African Americans in southern Louisiana had been…
1900 CE
During the colonial period, New Orleans had developed three racial groups, as was typical of other French and Latin colonies: white, free persons of color (mixed race or gens de couleur libre), and enslaved black people.
Robert Charles, the tragic central figure in the new Orleans riots of July 1900, is classified as mixed-race (mulatto in the terms of the time) and his ancestors may have been free before the Civil War.
In colonial French society, free people of color had more rights and often gained education, property and more skilled jobs and professions.
After the United States takeover in the Louisiana Purchase, and particularly after Reconstruction, the increasingly numerous whites from United States southern Protestant culture had worked to impose the Southern binary system of classifying everyone as black or white.
Mixed-race people still form a class elite in New Orleans.
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