Making Race in the Courtroom
Описание книги
No American city’s history better illustrates both thepossibilities for alternative racial models and the role of the law in shapingracial identity than New Orleans, Louisiana, which prior to the Civil War washome to America’s most privileged community of people of African descent. Inthe eyes of the law, New Orleans’s free people of color did not belong to thesame race as enslaved Africans and African-Americans. While slaves were“negroes,” free people of color were gensde couleur libre, creoles of color, or simply creoles. New Orleans’screoles of color remained legally and culturally distinct from “negroes”throughout most of the nineteenth century until state mandated segregationlumped together descendants of slaves with descendants of free people of color. Much of the recent scholarship on NewOrleans examines what race relations in theantebellum period looked as well as why antebellum Louisiana’s gens de couleur enjoyed rights andprivileges denied to free blacks throughout most of the United States. This book, however, is less concerned with the what and why questions than with how peopleof color, acting within institutions of power, shaped those institutions in ways beyondtheir control. As its title suggests, Making Race in the Courtroom argues that race is best understood notas a category, but as a process. It seeks to demonstrate the role offree people of African-descent, interacting within the courts, in this process.
Отрывок из книги
MAKING RACE IN THE COURTROOM
The Legal Construction of Three Races in Early New Orleans
.....
As Robin Blackburn insightfully posited more than twenty years ago, “New World slavery coded ‘black’ skin as a slave characteristic; free people of colour might be led to deny their blackness—or to deny slavery.”37 For the most part, free people of color in early New Orleans did not deny slavery for it would have been economically irrational and politically risky to do so. And while they did not deny their African ancestry, they did, in many respects, seek to distinguish themselves from slaves. By bringing this perspective into the courtroom, free people of color in New Orleans helped to make New Orleans, and indeed most of Louisiana, a three-race society.
Before the Adele decision, however, anxious white officials in New Orleans had mixed feelings and sent mixed messages about the free colored refugees. In 1806, the territorial legislature passed a law creating a presumption of enslavement for all “free people of color from Hispaniola [then] residing” in New Orleans. While the legislature repealed this act less than a year later, it replaced it with a law that prohibited “the emigration of free Negroes and Mulattoes into the Territory of Orleans.” This act imposed a penalty on free colored violators “in the amount of $20 a day for every day past two weeks” that they remained in the territory and stated that “failure to pay such fine will result in commission to jail and [the violator] may be sold for a time sufficient to pay the fine.”37 During the 1809–10 immigration, however, the government in New Orleans appeared powerless to enforce the law. Claiborne first attempted to selectively enforce it against men of color above the age of fifteen, but even this proved unsuccessful. He then resorted to pleading with American diplomats in Jamaica and Cuba for assistance. In separate letters to Maurice Rogers, in St. Iago, and William Savage, in Kingston, he asked the consulates to “discourage free people of color of every description from emigrating to the Territory of Orleans” because New Orleans already had “as much proportion of that population, than comports with the general Interest.”38
.....