The Creoles of Color: The Category America Couldn't File

Before the Civil War, New Orleans contained a class of people the American South's racial system could not quite process.

Free people of color, Creoles of African and European and sometimes Indigenous descent, had existed as a legally recognized social category in Louisiana since the French colonial era. They were not enslaved. They were not white. They attended the opera. They sent their children to French-language schools. They owned property, held professions, and, in cases that are documented in the Louisiana notarial records and in the collections at the Historic New Orleans Collection, owned enslaved people themselves: a fact of the historical record that the community itself later reckoned with in complicated ways.

The Comité des Citoyens, the organization that coordinated Homer Plessy's eighteen ninety-two test case on the East Louisiana Railroad, was composed of these Creoles of color. They were not acting out of a generalized commitment to civil rights for all Black people in the American sense; they were acting, in part, to protect the distinct social status their community had held for a century. They lost. The Supreme Court's decision in Plessy v. Ferguson in eighteen ninety-six, and the subsequent tightening of Louisiana's racial codes through the Jim Crow era, compressed the legally recognized middle category into a single designation: Black. A social identity that had existed for two centuries was officially erased.

What it left behind was a neighborhood, the Treme, and a musical tradition, and a cuisine, and a way of being in the world that New Orleans had developed across the racial categories the American South tried to enforce. The Creoles of color are the most institutionally underserved story in New Orleans cultural history, according to the scholars at the Williams Research Center at Tulane. The records are there. The story is told in fragments, across archives, in the spaces between categories the law kept trying and failing to make rigid.