also approximately 130 miles north of the Gulf of Mexico and 30 miles north of the city of New Orleans, Louisiana. St. John parish has been known as a river region due to its extraction and exportation of biotic and potential resources. The parish’s primary source of income is generated through the processing of petroleum, natural gas and sulfur. Due to the parish’s mild climate the farming (sugar cane, feed

The vision was to have a colony on the Mississippi River that was a gateway to open and expand trade with the new world. On May 7, 1718, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville and the French Mississippi Company officially founded Nouvelle-Orleans. Bienville would later become governor of the Louisiana colony three different times between the years 1702 and 1743. The city was named after Duke Philippe d'Orléans, who was France's head of state at the time (Briney).

Black people lost their freedom as oppression began, their identity was lost. Their traditions and love for nature were nowhere to be found as they forgot their languages, origin, and cultures. Their destiny was in the hands of their masters even their future generations for they surrendered into slavery.

African American’s, after the Civil War and abolishment of slavery, still found themselves in a racist and oppressive society. Though legally free, lots were still engaged in forced labor. Threatened with back lash by their so called “masters” they were trying to find their way as free people. Trying to find some sort of or create better reality in a vile society of people who still believed African American’s were only fit to be slaves. The onslaught of World War I gave African American’s an opportunity to leave the vile societies of the south.

Once free they had a realization that they could do anything. This appeared in the stories, essays and poems they wrote. They were opened up to a world that held so many possibilities. The world was theirs and because they didn’t have it for so long. African Americans lived oppressed and without any rights. When they were freed it opened up so many possibilities. Emily Dickinson talked about how we can’t understand something until it is no longer with us. African Americans were trapped for all their lives and once released they had ambition. Their ambition sent them to work and continue to advance in the world. The problem for the white people is they didn’t have this ambition. They had never had been without rights, so they couldn’t understand. African Americans worked until they surpassed the white’s so no white could ever put them in captivity again. They were humans and were equal and nothing could change that.

New Orleans was founded in 1718 by Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville. Forty-five years later, in 1763, France signed treaties ceding Louisiana to Spain to whom it remained for the next forty years. Due to Mexican, Cuban and Spanish influence, the race rules in New Orleans were more liberal, allowing for a class of free people of color. In 1803 Louisiana was sold back to the French, who then twenty days later sold it to the United States in the Louisiana Purchase. New Orleans had become the largest city in the Confederacy by the start of the Civil War in 1861.

They were free from slavery and had new opportunity, but were often met with limited ability to pursue those opportunities as well as being met with outright resentment and violence from the white population in the form of gangs like the Ku Klux Klan. However, despite all the violence and resistance they faced the freepeoples had a significant interest in how Reconstruction policies affected them as now they had the ability to marry legally, which created legitimacy for children and access to land titles. (Nash, et al., 2007., p. 471) The creation of the Freedman’s Bureau was also another policy that attempted to benefit them, but it’s resources being stretched too thin and too often turned disadvantageous for them in terms of contracts giving rise to sharecropping and tenant farming. (Nash, et al., 2007., pp.

The mulatto elite separated themselves from the black masses by assimilating the morals and manners of the slaveholding aristocracy. They acquired as a part of their family traditions the patterns of behavior which were associated with the idea of the southern lady and southern gentleman. As a rule, these families formed a closed circle from which were excluded all who could not boast of similar ancestry and did not conform to the same standards of morals and manners. They were self-conscious of their “culture” which consisted of the enjoyment of English and, in Louisiana, French classical literature music. They maintained literary societies in which they could enjoy and foster their “culture.” The patterns found in rural as compared to urban black communities changed. The folk tradition of the

The South was a complete mess after the Civil War. The early part of the 20th century brought many changes for African Americans. There was a difficult challenge of helping newly free African American slaves assimilate among their white counterparts. They suffered from crop failures, economic hardships, and the early failures of Reconstruction in the south. So as result many Southern African Americans migrated to northern cities in search of employment and a chance at a better life. However, Southern African Americans migrating to northern cities quickly discovered that they were not able to enjoy the same social and economic mobility experienced by their European immigrant counterparts arriving around the same time. There were many

The life of African Americans in the 1800 was so harsh and unfair. Their owners would treat them cruelly and made them work long hours. They were not fed and had no sanitation which led to malnutrition and disease. Many young girls also went through sexual abuse and owners wouldn’t even get prosecuted because they were the ones who ruled everything. They separated many families from husbands, wife’s, and children. Those who were not prepared suffered every day because they were not with their families. Many of them never saw their family again.

on July 14, 1803. The total cost of the whole Louisiana Purchase was about fifteen

 African Americans had a rough life during the revolution. Mary Postill is a prime example of the hardships that an African American slave had to go through. After she fled to Charleston, the military gave her a certificate of freedom. At the time, the military was controlled by the British. A loyalist who claimed freed blacks wrongly then took control of Mary and her family and made them his slaves so they could no longer be free. Gray brought Mary to court when she attempted to flee. She swore that she was free, but Gray, being that he was an esteemed white man, won the case. He then sold Mary and her family down the river for a hundred bushels of potatoes. This was her punishment for trying to escape him. The owners of slaves usually made their workers do the most tedious and tiresome work such as helping with the rice production. They were not well fed and they were not given enough supplies to make their own clothing. The slaves were also physically and mentally abused. Carol Berkin states in chapter 8 of

This paper discusses the experiences of African American Women under slavery during the Slave Trade, their exploitation, the secrecy, the variety of tasks and positions of slave women, slave and ex-slave narratives, and significant contributions to history. Also, this paper presents the hardships African American women faced and the challenges they overcame to become equal with men in today’s society. Slavery was a destructive experience for African Americans especially women. Black women suffered doubly during the slave era.

The French Quarter was founded in 1718 as a 70 squared military-style grid. Its founder, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, who was a French Canadian naval officer, got together with two other French engineers to design the city’s street plan. His plan was to construct a central square that was surrounded by a 6x9 city block grid. At the center, a church, a rectory and a prison were constructed. The French Quarter still maintains historical buildings, such as the Church of St. Louis and the Ursuline Convent. It has incorporated a style of urbanism for four centuries, which became a part of the city during the Civil War and Reconstruction. In 1803, the Louisiana Purchase transferred the colony to the U.S. beginning an era of prosperity. The victory of

The African Americans were given their own freedom as well after being free from Britain. The diversity had become denser and so trade had flourished, and America had become more social. In Document F, it would state, "In 1790, the first U.S. census counted 13,059 free blacks in New England, with another 13,975 in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Strictly speaking, none of them was "free," for their lives were proscribed politically, economically, and socially. While white indentured servants often became respected members of their communities after their indentures ended, free blacks in the North rarely had the opportunity to rise above the level of common laborers and washerwomen, and as early as 1760 they had formed ghettoes in the grimy alleys and waterfront districts of Boston and other Northern towns" This would show how the indentured servants became members of the community and had not been looked down from the rest of the other people. And how America was the land of the free and was not discriminating other people based on their race or ethnicity.  To sum up, the people of races were not judged and were accepted by the