Creole Community Research Articles

Colonial Natchitoches: A Creole Community on the Louisiana-Texas Frontier

This book is about the founding and development of the first French settlement west of the Mississippi. The bulk of the book is given over to a study of the demographic, economic, and social development of this colonial town. Only the first chapter gives a summary historical narrative. Other chapters include numerous tables, the result of meticulous research, elaborating the demographics of the people as well as their economic and social evolution.Natchitoches began as a community organized primarily to trade with the Indians of the western frontier. Traders went up the rivers to the Indian villages and towns and returned with pelts and other forms of wealth that they shipped downriver to New Orleans. At the height of its trading career, French traders ranged over areas of Texas and Arkansas and as far west as Santa Fe, New Mexico, even though this encroached upon Spanish territory in Texas and New Mexico.The careful reader cannot help but note the contrast between the far-ranging French colonial society and the challenging Spanish system which was developing alongside it. While the French traveled the rivers and visited the Indian towns and villages, the Spaniards journeyed on horseback and on foot to establish mission towns and presidios. The Spanish cajoled seminomadic Indians into becoming sedentary inhabitants of the missions, where they could be converted into civilized inhabitants. Neither the Spanish missionaries nor the French traders were kind to the natives, who were exploited by both systems. It is obvious, however, that the French system took from the land and produced revenue, while the Spanish system was a continual economic drain on the mother country.The frontier trading town evolved from a trading post into an agricultural center as the governing power changed from French to Spanish hands after the French and Indian War. While the new Spanish government of Louisiana did not discourage Indian trading, it also encouraged and subsidized the culture of tobacco. It is interesting to note that even though governing control rested with the Spaniards, they kept the former French colony under separate regulations and even used former French officials in positions of authority. Ironically, while such economic and political changes were taking place in Natchitoches, Spanish governing officials continued to maintain the cumbersome mission system in Texas.Since plantation agriculture needed a labor supply, the colonists of Natchitoches began to import African slaves and thus to change the demographic makeup of the society. From the relatively egalitarian society of the frontier trading post, Natchitoches soon became more stratified with a small group of relatively wealthy families and the large, poorer majority that either continued to engage in Indian trade or worked for the plantation owners.During the closing years of Spanish control, the tobacco subsidies disappeared. Abruptly, facing economic chaos, some colonists in Natchitoches began to grow cotton. Because of this agricultural transition, the area began to resemble economically the southern part of the United States, to which it would soon be joined.The transition from tobacco to cotton required a substantial capital investment, and not all of the Natchitoches colonists had the land and other resources to follow their more wealthy neighbors. Those who could not manage the move into cotton chose to go into cattle ranching. Raising cattle did not require the large capital investment in land and labor that cotton culture did. It was also not as labor intensive. Many colonists received grants to hitherto unused land that was unsuitable for agriculture. Many of them prospered at this new occupation.The chapters on slavery reveal the manner in which this institution so quickly invaded this frontier area. Indian slavery as well as African slavery was practiced. Africans were used on the tobacco and later the cotton plantations while Indians were utilized in the trading occupations. The tables that fill the bulk of the book represent a large amount of detailed and exhausting research. The authors must have examined every will filed, every baptismal record, and every court case recorded in Natchitoches during the colonial period. Among other interesting information, these tables tend to demonstrate the amount of intermarriage and cohabitation between the settlers, the Indians, and the slaves. Unfortunately this did not transmit into the egalitarianism suggested by the frontier thesis. Rather it produced a more stratified society similar to that of the southern part of the United States.This slim volume should be on the shelf of every researcher looking into colonial and frontier development.

Colonial Natchitoches: A Creole Community on the Louisiana-Texas Frontier

Colonial Natchitoches: A Creole Community on the Louisiana-Texas Frontier

Colonial Natchitoches: a Creole community on the Louisiana-Texas frontier

Colonial Natchitoches: a Creole community on the Louisiana-Texas frontier

Racial/Ethnic Identity among Creole Peoples in Mauritius

This article provides the findings of qualitative research into the perceptions of racial/ethnic identity among the Creole community of Mauritius. Participants were 24 Creole Mauritians (males = 16, females = 8, age range = 22–69 years). Interview data were collected and analyzed primarily through a hermeneutic (phenomenoligically-oriented) (van Manen, 1997) process. Six major themes of racial/ethnic identity emerged: experiences of dis-ease, experiences of stuckness (ad-extra and ad-intra), epiphany experiences, experiences of self-appreciation, and experiences of hopeful optimism. The themes describe individual processes of racial/ethnic identity development as well as sociopolitical obstacles to positive identity formation among the Creole.

