Those who were forced into the ships of the infamous slave trade probably thought of themselves using ethnic and territorial terms that have been lost to us. But across the ocean, enslavers and local elites lumped Africans of many different backgrounds into a single category of debasement, “Negroes,” and sustained this category through laws that regulated freedom.

But the creation of racial identity through legal means took some surprising turns.

From the beginning, enslaved people and free people of African ancestry used those same laws to claim freedom and citizenship for themselves and their loved ones. They created spaces for communities where “blackness” and freedom were not only possible, but foundational.

Although free people of color were few in number compared to enslaved people, and lived on the margins of plantation societies in many ways, the contests over their identities, status, and rights were the terrain on which race was made. Legal contests over freedom determined whether and how it was possible to move from slave to free status, and whether claims of citizenship would be tied to racial identity.

By the early 18th century, Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana (all colonies themselves, of the Spanish, British, and French Empires, respectively), had legal regimes that constituted blackness as a debased category equivalent to enslavement. But 150 years later, by the mid-19th century, the social implications of blackness in each of these regions were fundamentally different.

In Cuba in the 1850s, a free man of color could marry a white woman, attend public school, and participate in a religious association that gave him opportunities to be part of public life. But, in 1850s Louisiana or Virginia, a free man of color saw his churches and schools being shut down, faced prosecution for marrying across the color line, and ran the risk of being kidnapped, imprisoned, and even re-enslaved for remaining in the state in which he was born.

In Louisiana or Virginia, when a person sought to prove in court that he was not a person of color, he would bring evidence of civic acts, because citizenship and whiteness were so closely linked in political thought and legal doctrine that a citizen must be a white man, and only a white man could be a citizen. In Cuba, similar conduct was not necessarily incompatible with blackness.

The key to understanding these divergent trajectories lies in the law of freedom. Different approaches to freedom were rooted in various legal traditions. The right to manumission, for example, was firmly entrenched in the Spanish law of slavery, and so in Cuba manumission, or release from slavery, was not tied to race, a crucial difference from both Louisiana and Virginia.

One turning point in this story was the Age of Revolution. The populations of free people of color, who claimed freedom in rising numbers, exploded in all three jurisdictions, and the example of the Haitian Revolution inspired the enslaved as it struck fear in the hearts of enslavers.

But the expansion of freedom meant different things in the Spanish empire and in the U.S. republic. Communities of people of color in Cuba and Spanish Louisiana owed their existence to legal understandings and customary practices anchored in traditions of the ancien regime. Enslaved people who managed to purchase their freedom or, more rarely, obtained manumission through other means, became members of highly stratified societies. Black freedom did not imply social equality and republican rights.

By contrast, in Virginia during the Age of Revolution, the expansion of manumission, and the increase in freedom lawsuits, were tied to questions of citizenship, and of black participation in the new political order under conditions of equality. Enslaved and free people of color alike infused these questions with a sense of urgency, as they made use of every available legal loophole to purchase or make claims for their own freedom. Their actions produced dramatic results: by the early 19th century, the proportion of free people of color in Virginia had increased significantly.

Virginia’s white citizens witnessed these trends with horror and petitioned to outlaw manumissions. It was, literally, a reactionary request: to restore the colonial law of freedom. The 1806 law requiring freed slaves to leave the state fell short of that goal, but marked the first step towards a social order in which blacks could only exist as slaves.

After Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831, whites’ political will to exclude free blacks intensified. Slaveholding states in the U.S. South responded to threats of rebellion, and to Northern abolitionists’ demands for immediate emancipation, with a defense of slavery as a positive good: the best possible condition for debased “Negroes.” To galvanize the support of non-slaveholding whites, Southerners cemented white solidarity by defining citizenship and voting rights along racial lines.

This movement created a paradox: egalitarian democracy would go hand-in-hand with the expansion of racist practices and ideologies. As slaveholders appealed to non-slaveholders with the promise of broad citizenship rights for all white men, free people of color became increasingly anomalous, and even dangerous to the polity. That is why colonization efforts that sought to remove free blacks to a distant location in Africa prospered in 19th-century Virginia and Louisiana (which changed hands to the United States in 1803), but not in Cuba.

That is also why Virginia and Louisiana acted in the 19th century, especially in the 1850s, to end the possibility of manumission, self-purchase, or freedom suits. By 1860, free people of color in Virginia and Louisiana were increasingly forced to leave the state upon emancipation or to live under threat of prosecution. A few even chose “voluntary” re-enslavement in order to remain with their families.

