Separate cultural milieux and spaces should have worked to avoid cultural clashes. But after 1803, American administrators and state legislators showed great interest in circumscribing the growth and legal rights of free people of color and slaves in Louisiana. The largest number of free people of color (called gens de couleur libres in Louisiana French) resided in New Orleans and was Creole. Most slaves in Louisiana on the eve of the purchase of 1803 were Louisiana Creoles or from various nations in Africa. In 1857, the Louisiana House of Representatives considered a bill preventing emancipation of slaves except when they had saved the life of their master. Julien T. Hawkins, an American representing St. Martin Parish, proposed an amendment to this bill, which called for freed slaves to be expelled from the state. That year, the New Orleans-based American paper, the Daily Picayune, encouraged legislators to prohibit manumission altogether in Louisiana. That decade, New Orleans civil ordinances, and state laws, required that all free people of color register with the New Orleans Mayor’s Office, with proof of their freedom. New Antebellum laws enforced “insulting whites” ordinances, and free people of color had to carry proof of their freedom on their person at all times. The new legal attitude concerning slaves and free people of color introduced by American policymakers and legislators had serious and immediate results. At 11pm in New Orleans on 26 July 1850, Lieutenant C. Petric of the 2^nd Municipality arrested William Johnson. Petric argued that Johnson was a slave and slave laws indicated that slaves not be out at night after 8pm. Johnson stated that he was free and sued for damages. The 3^rd District Court found in favor of Johnson and awarded him $1 in damages as opposed to the $100 he requested. The new legal attitude in Louisiana towards free people of color was immediate enough that hundreds of Creole free people of color left the state for France, Mexico, Haiti, and Puerto Rico, where they could live protected by laws similar to those they had known before 1812.¹For the origins of slaves in French, Spanish, and early territorial and national Louisiana, see Gwendolyn Midlo Hall’s slave database here. Judith Kelleher Schafer, Becoming Free, Remaining Free: Manumission and Enslavement in New Orleans, 1846-1862 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003), 87, 89; Schafer, Slavery, the Civil Law, and the Supreme Court of Louisiana (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997); Gary B. Mills and Elizabeth Shown Mills, The Forgotten People: Cane River’s Creoles of Color (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013), 216-46; Domínguez, White By Definition, 21-149. For information on the outmigration of Louisiana Creoles to Mexico, see Sidney J. Lemelle, “‘The Circum-Caribbean’ and the Continuity of Cultures: the Donato Colony in Mexico, 1830-1860,” Journal of Pan-African Studies 6, no. 1 (July, 2013): 57-75; Mary Gehman, “The Mexico-Louisiana Creole Connection,” Louisiana Cultural Vistas (Winter 2002).

The Roman Catholic Church in New Orleans initially supported Creole identity and integrated churches, but this also came under American pressure in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. In 1866 and again in 1884, Catholic clergymen from throughout the United States attending the 2^nd and 3^rd Plenary Councils in Baltimore convened to deliberate on racially separate Catholic churches. During the 1866 meeting, New Orleans Archbishop Jean-Marie Odin, a Frenchman, and his assistant, Napoléon Joseph Perché, showed disinterest in the idea of separate facilities for nonwhite Catholics under their jurisdiction. In 1884, however, the 3^rd Plenary Council issued a decree for separate facilities for nonwhite Catholics. Louisiana Catholic leaders once again disapproved. “Distinct and separate churches are not advisable,” wrote the Louisiana Archdiocesan Chancellor (Rev. L.A. Chassé) in 1888. “Experience has taught me that the colored people prefer to come to mass and to the sacraments with their white brethren as it is done now in all the churches where French language is spoken.” In the early days of his tenure, Archbishop Joseph Janssens of New Orleans warned the Commission for Catholic Missions Among the Colored People and Indians that: “Our colored Catholics, Creole colored, as they are called, are in language, manners and ways of thinking quite different from the colored people elsewhere.” ²Slawson, “Segregated Catholicism,” 147-48; James B. Bennett, Religion and the Rise of Jim Crow in New Orleans (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 146-47; American Missionary Association, The American Missionary, Volumes 59-60 (Charleston, SC: Nabu Press, 2012), 143; Dolores Egger Labbé, Jim Crow Comes to Church: The Establishment of Segregated Catholic Parishes in South Louisiana (New York: Arno Press, 1978), 18-19; John T. Gillard, Colored Catholics of the United States (Baltimore: Josephite Press, 1941), 122; Landry, “A Creole Melting Pot,” 10-11, 38.

