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The Creoles of color are a historic ethnic group of Creole people in Louisiana and southern Mississippi and Alabama, especially in the city of New Orleans. ==History== During Louisiana’s colonial period, ''Créole'' referred to people born in Louisiana who had ancestors from elsewhere; i.e., all natives other than Native Americans. First used by French colonists to distinguish themselves from foreign-born settlers, and later as distinct from Anglo-American settlers, colonial documents show the term "Créole" was used variously at different times to refer to white people, mixed-race people, and black people, including slaves.〔Kein, Sybil. ''"Creole: the history and legacy of Louisiana's free people of color"''. Louisiana State University Press, 2009, p. 73.〕 Mixed-race Creoles of color became identified as a distinct ethnic group, ''Gens de couleur libres'' (free persons of color), prior to the 19th century. These free persons of color and their descendants often enjoyed many of the privileges of whites, including property ownership and formal education. During the antebellum period, their society was structured along class lines. While it was not illegal, it was a social taboo for Creoles of color to marry slaves and was rarely done. Some of the most prosperous Creoles of color owned slaves themselves. Other Creoles of color such as Thomy Lafon used their position to support the abolitionist cause. Another Creole of color, Francis E. Dumas, emancipated all of his slaves and organized them into a company in the Second Regiment of the Louisiana Native Guards.〔Shirley Elizabeth Thompson, ''Exiles at Home: The Struggle to Become American in Creole New Orleans'', Harvard University Press, 2009, pg. 162〕 Some historians suggest that New Orleans was the cradle of the civil rights movement in the United States, due to the earliest efforts of Creoles to integrate the military ''en masse''. W.C.C. Claiborne, appointed by Thomas Jefferson to be governor of the Territory of Orleans, formally accepted delivery of the French colony on December 20, 1803. Free men of color had been members of the militia for decades under both Spanish and French control of the colony of Louisiana. They volunteered their services and pledged their loyalty to Claiborne and to their newly adopted country. The militia of Creoles of color would, a decade later, again volunteer to defend their city and country at the Battle of New Orleans, when the British began landing troops on American soil outside the city in December 1814. But in early 1804, the new U.S. administration in New Orleans, under Governor Claiborne, was faced with a dilemma previously unknown in the United States, i.e., the integration of the military by incorporating entire units of previously established "colored" militia. In a February 20, 1804, letter to Claiborne from Secretary of War Henry Dearborn wrote that "it would be prudent not to increase the Corps, but to diminish, if it could be done without giving offense." Beginning with the United States acquisition of the Louisiana Purchase and especially after the American Civil War, many Creoles of color lost their status under the binary system of the United States. Its southern society had classified people with any visible African ancestry as black and second class, because slavery had become a racial caste. Former free people of color were relegated to the ranks of the masses of emancipated slaves. With their advantage of having been better educated than the new freedmen, many Creoles of color were active in the struggle for civil rights.〔Kathe Managan, (The Creole Community and the Struggle for Civil Rights ), lameca.org, Accessed November 22, 2013.〕〔Adam Fairclough, (Race & Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana, 1915-1972 ), University of Georgia Press, 2008, pp. 1-21〕 But white Democrats regained political power across the former Confederate states by the late nineteenth century and began to re-impose white supremacy. To achieve this, they established legal racial segregation under a Jim Crow system and disfranchised most blacks through voter registration and electoral rules, often part of new state constitutions. Creoles of color suffered a major reversal when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against them with ''Plessy v. Ferguson'' in 1896, ruling that "separate but equal" accommodations were constitutional. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Creoles of color」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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