The forgotten frontier: colonist and Khoisan on the cape's northern frontier in the 18th century

In South African history, the Eastern Cape frontier has been traditionally regarded as the pre-eminent zone of contact between colonists and indigenes. But there was an earlier frontier in the history of the country where the conflict between Dutch colonists and indigenous herders and hunters, the Khoi and San (Hottentots and Bushmen), was in many ways more decisive in its outcome, more brutal and violent in its manner, and just as significant in its effects on later South African history. This was the frontier north of Cape Town, which from the earliest days of Dutch settlement began advancing through fits and starts into the interior. By the end of the 18th century, the frontier had reached the Orange (Gariep) River and the indigenous Khoisan people, after initial resistance, had been defeated and absorbed as an underclass into the colonial world or else expelled beyond it, to regions where new creole communities emerged. Filled with extraordinary personalities and memorable episodes, and set in the often harsh landscape of the western and northern Cape, this title will appeal both to the general reader and to the student of history.

Code‐switching and social identities in the Eastern Maroon community of Suriname and French Guiana1

Sociolinguistic research on Creole communities has so far focused mainly on the social and linguistic distinctiveness of Creoles and on their synchronic interaction with their European lexifier. To date, little work has been done on the stylistic make‐up of Creoles and on how these styles are employed in interactions to negotiate social identities and relationships. This paper investigates patterns of code‐switching between different Creole varieties in the Eastern Maroon community using Myers‐Scotton's markedness model. It demonstrates that such patterns are structurally similar to those found in other bilingual communities and function as an important resource for creating interactional meanings. Moreover, it shows that overall similar patterns of code‐switching convey partially different meanings due to their interaction with situational factors.

Ilustración y orden social: el problema de la población en el Semanario del Nuevo Reyno de Granada (1808-1810(

On the basis of a study about the «Semanario del Nuevo Reino de Granada» this article argues that the issue of population in this publication participates of an effort to construct a project of social order and an enlightened Creole community in charge of achieving it. Several memoirs are analyzed in order to explore how the concern for knowing, quantifying, classifying, ordering and controlling the population of the Nueva Granada relied on political economy, medicine, hygiene and education as powerful mechanisms to constitute individuals ‘useful to the Kingdom’.

:Race, Nation, and Religion in the Americas

This collection of intriguing and provocative essays is a successful outgrowth of two recent conference panels in anthropology and religious studies, respectively. The chapters, all based on solid historical and/or anthropological case studies, commonly center on race and religion in the Americas, but they deal with differing topics in the historically and geographically diverse times and spaces of the Americas, including the Spanish Floridas, Haiti, Brazil, and Mexico. By bringing such varying topics into a single collection, editors Henry Goldschmidt and Elizabeth McAlister, both scholars of religion, do an excellent job in “exploring the coarticulation of race, nation, and religion—and more broadly, to develop a theoretical and methodological understanding of the complex ways such categories intersect in the construction of collective identity, difference, and hierarchy” (p. 5), while acknowledging that this is “[a]n ambitious project” (p. 21). The twelve essays included in this volume are divided into six distinctive thematic pairs, and, fortunately, the reader is provided with a meticulous summary of each theme by the coeditors. In the first section, on “heathens” and “Jews” in the colonial imagination, Daniel Murphree and McAlister discuss the historical creation of racial categories based on religious differences under European colonialism in the case of Florida and Haiti, respectively. In the second section, on white America and Afro-Brazil, historian Daniel B. Lee and anthropologist John Burdick examine a symbolic association between Christianity and whiteness. Derek Chang and Julia Cummings O'Hara, authors of the essays for the third section, explore the ways by which Christian missionary work in the Americas has reinforced racial divisions for the sake of the white dominant nations. James B. Bennett and Danielle Bruce Sigler contribute the fruits of their research to the fourth section on segregation, congregation, and the North American black-white racial binary. While Bennett examines the important roles of the Catholic Church in redefining race at the expense of the Creole community in New Orleans at the turn of the twentieth century, Singer presents two interesting cases in which the individual's identity politics (“whitening” through ministry) actually ended up helping the nation maintain and even strengthen its racial divisions and social hierarchy. Essays by Kate Ram and Jennifer Snow for the fifth section discuss the nation-states' continuous efforts to police the racial and religious boundaries of “civilization” for the sake of elites in nineteenth-century Haiti and early twentieth-century northern Mexico. The sixth section focuses on rituals and representation of race. Whereas Lindsay Hale examines the aesthetics of Afro-Brazilian religion Umbanda in Rio de Janeiro in relation to Brazil's national myth of racial democracy, Judith Weisenfeld, studying Hollywood movies from the 1920s through the 1940s, discusses the projection of blackness on the screen, with special emphasis on the presentation of African American religion.

