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Gens de couleurs2/24/2023 ![]() ![]() Many worked in professions including “carpentry, cigar making, masonry, shipping, embalming, hairdressing, nursing, and midwifery.” These mixed-race Creole of New Orleans were “famous for their wealth, culture, and education until after 1830” when the American concept of race began to reign. Under the French and Spanish, people with combined African and European ancestry enjoyed many of the privileges white people did. (Within a decade, that dropped to less than a fifth as the immigrant white population came in.) Sumpter notes that the Spanish did distinguish between light and dark skinned people of color Creoles, those born in New Orleans, were also of a higher caste than those born in Africa. All this helped generate a growing population of free people of color-by 1830, they made up nearly a quarter of New Orleans’ population. Spanish officials expanded opportunities for emancipation and accepted mixed race relationships. The Spanish, who ruled from 1763-1800, largely continued French policies. Slaves, meanwhile, could gain freedom in numerous ways-for instance, by defending the colony or teaching a master’s children. The distinction between free and unfree people of color was written into this law, with the free people of color legally equivalent to whites. The French, who controlled the colony from 1682-1763, had a Code Noir that governed relations between Africans and Europeans and regulated emancipation. The first slave ship arrived in Louisiana in 1719. Sumpter writes, a “ tripartite racial structure and racial fluidity” that narrowed and tightened with statehood (1812) and absorption of American definitions of race.įrom the beginning, French and Spanish colonial conceptions of racial categories were much looser than those in the English colonies. ![]() Some of these gens were quite well off a few owned slaves themselves. A large population of free people of color, gens de couleur libres, lived amid enslaved people of color. The city was French and then Spanish before Louisiana became an American territory in 1803. New Orleans is unique among American cities for its complicated colonial and racial history. ![]()
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