Archbishop Janssens, a Dutchman intimately familiar with race relations in the US South, eventually gave in to the idea of “experimenting” with segregated Catholic churches in New Orleans. But his decision lay in the growth of black evangelical Protestantism in New Orleans, which began encouraging Creoles to apostacize. “[It was] the poor darkey,” Janssens wrote to Katherine Drexel in 1894, “that is led astray from the [Catholic] Church to the Baptist and Methodist shouting houses.” Through council from the Archbishop of Cincinnati, William Henry Elder, Janssens determined to give nonwhite Catholics under his care the option to attend a Catholic church established expressly for their spiritual welfare. Katherine Drexel, foundress of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, warmly welcomed the idea and pledged $3,000 for the establishment of the parish. In 1893, Janssens determined to place the new segregated church parish in the American municipality, where Americans of color were “more amenable to segregation.” The church was named St. Katherine’s in honor of Katherine Drexel, and Vincentians, a Catholic order of priests, agreed to staff the church.³Association, The American Missionary, 143; Slawson, “Segregated Catholicism,” 12-13; Landry, “A Creole Melting Pot,” 49, 58.

New Orleans Creoles reacted in horror. “They look with disfavor on separate churches, imagining that we wish to draw the line of white and colored upon them,” Janssens reported to the Commission for Catholic Missions among the Colored People and Indians. He noted in a letter to Katherine Drexel that “some few hightuned colored mulatto persons are stirring up strife against a colored church in the city.” He was referring to the Comité des Citoyens, a Creole organization based in New Orleans, whose express goal was to fight for integration rather than segregation. It had been the origin of the Plessy v. Ferguson case, testing the constitutionality of racially separate train car accommodations for nonwhites. The Comité sent a subcommittee to meet Janssens in protest of the new “Jim Crow” church, which they found to be “an insult to their race, uncatholic and unchristian.” The organization reported the meeting in its official organ, the Daily Crusader, that when the time came, they would “call on the Catholics and all the people to protest against the un-Christian, un-Catholic institution-the Jim Crow church.” The Baton Rouge Republic reported that nonwhite Catholics would rather “leave the [Catholic] church rather than to submit to what they deem an indignity” and which they ridiculed as “the Church of St. Jim Crow.” Janssens whined that “the mulatto would believe himself contaminated to go to such places. We must reclaim the poor dark negro & lead him back to the church.” But he decided to continue with the plan, with the expectation that “regular negroes,” that is Americans, favored the new church and would attend. And that they did.⁴Gillard, Colored Catholics, 122; Annemarie Kasteel, Francis Janssens, 1843-1897: A Dutch-American Prelate (Lafayette, LA: Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Southwest Louisiana, 1992), 303; Slawson, “Segregated Catholicism,” 155, 163-64.

The Sisters of the Holy Family (SSF), a Catholic order of nuns founded by Venerable Henriette Délille, a New Orleans Creole, had proven crucial to continued Roman Catholicism among New Orleans’s Creoles “of color.” But they too found themselves accommodating Americanism by 1900. In 1894, the order came under the direction of an African American nun from Maryland named Mother Mary Austin. Sister Mary Bernard Deggs described Austin as the “only American superior who has ever governed our dear little community since its founding.” Creole SSF sisters “recognized that their French Creole culture was becoming extinct” as the culture of the order shifted from Creole to American in language and attitude. From Mother Austin’s tenure onwards, the order’s operational language shifted to English in the mother house in New Orleans as well as in the schools the order operated, like Holy Rosary Institute in Lafayette, Louisiana. French would not resurface again until the 1950s–as a foreign language–for students for whom French and Kouri-Vini served as their first and only language at Holy Rosary. Historians like Shirley Elizabeth Thompson have every reason to conclude that Creoles felt like exiles in their own communities. They did not go to America; America came to them and forcefully impressed American traditions, culture, and law onto the long established Creoles. Their French and Kouri-Vini languages, integrationism and mixed marriages, Roman Catholicism, and traditions and other culture faced immediate transformation and it led Creoles to recoil in anger and distrust Americans (especially African Americans), leading to even more parochialism, endogamy, and clannishness than ever before. Whitened and colored Creoles came to resent Americans equally. This is the historical context of Yaba Blay’s anxieties over créolité.⁵Sister Mary Bernard Deggs, No Cross, No Crown: Black Nuns in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans, ed. Virginia Meacham Gould and Charles E. Nolan (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2001), 184-186; James B. Bennett, Religion and the Rise of Jim Crow in New Orleans (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 154-155; Edward T. Brett, The New Orleans Sisters of the Holy Family: African American Missionaries to the Garifuna of Belize (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), 217; Don J. Hernandez, “The History of Holy Rosary Institute,” Ph.D. diss., Louisiana State University, 2010, 69; Barthé, “Becoming American,” 213; Thompson, Exiles at Home.

See page 4 below the citations that follow.