Linguists' most dangerous myth: The fallacy of Creole Exceptionalism

“Creole Exceptionalism” is defined as a set of beliefs, widespread among both linguists and nonlinguists, that Creole languages form an exceptional class on phylogenetic and/or typological grounds. It also has nonlinguistic (e.g., sociological) implications, such as the claim that Creole languages are a “handicap” for their speakers, which has undermined the role that Creoles should play in the education and socioeconomic development of monolingual Creolophones. Focusing on Caribbean Creoles, and on Haitian Creole in particular, it is argued that Creole Exceptionalism, as a sociohistorically rooted “régime of truth” (in Foucault's sense), obstructs scientific and social progress in and about Creole communities. Various types of Creole Exceptionalist beliefs are deconstructed and historicized, and their empirical, theoretical, and sociological flaws surveyed. These flaws have antecedents in early creolists' theories of Creole genesis, often explicitly couched in Eurocentric and (pre-/quasi-)Darwinian doctrines of human evolution. Despite its historical basis in colonialism and slavery and its scientific and sociological flaws, Creole Exceptionalism is still enshrined in the modern linguistics establishment and its classic literature, a not unexpected state given the social structure of scientific communities and the interaction between ideology and “paradigm-making.” The present Foucauldian approach to Creole Exceptionalism is an instantiation of a well-defined area of the linguistics/ideology interface. The conclusion proposes alternatives more consistent with Creole structures and their development, and more likely to help linguists address some practical problems faced by Creole speakers.This project has been supported by, inter alia, a much-appreciated fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (# FA-37500-02). While I am responsible for the views and errors in this paper, I feel immensely privileged to have benefited from the generous encouragement and judicious comments of editor Jane Hill and two anonymous reviewers at Language in Society, and of many friends and colleagues: Myriam Augustin, Marie-Lucie Brutus, Noam Chomsky, Yves Dejean (Papa Iv), Dominique Fattier, Marilyn Goodrich, Ken Hale, Dimitri Hilton, Tometro Hopkins, Tami Kaplan, Antonia MacDonald-Smythe, Heliana Mello, Miriam Meyerhoff, Salikoko Mufwene, Marilene Phipps, Ella Maria Ray, Faith Smith, Geneva Smitherman, Arthur Spears, and Adrienne Talamas.

Questions of Criolian Contagion

This essay explores the plantation system as it operated in the Greater Caribbean in the formation of creole communities. Special focus is given to the two kinds of markets found in such communities, and to the ways in which African approaches to work and play entered into the rich mix of cultural forms growing out of the plantation experiment.

Questions of Criolian Contagion

Abstract This essay explores the plantation system as it operated in the Greater Caribbean in the formation of creole communities. Special focus is given to the two kinds of markets found in such communities, and to the ways in which African approaches to work and play entered into the rich mix of cultural forms growing out of the plantation experiment.

New South Narratives of Freedom: Rereading George Washington Cable's "'Tite Poulette" and Madame DeZphine