Free people of color continued to claim freedom in court, and fought tenaciously for the basic rights to a homeland, to remain close to friends and kin, and to live in their communities of origin. Yet they saw their militia and schools shut down, and their churches survived only under white leadership. Increasingly contested battles in court over racial identity attested to the growing anxiety over black citizenship and the need to prove whiteness in order to claim basic rights.

By 1860, Cuba had diverged significantly from Louisiana and Virginia—not in its legal regime of slavery, but rather in its regime of race. Enslaved people in Cuba took advantage of legal reforms that were not intended for their benefit to carve out greater freedoms for themselves. But in Virginia and Louisiana, where the status of communities of color was reduced to something closer to slavery, race rather than enslavement became the true “impassable barrier,” in the words of Justice Roger B. Taney. In Cuba, where free people of color could be rights-bearing subjects, enslavement was the dividing line.

Laws regulating free people of color also served as a template for post-emancipation societies seeking ways to keep black people in their place. Slavery laws did not translate forward in the same way that regulations based on race did. When Southerners sought to restore the antebellum order after the Civil War, they could not re-impose slavery, but they passed Black Codes whose language echoed the laws regarding free people of color almost exactly. Under the Black Codes, freedmen could enter into contracts, own property, and appear in court on their own behalf. But in myriad other ways, their lives were constricted, just as they would have been if emancipated before 1861.

In the U.S., laws limiting the immigration of free people of color from one state into the other were the first immigration restrictions. These statutes echo into the 20th century—and to the present day—in limitations on the right to immigrate into the U.S. based on racial and national identity. In Cuba, on the other hand, legal racial barriers came under increasing attack even before final emancipation in 1886. In the 1880s, limitations on interracial marriages were eliminated and racial segregation in public services and education was outlawed. These changes were an imperial imperative. As the colonial state of Spain sought to retain control over its restive colony of Cuba, it had to cultivate the political support of the free black population. By 1898, the island’s short-lived political regime of “autonomy” recognized black males as voting subjects with equal rights.

The transition from black slavery to black citizenship was neither linear nor preordained. It was as contentious and ferociously contested a process in Cuba as it was in Virginia and Louisiana. But the new struggles for standing and citizenship took place against the backdrop of significantly different legal regimes of race. From being enslaved to being a citizen, the connecting tissue before and after emancipation for black people was not “from slave to citizen,” but from black to black.

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From 2012 to 2017, Blatty, a New Orleans-based photographer, drove to small towns and villages on the bayous to document a way of life that is rapidly disappearing. The causes of this decline include the growth of the city of New Orleans and its levees, the hurricanes, and the oil industry. In Blatty’s evocative photos, though, these communities are very much alive: You can smell the mud of the marshes, the shrimp and crabs piled up to be sold, and the oil powering the motorboats. And in quotations from the individuals she photographed you can feel their love and longing for family, tradition, and place.

In the aftermath of disasters like Hurricane Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, we’ve become aware of the intermittent extreme dangers faced by these communities. Blatty’s work, as collected in Fish Town: Down the Road to Louisiana’s Vanishing Fishing Communities, published by George F. Thompson Publishing and distributed by University of Virginia Press, shows the everyday precariousness of their world.

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Wander inside the shop, and you’ll find every surface packed with totems, oils, potions, pendants, plastic souvenirs, herbs, and unmarked satchels of gris-gris; a variety of Laveau effigies for sale; and small back rooms for tarot and psychic readings. The whole place toes that line one finds all over the city of New Orleans, which presents itself as both tourist pap and the genuine article. But the blurring of that line comes as no disrespect to the shop’s namesake. Marie Laveau, ostensible founder of American Voodoo, was very familiar with borderlands, with following that thin line between the sacred and profane.

Though they have often been overlooked or erased from the official record, prophetesses like Laveau have populated the American scene since the beginning—spiritual innovators and religious visionaries like Shaker messiah Ann Lee, godmother of liberation theology Sojourner Truth, Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy, and evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, among many others. Marie Laveau strikes me as the most fundamentally American of them all.

This painting, produced in 1920, is purportedly a copy of an earlier painting made of Marie Laveau by George Catlin in 1835. Courtesy of the Louisiana State Museum.

