Making Race in the Courtroom: The Legal Construction of Three Races in Early New Orleans

No American city’s history better illustrates both the
possibilities for alternative racial models and the role of the law in shaping
racial identity than New Orleans, Louisiana, which prior to the Civil War was
home to America’s most privileged community of people of African descent. In
the eyes of the law, New Orleans’s free people of color did not belong to the
same race as enslaved Africans and African-Americans. While slaves were
“negroes,” free people of color were gens
de couleur libre, cre...