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Keys to the Archive: Miss Jane Pittman

Emancipation Proclamation

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Contents of this tag:
1. Oprah Links Miss Jane and Obama
2. Emancipation Proclamation
3. Louisiana Code Noir of 1724
4. Second Wave Ku Klux Klan The parade pictured here contributed to the second, and largest, wave of Ku Klux Klan activity, which emerged in the 1920s. This event took place just outside of Washington D.C. The KKK elected hundreds of officials into every level of government in every region of the United States. They were known as the “Invisible Empire” during this time and worked to terrorize Blacks, Jews, Catholics, and immigrants. The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) is an organization founded by a small group of former Confederate soldiers in Pulanski, Tennessee in 1866. Originally the group was created to invoke fear into freed slaves and the white people that helped them, but it expanded into much more. They are known for horrendous acts like the bombing of the church in Birmingham, Alabama that killed four young girls. They are also known for their symbols and strange titles (Grand Duke, Imperial Wizard, Grand Cyclops, etc). The use of these symbols was “to pose as ghosts or ‘spectral’ figures, drawing on then-resonant symbols in folklore to play ‘pranks’ against African Americans and others” (David Cunningham). They used hoods, masks, and burned crosses. The symbol of the burning cross was only added in to their symbols after The Birth of A Nation depicted a cross burning scene and the KKK adopted it to spur membership. Scandals and the rigidity of the KKK caused for membership to have difficulty increasing. However, they remain affiliated with other, similar groups (Neo-Nazis, and other organizations that use the Klan name). Today, though some continue to be blatant in their approach, others try to disguise their racist tactics through rhetoric (“rights for whites”). The KKK continues to be relevant today in many ways including through support of the current president.
5. Loving v. Virginia
6. Creole Slave Owners Creoles of color emerged in antebellum Louisiana as a distinct group of free people who enjoyed some of the same rights as whites, including the right to own slaves. For instance, thirteen members of the Metoyer family collectively owned 215 slaves in Natchitoches Parish. Augustine Metoyer issued this bill of sale, written in French, to M. In. Baptiste Florantin in 1818. The matriarch of the family was notable medic, planter, and business woman Marie Thérèse Metoyer.
7. Great Mississippi Flood of 1927
8. Jackie Robinson Breaks the Color Line
9. Slave Auction
10. Segregated South
11. Beginnings of the Transatlantic Slave Trade
12. Miss Jane Pittman Adaptation Airs
13. Huey P. Long Assassinated
14. Ernest Gaines Born Gaines was born in Oscar, LA on January 15, 1933. He wrote about sitting on the porches of Cherie Quarters as a child, drafting letters for his elders. His exposure to their stories informed much of his writing and provided a link to slavery in the United States. Although his family moved to California when he was a teen, he visited in the 1960s to see his people and take pictures of the area, such as this image of “The Quarters” of Riverlake Plantation. He later described it as “where we lived for five generations.”
15. The Spanish-American War
16. Frederick Douglass's First Speech
17. Marie Laveau Baptismal Certificate Marie Laveau was baptized on September 16, 1801 (no birth certificate exists). Known popularly as “the Voodoo Queen” of New Orleans, she is, arguably, the most famous practitioner of folk magic in American history. She was born at the end of Spanish control of Louisiana, shortly before the Louisiana Purchase, which explains why her baptismal certificate appears in Spanish. Her entry appears at the top of the page, under entry 320.
18. Student Protests at Southern University
19. Plessy v. Ferguson
20. Booker T. Washington
21. The Confessions of Nat Turner William Styron’s 1967 novel The Confessions of Nat Turner initiated the genre of neo-slave narrative. Styron, a white author, came in for criticism because the novel perpetuated racial stereotypes, sparking controversy about how to represent slavery in literature. Some scholars read Miss Jane Pittman, along with contemporaries such as Roots, as a response to Styron’s vision of kindly slaveowners and a blundering revolutionary.
22. Reconstruction Ends
23. Brown v. Board of Education

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Creole By Jaleesa Harris

The attempt to define Louisiana Creoles faces the same dilemma facing any attempt to define an ethnic group complied of people of different diasporas, languages, and experiences: deciding which or what elements to include in the synopsis, fearing one is too broad and the other too general. History has a way of establishing cultural norms adapted or created within a group of people with shared ancestry, and the same is true for Creoles of Louisiana.

Historically, Louisiana Creoles were a group of free people of color based in New Orleans before the Civil War. These people were distinguished by “their French language, culture, education, religion, and often a mixed heritage of African, French, Spanish, and Native American” (Eble 48). As a group, conflicting and confrontational racial differences created labels such as White Creoles, Black Creoles, and Creoles of Color. According to one historian, “continuing to focus on the confrontational aspect would, however, be overly simplistic, since, while the numerous groups interacted through opposition, they also progressively mingled and gave birth to a particular society, making New Orleans the “Creole capital” of the United States” (Dessens 187). Creoles of color provided a dichotomy for race relations in Louisiana during a time when most people of African descent were enslaved and considered sub-human.

The Louisiana Creole community of color, treated as an elite group of Negroes, proved privilege and phenotypic differences allowed the group levels of autonomy in education, finances, and dialect. The 1863 introduction of the Emancipation Proclamation freed all people of African descent in the Confederacy. Emancipation ushered in a time of great hope and opportunity for many, but for elite Creoles, this freedom for all removed a previously clear identity marker between the free and the enslaved. Creoles lost their once elite status and were forced to migrate from the Creole capital and create exclusives communities to maintain resemblances of their antebellum lives. In The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Ernest Gaines defines Louisiana Creoles through their relationship to the African American community at Samson Plantation.