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African American Experience in Louisiana Historic Context for The The African American Experience in Louisiana Prepared for: State of Louisiana Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism Office of Cultural Development Division of Historic Preservation Prepared by: Laura Ewen Blokker Southeast Preservation Greensburg, Louisiana [email protected] May 15, 2012 On the cover: (Clockwise from top left to center) Slave quarters, Evergreen Plantation, Wallace, St. John the Baptist Parish; Antioch Baptist Church, Shreveport, Caddo Parish; Dorseyville School with St. John Baptist Church in background, Dorseyville, Iberville Parish; Star Cemetery, Shreveport, Caddo Parish; S. W. Green House, New Orleans, Orleans Parish; Prince Hall Masonic Temple, Baton Rouge, East Baton Rouge Parish; Freetown, St. James Parish; A. P. Tureaud House, New Orleans, Orleans Parish; J. S. McGehee Lodge # 54, St. Francisville vicinity, West Feliciana Parish; Southern University, Baton Rouge, East Baton Rouge Parish. Photographs of A. P. Tureaud House and S. W. Green House in New Orleans by Charles Lesher. All other photographs by Laura Ewen Blokker. TABLE OF CONTENTS Executive Summary/ Statement of Historic Context …………………………………………..…1 Background History and Development Birth of a Creole Culture: People of African Descent in French and Spanish Colonial Louisiana, 1699-1802……………………………………………………………………..4 Diminishing Liberties and Growing Tensions: African Americans in the American Territorial Period and Antebellum Statehood, 1803-1861……………………………….10 Uneasy Alliances and the Attainment of Freedom: The African American Experience During the Civil War, 1861-1864………………………………………………………..23 Navigating a Changed Nation: African Americans and Reconstruction, 1865-1877…...28 The Battle for Equality: Post-Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights Movement, 1878-1965………………………………………………………………………………..36 Associated Property Types………………………………………………………………………49 Residential……………………………………………………………………………….51 Enslavement……………………………………………………………………………..64 Labor, Agriculture, and Industry………………………………………………………...68 Religious…………………………………………………………………………………70 Educational………………………………………………………………………………75 Professional and Artistic…………………………………………………………………91 Commercial………………………………………………………………………………93 Social…………………………………………………………………………………….95 Recreational…………………………………………………………………………….100 Political…………………………………………………………………………………104 Military…………………………………………………………………………………106 Medical…………………………………………………………………………………107 Districts…………………………………………………………………………………108 Geographical Data……………………………………………………………………………...118 Summary of Identification and Evaluation Methods………………………………..................118 Illustration Credits and Acknowledgments…………………………………………………….120 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY/ STATEMENT OF HISTORIC CONTEXT The purpose of this historic context is to provide a basis for evaluating the historical significance and National Register eligibility of resources throughout the state of Louisiana related to the African American experience. The African American experience is an integral part of Louisiana’s broader history, but because it has not always been treated as such and the significance of the historic resources related to it has not been well-understood, it is necessary to devote individual attention to this important subject. The time period considered in this context is 1709 – 1965. The beginning point is established by the year in which Africans first came to Louisiana. Records indicate that the first several Louisiana residents of African descent were brought to the colony as slaves in 1709.1 This context concludes with the year 1965 even though the National Register of Historic Places generally only considers properties of fifty years of age or greater as eligible resources. This year was selected both in order to include events of the Civil Rights movement that render resources of exceptional significance and so that the context will not become immediately out of date. Louisiana’s history of French and Spanish colonization has set it apart from other places in the United States in many ways, not excluding its African American experience. The French and Spanish laws which dictated the rights and allowable treatment of people of African descent set the foundation for the unique experience of African Americans in Louisiana. It is known that there were free people of African descent in Louisiana as early as 1722 and in the antebellum years, Louisiana came to have one of the largest populations of Free People of Color in the United States and the largest in the lower South. Throughout the three centuries since people of African descent first arrived in Louisiana, they have made no small contributions to the state. From the early introduction of the African technologies of rice and indigo cultivation, and metalworking that helped the struggling colony survive; to the preservation and creolization of African musical, linguistic, and culinary traditions that distinguish so much of what is celebrated about Louisiana today; to military acts that determined the political fate of the land; to artistic and literary creations; to the invention of the multiple-effect evaporator for sugar refining; to the fine building craftsmanship that holds together and enlivens the state’s architecture; to the election of the first African-American governor in the U. S.; to the first integration of public schools in the nineteenth century South; to bringing the case of Plessy v. Ferguson to the supreme court; to the first large scale bus boycott of the Civil Rights Movement; to the invention of the sugarcane-planting machine, African Americans have achieved much in Louisiana and been recognized for too little. The Harlem Renaissance poet, writer, activist, and Louisiana native, Alice Dunbar-Nelson wrote, There is no State in the Union, hardly any spot of like size on the globe, where the man of color has lived so intensely, made so much progress, been of such historical importance and yet about whom so comparatively little is known. His history is like the Mardi Gras 1 Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, “Death and Revolt,” in The African American Experience in Louisiana: Part A, From Africa to the Civil War, ed. Charles Vincent (Lafayette: University of Southwestern, LA, 1999), 12-13, first published as chapter 3 in Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 56-95. Page 1 of 123 of the city of New Orleans, beautiful and mysterious and wonderful, but with a serious thought underlying it all. May it be better known to the world someday.2 It would be very difficult to overstate the profound impact African Americans have had on the cultural and historical development of Louisiana over the past three hundred years, and yet many buildings, structures, objects, and sites associated with the African American experience were traditionally overlooked as resources of historic significance. As historic preservation has matured in its many forms – including scholarly discipline, governmental programs, and grassroots initiative – our perception of the places that are significant to our understanding of who we are and where we have been as a nation has greatly expanded. Over the past few decades, historic preservationists and historians have looked critically at the state of work in their respective fields and found great voids in the representation of our national story. Through these decades a great deal of good work has been done to fill this hole, but there is much to be done still. One of the greatest lacunas is African American history. As noted by Carole Merritt, African-American family historian and the author of Historic Black Resources: A Handbook for the Identification, Documentation, and Evaluation of Historic African-American Properties in Georgia, That the study and teaching of American history has largely neglected the African- American experience distorts for all Americans their sense of self. Contrary to common belief, the record of black life in this country is abundant and rich. Various documents capture many aspects of the black community and how it developed within the broad patterns of American history. As the black community reassesses its past, material culture has the special promise of providing new information, posing new questions, and suggesting new interpretations of the African American experience.3 This document attempts to provide as broad of a foundation for the evaluation of properties related to the African American experience in Louisiana as possible within the limits of its scope and purpose. A Historic Context is not an exhaustive, complete history, but rather an overview which creates a setting for understanding our tangible heritage. Therefore, this document will necessarily exclude many details of this expansive topic and readers are encouraged to refer to sources cited in the footnotes and the bibliography for further reading on the African American experience in Louisiana. This text relies heavily on the collection of scholarly papers presented in The Louisiana Purchase Bicentennial Series in Louisiana History, volume XI, The African American Experience in Louisiana: Parts A-C, edited by Charles Vincent, but is supplemented by many other resources. The “Background History and Development” narrative is followed by a “Property Types” section that explores the various built resources and landscapes that demonstrate potential significance to the theme of the African American Experience in Louisiana. Buildings and landscapes connect us to our past, allowing
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