Although George Washington Cable is now widely known as a perceptive writer on transracial subjects, it was not until his third short story, (1874), that Cable introduced black-white racial issues in his published fiction. Indeed, a number of central concerns which Cable developed in writings throughout his career, including social construction of racial categories, possibilities of changing natural feelings about racial difference, interrelated race and gender issues, as well as legal ramifications of interracial relationships, are compellingly presented in this first of Cable's published fictions ofrace. With Poulette, too, Cable for the first introduces engaging, if still largely stereotyped, women characters, as well as a more developed and integrated central male figure, the young Dutch immigrant Kristian Koppig, one of a series of portrayals of an alternate masculinity, a Southern masculinity vulnerable to change, that reflects a key interest of Cable throughout his writing life. and in his related narrative of Madame Delphine (1881) (1) Cable explores possibilities for change in the South of his own young manhood, a volatile Period after emancipation and before segregation was sanctioned by the Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court ruling of 1896. that window of when it seemed to many that the future was open, Cable wrote against any idea of looking back to an idealized, monolithically-conceived past of male supremacy as a basis for constructing a New South. With a conception of fiction as parable and believing that progress in the South required change of individual Southern men and Southern women, Cable modeled with individual characters possibilities of transformation of familiar Southern values and cultural practices regarding men's and women's roles, race, and, especially in Madame Delphine, religion. I As in many of his early short stories, at the opening of Poulette, the plane of Cable's third person narration is set near the of the story's composition, New Orleans in the early 1870s, toward the end of Reconstruction. Interweaving recollections of the old New Orleans of the of Kristian Koppig with touristic impressions of the Vieux Carre of his own postbellum era, the narrator suggests an interpenetrating past and present in which the past continues to impinge on and shape contemporary time. a pivotal phrase toward the end of the opening frame narrative, Cable's narrator introduces the story of Kristian and `Tite Poulette with a mellow, once upon a time intonation: In the good old times of duels, and bagatelle-clubs, and theatre-balls, and Cayetano's circus (214). The bland, ingenuous tone here teases the reader with a hint of a picturesque New Orleans of honor and grace. Such a conventional, sanitized vision of an idyllic prewar Louisiana was promulgated in Cable's day by the prominent Creole writer and spokesman Charles Gayarre and others and served to buttress supremacist ideology in the postbellum era. (See Tregle 169-70, 173-74, 178-83 and Tunnel 1-7.) Central to the mythic, ideal Southern vision were men who would physically fight for honor and women of grace and virtue, virtue respected and actively protected by men of honor. (See Wyatt-Brown 34-55; 227.) Early on we learn that is socially, not just physically, determined, and that for white-appearing 'Tite Poulette and her mother, Madame John, not being real white (221) is the most important thing to know about the two central women characters. an indirect fashion, easy to miss on first reading, Cable's narrator suggests how Madame John's socially imposed race and gender status as quadroon lad[y] (217) is fundamental to her identity in her immediate Vieux Carre Creole community as well as her possibilities in life: [W]ho was this Madame John? …

Jazz on the road: Don Albert's musical life

Christopher Wilkinson uncovers a fascinating and unexplored side of American musical and social history in this richly detailed account of Don Albert's musical career and the multicultural forces that influenced it. Albert was born Albert Dominque in New Orleans in 1908. Wilkinson discusses his musical education in the Creole community of New Orleans and the fusion of New Orleans jazz and the Texas blues styles in the later 1920s during his tenure with Troy Floyd's Orchestra of Gold. He documents the founding of Albert's own band in San Antonio, its tours through twenty-four states during the 1930s, its recordings, and its significant reputation within the African American community. In addition to providing a vivid account of life on the road and imparting new insight into the daily existence of working musicians, this book illustrates how the fundamental issue of race influenced Albert's life, as well as the music of the era. Albert's years as a San Antonio nightclub owner in the 1940s and 1950s saw the rise in popularity of rhythm and blues and the decline of interest in jazz. There was also increasing racial animosity, which Albert resisted by the successful legal defense of his right to operate an integrated establishment in 1951. In the two decades before his death in 1980, his performances in Dixieland jazz bands and interviews with oral historians concerning his own career were the fitting climax to a multifaceted musical life. Albert's voice and personality, his feelings and opinions about the music he loved, and the obstacles he faced in performing and promoting it, are artfully conveyed in Wilkinson's fluid, accessible, and erudite narrative. Jazz on the Road shows the importance of live performance in bringing jazz to America, and succeeds brilliantly in depicting an era, a locale, and a way of life.

