Blacks by Fernanda

         

 

Free people of color had professions and were well educated. This video explains the influence of black people in New Orleans. 

Going back in history... 

                                                During the 18th century, Africans came to the city directly from West Africa. The majority passed neither through the West Indies nor the American South. They developed complicated relations with both the Indian and European populations. Their descendants born in the colony were also called Creoles. The Spanish rulers (1765-1802) reached out to the black population for support against the French settlers; in doing so, they allowed many to buy their own freedom. These free black settlers along with Creole slaves formed the earliest black urban settlement in North America. Black American immigrants found them to be quite exotic, for the black Creoles were Catholic, French or Creole speakers, and accustomed to an entirely different lifestyle. Immigrants also augmented the ranks of the city's black population when thousands of Haitians fled to New Orleans from that troubled island's revolutions long before Americans confronted its refugees in the late 20th century.

The native Creole population and the American newcomers resolved some of their conflicts by living in different areas of the city. Eventually, the Americans concentrated their numbers in new uptown (upriver of Canal Street) neighborhoods. For a certain period (1836-1852), they even ran separate municipal governments to avoid severe political, economic and cultural clashes. Evidence of this early cleavage still survives in the city's oldest quarters. A ride on a St. Charles streetcar will take a visitor away from the exotic French Quarter (the original downtown old city or Vieux Carré of the Creoles), initially through a business district more like that of the rest of America, and then through neighborhoods such as the lower and upper Garden Districts that look a little like Charleston or Savannah. Further still, through the University district, neighborhoods emerge filled with Victorian homes once common in American cities. Indeed, one of the city's nicknames, the Crescent City, came from the pattern of its growth along the river, which made a large bend through the delta starting at the original French settlement and moving out to the once separate town of Carrollton. The streetcar, the oldest surviving trolley in the United States, was constructed to connect those two 19th century settlements.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3b/Free_Woman_of_Color_with_daughter_NOLA_Collage.jpg/180px-Free_Woman_of_Color_with_daughter_NOLA_Collage.jpg

Work Cited

"The People and Culture of New Orleans By Arnold R. Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon Department of History, University of New Orleans." The People and Culture of New Orleans. The Official Tourism, 2015. Web. 12 Dec. 2015. <http://www.neworleansonline.com/neworleans/history/people.html>.