Creoles of Color in the Bayou Country - Paperback

by Carl a. Brasseaux (Author), Claude F. Oubre (With), Keith P. Fontenot (With)

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.

Front Jacket

The first serious historical examination of a distinctive multiracial society of Louisiana

Author Biography

Carl A. Brasseaux, former director of the Center for Louisiana Studies and a Louisiana Writer of the Year, has spent a lifetime studying the peoples and cultures of the Louisiana coastal plain. He is author or coauthor of more than forty books including Asian-Cajun Fusion: Shrimp from the Bay to the Bayou; Ain't There No More: Louisiana's Disappearing Coastal Plain; Acadian to Cajun: Transformation of a People, 1803-1877; and Creoles of Color in the Bayou Country, all published by University Press of Mississippi. Claude F. Oubre (1937-2011) was a professor of history and political science at Louisiana State University at Eunice. Keith P. Fontenot is an archivist at St. Landry Parish Clerk of Courts, 27th Judicial District, Opelousas, Louisiana.