Jamaican and British Baptists in West Africa, 1841–1888

This article surveys West Africa outreach between 1841–1888 by the London-based Baptist Missionary Society (hereafter BMS) and the Kingston-based Jamaican Baptist Missionary Society (hereafter JBMS). Documentation focuses on responses of mission board leaders, missionaries, the local Creole community, and African Christians to the reality of growing interference by European powers and the imposition of colonial rule on the region. This case study elucidates the complex role of missionaries in the process by which the West came to exercise political and economic domination of Africa. It complements a survey of the role of Black Americans in the Protestant missionary movement in Africa.1

The interplay of relexification and levelling in creole genesis and development

This paper bears on the relationship between relexification and levelling, two processes that play a role in Creole genesis and development. It is a well-documented fact that situations where creoles develop involve several substratum languages and one (or at least one major) superstratum language. Relexification of several substratum languages on the basis of a single/major superstratum language provides the creole community with a common lexicon, hence a common language. As a mental/cognitive process, relexification is an individual process. Consequently through relexification, the specificities of the various substratum languages are reproduced in the incipient creole, thus creating what might be referred to as different dialects of the new language. Relexification of several substratum languages, on the basis of a single superstratum language, can be viewed as the major source of variation in an incipient creole. This provides a sound explanation for the fact that different substratum languages may contribute different features to a particular creole. Dialect levelling, as discussed in the literature on dialects in contact, refers to the reduction of variation between dialects of the same language, in situations where these dialects are brought together. On the basis of three sets of data from Haitian creole, it is shown that, in creole development, dialect levelling operates on the output of relexification. The role of levelling in creole genesis and development accounts for the fact that the properties of some specific lexical entries of the creole may depart from those of the corresponding lexical entries in the individual substratum languages.

Jim Crow laws of the 1890s and the origins of New Orleans jazz: correction of an error

A seriously misleading error has crept into almost all the literature on the origins of New Orleans jazz. The error mistakenly attributes to the Jim Crow laws of the 1890s a significant role in the formation of the city's jazz tradition.Jazz historians have done a reasonably good job of depicting the two black communities that existed in new Orleans from the time of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 until the twentieth century. One community comprised a French-speaking Catholic group who lived mostly in downtown New Orleans, i.e. the area of the city down-river from Canal Street. Before the Civil War this group, commonly called Creoles, or Black Creoles, but more accurately called Franco-Africans, comprised free people of colour as well as slaves, and after the war consisted of their descendants who perpetuated the group's language, religion and musical tradition, which combined French, African and Caribbean elements.Members of the other black community were English-speaking Protestants who lived mostly in uptown new Orleans. That group, before the Civil War, was made up largely of slaves brought to New Orleans by Americans who flooded into Louisiana after the 1803 Purchase, though it also included some free people of colour. After the war, the descendants of these immigrants continued their language, religion and musical tradition, which came mostly from the rural South. There Anglo-Africans were generally less prosperous and less educated than the downtown Franco-African or Creole community.

Disparate diasporas: identity and politics in an African Nicaraguan community

Based on a decade the author spent among the African-Caribbean people on Nicaragua's southern Caribbean coast, Disparate Diasporas is a study of identity formation and politics in that community. Edmund Gordon lived in Bluefields, Nicaragua, during most of the 1980s, a turbulent period during which he participated in the community's search for solutions to problems ranging from a crumbling economic base to the mutual mistrust and animosity between most Creole people and the Sandinista revolutionary government. Disparate Diasporas is not a conventional ethnography. Rather than being just an observer, Gordon actively participated in the life of the community, intent on contributing to its political processes. A basic premise of his book is that engagement and activity can enhance ethnographic insights and sharpen theoretical understanding. Disparate Diasporas shows how a particular Black community can evolve distinct types of diasporic consciousness, and, depending on the historical moment, how different types of memories, consciousness, and politics come to predominate. The author uses the Gramscian notion of common sense to understand the Creole community's history of shifting politics and ideologies, focusing on the period of the 1970s and 1980s. His work explains the inability of the Sandinistas to come to terms with the racial and cultural challenge to the Nicaraguan nation posed by the Creole community.

French roots in the Illinois country: the Mississippi frontier in Colonial times

Winner of the Kemper and Leila Williams Book Prize for the Best Book on Louisiana History, Roots in the Illinois Country creates an entirely new picture of the Illinois country as a single ethnic, economic, and cultural entity. Focusing on the French Creole communities along the Mississippi River, Carl J. Ekberg shows how land use practices such as medieval-style open-field agriculture intersected with economic and social issues ranging from the flour trade between Illinois and New Orleans to the significance of the different mentalities of French Creoles and Anglo-Americans.

