Making Race in the Courtroom

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. This book deals with this topic.

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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, creoles of color, or simply creoles. New Orleans’s

creoles of color remained legally and culturally distinct from “negroes”

throughout most of the nineteenth century until state mandated segregation

lumped together descendants of slaves with descendants of free people of color.











Much of the recent scholarship on New

Orleans examines what race relations in the

antebellum period looked as well as why antebellum Louisiana’s gens de couleur enjoyed rights and

privileges denied to free blacks throughout most of the United States. This book, however, is less concerned with the what and why questions than with how people

of color, acting within institutions of power, shaped those institutions in ways beyond

their control. As its title suggests, Making Race in the Courtroom argues that race is best understood not

as a category, but as a process. It seeks to demonstrate the role of

free people of African-descent, interacting within the courts, in this process.