The Free People of Color of New Orleans

This ground breaking book, first published in 1994, presents in brief and readable form the history of a unique sub-group of people of African descent in the U.S., the free people of color in Louisiana. The French called them les gens de couleur libre, and they identified as Creoles along with their French and Spanish neighbors. After the Civil War they became Creoles of color,shortened today to simply Creoles.
Theirs was an ambiguous status, sharing the French language, Catholic religion and European education of the elite whites -- who were often blood relatives-- but keeping African and indigenous influences from their early heritage.
Freed in the early years of the Louisiana colony, they had all the rights of a white person, except they could not vote, hold public office or marry white. Succeeding genreations often mixed with French, Spanish, Germans and Italians -- in some cases they were able to pass for white.
The free people of color dominated the building and service trades, had their own schools, newspaper and social organizations. Many wwre wealthy having invested in real estate and the slave trade.
The Civil War affected them in similar ways as it did whites, but they then lost their special status as a middle group neither black nor white and had to identify as "black", becoming leaders during Reconstruction and figuring heavily in civil rights struggles long before Dr. Martin Luther King.
This is their story, rarely mentioned in conventional histories, and often misunderstood today, even by their descendants.