The structure of British official attitudes: colonial Mauritius, 1883–1968

ABSTRACTThis article seeks to demonstrate the structure of attitudes in British colonial officialdom through a case study of Mauritius from the governorship of Sir John Pope Hennessy to decolonization. It suggests that officials consistently saw Mauritians as a whole as ‘the Others’, while seeking both to divide and rule them – into an émigré French elite left over from the French colonial period at the time of British conquest (1810), a Creole community, and an Indian community – without assimilating them; and to suspect each in turn of disloyalty and treachery. By a grim irony, many of the governors and their officials were suspected by the colonial office of joining the Others. This is thus a story of an adaptable imperial paranoia.

Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization (review)

Reviews99 Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization. Edited by Arnold R. Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon. Louisiana State University Press, 1992. 334 pp. Cloth, $42.50; paper, $16.95. Reviewed by Karen Trahan Leathern, who recently received a Ph.D. in American history from the University ofNorth Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her dissertation is titled " ? Carnival According to Their Own Desires': Gender and Mardi Gras in New Orleans, 1870-1941." Through the lens of race, Creole New Orleans explores a city that is in many ways unlike the rest of the South, yet inextricably embedded in it. In a remarkably cohesive collection of essays, the authors advance from the colonial period to the present with broad strokes, illuminating odd twists and turns. Borrowing from C. Vann Woodward's notion of historical counterpoint, they juxtapose "the Franco-African protest tradition of New Orleans and the tragic racial mind-set of Anglo-America." The essays by Jerah Johnson and Gwendolyn Midlo Hall in part 1, "The French and African Founders," redefine the history of colonial New Orleans. In place of well-worn stories of French explorers and Spanish rulers, the authors present engaging revisions that emphasize racial and ethnic intermingling. Johnson shows that the French initially encouraged Indian assimilation and French and Indian intermarriage. Although it clearly envisioned a French rather than a multicultural society, the colonial administration's attitudes in fact fostered a pluralistic assemblage. The attempt to blend Indians into the dominant society also brought Indians into close contact with African slaves, with whom they intermarried. Hall further expands on this notion of a permeable society by focusing on the development of Afro-Creole culture, which included both slaves and free blacks. Part 2, "The American Challenge," traces the decline of French influence and the evolution of American dominance. These essays are most valuable as contributions to a current dialogue in American history as scholars begin to explore the social construction of whiteness—how people came to understand what it meant to be white in the South. Paul F. Lachance shows how white and black refugees from the 1791 Haitian revolution and immigrants from France propped up a French-speaking white majority in the city until the 1830s. Next, Joseph G. Tregle Jr. compellingly dissects the creation of the Creole myth. In the antebellum years, all Louisiana natives, black and white, fell under the rubric of Creole. But after the Civil War, partly in reaction to George Washington Cable's fictional depiction of white Creoles as uncouth, hypocritical miscegenists, eminent historian Charles Gayarré and others promoted the image of Creoles as aristocratic, educated, refined, racially pure whites of French or Spanish descent. According to this scheme, only an unfortunate confusion led outsiders and racially mixed New Orleanians to consider persons of mixed blood as Creoles. Ironically, this new myth undermined white Creoles' identification with French culture because it emphasized their whiteness over their Frenchness. Part 3 addresses the Americanization of black New Orleans. Both essays explain how the permeable racial world presented in part 1 became enmeshed first in the racial dualism of Jim Crow and then in the racial politics of the civil rights era and afterward. Joseph Logsdon and Caryn Cosse Bell present a dynamic portrait of the French-speaking, free, black Creole community from the antebellum period to the end of the century. This privileged group saw its world slip away in the 1850s, when sectional conflict and changes in local government brought repression. Meanwhile, they absorbed revolutionary ideas from the French emancipation of 1848, which granted "full political rights" to former slaves in the French West Indies. These experiences molded a new generation that 100Southern Cultures formed the vanguard of a movement for racial equality. But the Civil War and its aftermath altered the demographic composition of New Orleans, which came to include an increasing number of English-speaking, Protestant blacks. Moreover, the two communities possessed different racial ideals. Opposed to caste divisions, black Creoles drew upon their antebellum heritage to seek an integrated society, while Anglo-Protestant blacks sought refuge and resistance in all-black institutions. In the late 1880s and early 1890s, Rodolphe Desdunes, editor of the daily newspaper the Crusader, and others in the...