Laveau was born in New Orleans in 1801 (or, according to some accounts, 1794) as a free person of color, descending from a long line of enslaved foremothers. Her parents were both mixed-race, free, though hailing from different lines of the Caribbean slave economy. Not much is known about their genealogies or relationship. Likewise, the particulars of Laveau’s childhood and early adulthood are made of layer upon layer of contesting legend. Was she widowed or abandoned by her first husband, Jacques Paris? Did she have two children or seven? Did she acquire her political intel as a hairdresser? Which female relative trained her in conjure? What we do know for sure is that by the middle of the century, Marie Laveau was a Voodoo (or Voudou, or Voudun) priestess of high repute, presiding over a multiracial, multiclass, multidenominational following.

Her spiritual dominion over New Orleans ushered in a distinctly American Voodoo, one that was more porous and flexible in its influences and practices, encompassing more gods (or “Iwa”) than the Haitian Voudun that had been passed down to her mother and grandmother and great-grandmother before her. Marie Laveau is thought to be American Voodoo’s earliest public practitioner—and in this way, its prophet. From the 1820s to the 1880s, she was famous across the land. People traveled to her from far and wide for counsel, ceremony, remedy, and insight, and her clientele knew no bounds: poor, rich, white, black, free, enslaved, slave-owning, she administered to them all—and not infrequently she administered to them all at once, together.

Laveau’s community ceremonies took place in big, public spaces like the shores of Lake Ponchartrain and the paving stones of Congo Square, as well as in the private homes of the elite bourgeoisie. Her St. John’s Eve summer solstice ceremonies saw people from every stratum of New Orleans public life, observing sacred rites of annual renewal. In doing this, she wasn’t changing the social structure but instead highlighting what was already there. Her theology and teachings were syncretic, drawing from her experiences in the Catholic church and the Ursuline nuns who, according to her biographer Martha Ward, likely educated her, and above all from the traditions transmuted during the Middle Passage to the Caribbean, where her maternal great-grandmother had been trafficked generations before. Catholic saints took on the names of Hatian Iwa (gods), and vice versa. But even those traditions, by the time they reached Laveau, had been filtered through encounters with other Afro-Caribbean religions like Santería and Yoruba, and even North American indigenous ceremony. It’s the sheer volume of influences and variety, and the scope of her reach, both in her theology and in her following, that seem so deeply in keeping with the long project of American religion-making.

The history of that project has long been told through the experiences and viewpoints of white men, but there have always been a much more diverse set of prophets among us. A prophet is someone who talks to god (or the gods) and brings messages back to the flock. A prophet typically offers a new interpretation of a sacred tradition or text that points toward not only reconsidering the practices or premises of institutionalized religion, but also toward significant social change. A prophet is not a saint and may not be concerned with achieving perfection or ascension or even enlightenment. Prophecy happens to the prophet. In fact, prophets are traditionally made into freaks: so strange or countercultural, presenting an image or carrying a message that is so unwelcome, that they are cast to the margins or the wilderness.

As such outcasts, America’s women prophets were already in a difficult position. Living under patriarchy put them in a double bind of public doubt—which for Laveau, as a black woman, was a triple bind. So they had to assert their power in unusual ways, trying both to “contest the [male] monopoly of the pulpit” (to quote the 1848 Women’s Rights Convention’s “Declaration of Sentiments”) while claiming special access to the truth as “outsiders.” This position became more possible for women to assume as the 19th century’s Second Great Awakening unfolded, essentially “awakening” the white public’s belief that anyone—regardless of race, class, sex or age—could have direct access to God, and so more and more, the prophetesses’ outsider status emboldened the public’s regard for her.

While different American prophetesses’ truths may have varied in content, they all endeavored to make the same basic intervention: to spell out or live out their tradition’s concealed wisdom, according to the God (or gods) with whom they communed. They wrested interpretive authority over traditions that had been talking to, or about, them for millennia. In keeping with American tradition, their movements were self-invented, and their images self-made. The American religion scholar Catherine Ann Brekus notes in her book Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740 -1845 that because women’s contributions to religion have been continually stymied or scrubbed from the official record, their history is “characterized not by upward progress, but by discontinuity and reinvention.” But this has struck me as something that, maybe only incidentally, keeps their contributions vital, because they are difficult to appropriate.

Many prophetesses shared a particularly American canniness when it came to navigating the free market to convey their theology. Mary Baker Eddy busted into the for-profit publishing sector (books and newspapers), Sojourner Truth produced a wide array of merchandise (paperback autobiography, self-portrait tintypes), and Aimee Semple McPherson monetized the airwaves (on radio, and almost TV). The private sector provided prophetesses the means to ascend, where the churches had otherwise barred them access. Another commonality was their ability to create an enigmatic public image, of staying just barely out of reach, but also very vivid to people at the same time. Sojourner Truth renamed herself under divine influence. Mary Baker Eddy wrote dozens of conflicting autobiographical accounts. Aimee Semple McPherson is widely believed to have staged her own fake kidnapping, after which she still retained tens of thousands of followers.

