🔵 By Charles Hill. Photo by lauragrafie.
To stop hatred of violent racial acts, one must know the source of these ideas. Generation to generation passes down the discourse of language, and it has a lasting effect on the idiosyncratic structure of the world in which we live. These idioms control our every like, want, and reaction. We structure most discourses in complex caste systems that we hold. They often have stereotypical probabilities and beliefs of our personal reality. To show how Plessy v. Ferguson and the Jim Crow segregation laws had lasting effects of negative discourse and disruption in the natural colonial caste system in which we live, I will take you through a journey filled with the richness of New Orleans culture. I will supply supportive evidence on how the social structure of New Orleans’s empirical discourse forced resistance to the Jim Crow laws and how class played a key role in a society trying to look past the color line.
France colonized provinces and islands all of the world. With every colony, they structured and instilled the laws of the land. In the 18th century, France passed laws defining who was a citizen and who had full citizens’ rights. These laws changed the appearance of the French citizens. France said that they could define a person of any race, color, or ethnic background as a free citizen with full civil rights. Once a person was a French citizen, he could enjoy all citizen’s rights. Every French colony created schools and colleges to educate its citizens.
Before long, interracial marriage in French colonies produced offspring who later became active politicians in the communities. These communities still recognized the institution of slavery, but the ability to become free for one’s next generation through an offspring with a French citizen was also a choice.
Our ancestors bought the Louisiana purchase in 1804. This played a huge role in the Plessy v. Ferguson case which occurred in the 1890’s. In less than a hundred years, people of the generation in which Plessy grew up structured themselves securely in the same colonial mindset instilled by the imperial French mindset.
Over the years between the Plessy case and the purchase of the Louisiana Province, anyone could own slaves. Unlike other states like Texas, any free citizens in Louisiana regardless of color, could own land and slaves. This idiosyncratic construction made the society of New Orleans unique and different from many other southern states. Caste systems defined by race and color of skin divided states in the South. In Texas, for instance, one couldn’t legally be a free Black man in the state before 1865.
The laws of the state prohibited any Black people, mulattos, and even octoroons from entering the state. The imperial social construction of New Orleans created a collective resistance in the years leading to the Jim Crow era. This caste system provided concrete roots in the local minds of New Orleans that disagreed with the binary system of the Jim Crow laws.
The caste system in Louisiana was also complicated through idioms of the belief of Black people in general. Since the lower rung of citizens in the French caste system was Black slaves, Afro-Creoles identified differently from their darker citizens. Isabel Wilkerson, in her book “Caste”, explains the discourse of the ideology “Americans of today have inherited those distorted rules of engagement whether or not their families had enslaved people… slavery built the man-made chasm between blacks and whites that forces the middle caste”. (1)
To study and assume the full concept of what citizens in New Orleans were battling, one must revert to the roots of the discourse in its social construction. Other states accepted the binary system of a black and white train car by the definition of either one or the other as de jure segregation as much as de facto. But in Louisiana, the de facto relationship of its citizens didn’t coincide with the jure segregation of the Jim Crow laws.
Wilkerson goes on to explain this in her own words and tries to define the effects of slavery mixed with colonialism, “The colonist created a caste of people who would by definition be seen as dumb because it was illegal to teach them (the slaves) to read or write” (2). These effects stratified the color line that Jim Crow instilled. In New Orleans, it also added internal strife between citizens of Freedmen and Afro-Creoles. Most highly educated Afro-Creoles would not be in the same caste as those who were now Freedmen. Even though the Jim Crow laws occurred years after emancipation, most Afro-Creoles had generations of self-improvement over the previously enslaved generation of their counter-partners.
The mixture of races and the definition of higher class were further complicated by the ability to speak the creolized French language that the highest of classes spoke in the French Quarter. The collective use of a common language created an ability to support class over those who were not Afro-Creole or French-speaking citizens who had they had restricted from education during enslavement periods. It was a collective choice to mix cultures and the color of skin. This collective choice of New Orleans’s citizens created mixed interracial communities that didn’t have the de facto segregation based on the color of skin alone. Blair, Kelley L.M. in the Right to Ride, wrote, “Colored and white Creoles shared a common creolized French language and helped to make New Orleans a Creole society with racially integrated neighborhoods and Catholic churches and schools” (3). These interracial communities worked as a idiosyncratic society that viewed Creole-speaking people from different ethnic backgrounds as a single class.
The Jim Crow laws created internal resistance in the minds of local New Orleans citizens, especially in the Creole communities. They grew up around people whose views as equals were not based on skin color or ethnic background but on the social language created. Te Jim Crow ideology conflicted with most internal caste systems, structured for generations. Jim Crow created a binary system based on a single drop of blood that was not considered white.
The binary system of Jim Crow also held and infrastructure resistance. For generations, the Creole communities had accepted de facto segregation in their neighborhoods, schools, and churches. With that being the case, the Jim Crow laws opposed the brick-and-mortar policies of New Orleans as a whole. This created a physically constructed natural resistance to de jure segregation. New Orleans’s residents held resistance to the assimilation of the Jim Crow laws by its people and infrastructure.
