Creoles of Color in the Bayou Country

Creoles of Color are rightfully among the first families of south-western Louisiana. Yet in both antebellum and postbellum periods they remained a people considered apart from the rest of the population. Historians demographers sociologists and anthropologists have given them only scant attention.<P>This probing book focused on the mid-eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries is the first to scrutinize this multiracial group through a close study of primary resource materials.<P>During the antebellum period they were excluded from the state’s three-tiered society—white free people of color and slaves. Yet Creoles of Color were a dynamic component in the region’s economy for they were self-compelled in efforts to become and integral part of the community.