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Louisiana Justice of the Peace Lets Black People Use His Bathroom

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~Fianna10/16/2009 12:18:22 pm PDT

re: #160 albusteve

social strata from lighter down to darker

Yes. Exactly. And the ways that it was put by some of the people of color is rather… harsh in our current era.

There was an institution called placage, which was essentially a quasi-legal marriage between white men and what were called quadroons or octoroons back then (women who were either one-quarter or one-eighth black). They were often Catholic weddings, which then had some weight, which is why they were considered quasi-legal. Some of the white men never married other women, most did and had white families, often out of the city, but spent a lot of their time with their “colored” families in New Orleans. Many of the men left sizable amounts of money to their children.

Because there was no legal binding on the marriage, it was sometimes carried on forever, but often did not. In the cases where the woman was no longer placee, she generally recieved a settlement of cash, maintainance for the kids and the house her white lover bought for them. In those cases, the women sometimes married free men of color, but would usually place her daughters if she could when they were old enough.

Quadroon and octoroon women would almost never marry darker skinned men then themselves. The goal was to essentially produce lighter skinned people in every generation.

The interesting thing is that they rarely passed in to white society, at least before the Lousianna purchase. They maintained a strong identity as Creole, considered themselves to be French and were often wealthy and slave-owners in their own right.

Very, very interesting history, and not a lot written on it. Doing the research was hard, especially since I did a lot of it post-Katrina and a lot of the documents weren’t available or had sadly been damaged or destroyed in the hurricane.