The ACERA (American Citizen’s Equal Rights Association) chose Homer Plessy for the first reason because he was of or from the middle class. He was a productive citizen of the society and held jobs such as those that Blair writes of, namely, “clerk, warehouse laborer, and insurance collector” (4). he was also born into a middle-class family whose parents had skilled labor jobs.
Though Plessy was not upper-class such as a lawyer or doctor was, they did not see him as an inactive person in society. The fact that he was a registered voter and an active member in the community advocating Civil Rights characterized his engagement in Civil Rights advocacy.
The class of Plessy was the middle of the three classes in the Afro society at that time. The Afro-Creole professional class was on top, and the unskilled Black workers were on the bottom. The neighborhood that Plessy lived in was an interracial community predominantly composed of the professional class.
He lived in the Seventh Ward in the section of Tremé. This section was of a higher class than Plessy’s, but his ability to rise above this status was due to his lighter complexion and his use of the Creole-French language. At the time ACERA chose Plessy, he was 27 years old and had a small family. He had a strong belief in the necessity of integration for the betterment of society.
Plessy was only one-eighth black and phenotypically white. Blair writes, “Plessy’s Creole status and light skin…” (5). These factors were necessary since ACERA needed someone that looked phenotypically white because only white people could buy a first-class ticket. ACERA required that Plessy be lighter skin and “pass” as white. Railroad personnel often threw African Americans that had darker skin from the white cars and treated them with hostility of they resisted. Blair discusses “the mob mentality that had fueled assaults by white passengers against African Americans seated in First Class cars”. (6)
By appearing to be phenotypically white, the law required that Plessy inform the conductor that he was not white but Black. Plessy had straight hair, and his nose appeared to be that of white descent. The reason the ACERA didn’t use a woman was because of an incident that happened years before someone sued the Railroad. Blair records, “A streetcar company… had been held liable when a white woman passenger with dark features sued because a conductor asked, “Don’t you belong over there?” (7), insinuating that she was in the wrong car and that she was black.
Using a Black woman would have not raised the alarm of a forced move on the train since they were often employed as caretakers or nursing mothers to white children. Blair reports, “Black woman nursing white children with their own breast milk could be tolerated.” (8) The upper elites in New Orleans would often come together to figure out ways in which they could turn the social construction to its natural state, a non-colored-based caste system. Blair writes, “Blacks in New Orleans also built coalitions with white residents.” (9) The ACERA also went to the extend of publishing in the Advocate, a local paper, an issue on class and how class and Jim Crow laws conflicted the social norms of New Orleans. Blair states, “Has it come to this that the laborer is thus to be abhorred…” (10), insinuating that no one wanted to sit next to a hot sweaty laborer, white or black. This statement was issued to incite strife between the upper and working classes.
The ACERA had to set the stage for this case to have a perfect outcome. They had to choose the right person, and they had to go through the long legal system to eventually get a result.
In June of 1892, Homer Plessy bought a first-class ticket, one that could only someone who looked white could buy. Once Plessy boarded the car and found a seat, he told the conductor that he was Black. Plessy then refused to move from his seat, saying that he had paid for first-class. They arrested him for not following the Jim Crow segregation laws.
Finally, in 1895 after years of waiting, the Supreme Court, with a majority vote, mandated the Separate but Equal law while still supporting the segregation laws. After the Plessy v. Ferguson case, railroad companies still insisted that it was not financially possible to supply separate but equal cars since not many Black people rode in first-class.
The way ACERA staged the Plessy case set a guideline for future advocates. They used this new way to fight against frivolous lawsuits in the Rosa Parks case and others. Today when laws try to change the social norm and try to reconstruct the local caste system, they often run into collective problems and resistance such as we have seen with New Orleans and the Jim Crow laws.
Jim Crow laws created a new caste that disrupted harmony, a caste where they solely focused on the color of one’s skin or one’s ethnic background. Society saw this social resistance in the Plessy case where the New Orleans society pushed back to reclaim the caste system to which they were already accustomed, namely, the caste system of money, education, and human mobility.
The Jim Crow laws created an era that had lasting effects on the minds of Americans today. When people base a caste system solely on race and place the white race on top, the effects are crucial. The segregation laws effected the existing idiosyncratic construction of class that was already in place. This in turn created one class with arrogance toward another.
This dark complexity of social construction has been, in my opinion, one of the most influential systematic negative discourses of that since the Emancipation Proclamation. When people structure a country in race-driven hierarchy, it is a recipe for disaster.
It is our duty as humans to not allow negative discourse of language and idioms constructed and projected from the earlier generation to pollute the next. We can only stop hatred and/or racism, as in violent acts, by finding the roots of its discourse and killing them. Once the roots are gone, we must construct and plant positive idiosyncrasy back in the most humane way possible.
WORK CITED
Wilkerson, Isabel. Caste: The Origins of our Discontents. New York: Random House, 2020:
(1) Pg. 48
(2) Pg. 52
Blair, Kelley L.M. Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina press, 2010:
(3) Pg. 53
(4) Pg. 56
(5) Pg. 56
(6) Pg. 73
(7) Pg. 75
(8) Pg. 68
(9) Pg. 58
(10) Pg. 62