Creoles of Color in the Bayou Country

Nonfiction, Social & Cultural Studies, Social Science, Cultural Studies, Ethnic Studies

• Author: Carl A. Brasseaux, Claude F. Oubre, Keith P. Fontenot
• ISBN: 9781604736083
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Publication: October 1, 1996
• Imprint: University Press of Mississippi
• Language: English

Creoles of Color are rightfully among the first families of south-western Louisiana. Yet in both antebellum and postbellum periods they remained a people considered apart from the rest of the population. Historians, demographers, sociologists, and anthropologists have given them only scant attention.

This probing book, focused on the mid-eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, is the first to scrutinize this multiracial group through a close study of primary resource materials.

During the antebellum period they were excluded from the state's three-tiered society--white, free people of color, and slaves. Yet Creoles of Color were a dynamic component in the region's economy, for they were self-compelled in efforts to become and integral part of the community.