Marie Laveau encompassed all of these aspects of American prophetesses, and far more. As a business and property owner, and a personal hair stylist, she developed enduring relationships across the complicated caste system of 19th century New Orleans. Her spiritual work had multiple dimensions, beyond her ceremonies: Biographer Carolyn Morrow Long has unearthed records of her prison activism, including her ministry to men on Death Row, and of her unparalleled triage work during the Yellow Fever epidemic. Martha Ward has pieced together a history of her efforts to liberate slaves by purchasing their freedom, revealing how Laveau’s spiritual practices were part and parcel with her vision of human rights.

And yet, however much we feel we know about her and however much she’s been inscribed on the city of New Orleans—through monuments like her oft-visited grave in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, through shops in the French Quarter, through the New Orleans Voodoo Museum, or through her very spirit—Laveau left no written record whatsoever. Everything we know about her is from census or secondhand, cobbled together from dozens of secondary sources, including contemporary biographers, the oral histories of old-timers recorded by Zora Neale Hurston during the Depression, Robert Tallant’s tall tales, novels, yellow journalism, and folk songs. This adds to her legendary power: We cannot pin her down. We can only trace her edge. The archive of her life and ministry requires our collective imaginations. People can write over her or appropriate her, contest each other’s memories or decrypt public records, but she will always own her story. The truth of her life will remain just out of reach to the rest of us.

If there is a single big takeaway from looking at the history of American prophetesses, it’s that the project has always been about freeing belief systems from powerbrokers, contesting the “monopoly of the pulpit,” and making way for a highly personal truth. Women like Marie Laveau had to elide the powers that be, to tap into the deeper source. Her prophecy was embodied by the community she created, which represented what America had always been and would always be: diverse, multiracial, contradictory, syncretic, mystical, stratified, racist, and only thinly democratized. Laveau embodies all of the complexities of this country, its religious and racial and cultural confusion, its violence and madness, and resolves all of it in her person and her theology. She contains multitudes—whether real or imagined. That’s where her prophetic vision issues from. It’s less that she had a specific prediction of the future, and more that she was the future.

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The bordello scenes in the video recall famous photographs from Storyville, New Orleans’s notorious red-light district, which flourished from 1898 to 1917. And while the song is clearly about Beyoncé, the persona she embodies in it resonates with an earlier iconic black female: Lulu White, the self-styled “Diamond Queen” of New Orleans’s turn-of-the-century demimonde. Knowing Lulu White’s story helps us see Beyoncé’s artistic creation within a complex historical framework, for in it are woven together threads of American history: stories of sexual slavery and prostitution; revolution and exile; and, not least, capitalism and the American Dream.

Lulu White was the most notorious madam in Storyville. She earned fame and fortune as the “handsomest octoroon” in the South, and her bordello, Mahogany Hall, featured “octoroon” prostitutes for the pleasure of wealthy white men during one of America’s most virulently—and violently—racist periods. It was also the dawn of consumer culture and the beginning of modern advertising. Thus, Lulu White crafted a persona for herself through stories that had long circulated in New Orleans; she repackaged those stories to create what today we would recognize as her brand.

The first story in White’s compendium was that of the “tragic octoroon.” The word “octoroon” describes a person who is seven parts white, and one part black. By the 1890s, the female octoroon was already a stock character in literature, having entered public discourse as part of antislavery efforts to highlight the moral and sexual depravity of the South. The label “octoroon” actually told a story about the women it described: in it their fathers were always white, and the “black” (enslaved) mothers always got successively lighter, finally producing a white-looking “octoroon.” Even in spite of paternal wishes, their daughters remained in slavery, where their light skin added to their value in the sexual slave market. The octoroon often takes her own life rather than submit—hence the “tragedy.”

The most famous abolitionist novel featured the “tragic octoroon” trope. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe described Eliza as the picture of feminine perfection, with her “rich, full dark eye,” “long lashes,” and “ripples of long silky black hair.” The reader encounters Eliza through the eyes of a visiting slave trader. “The brown of her complexion gave way on the cheek to a perceptible flush, which deepened as she saw the gaze of the strange man fixed upon her in bold and undisguised admiration.” The trader offers to sell Eliza in the New Orleans slave market. In spite of the “brown of her complexion,” she was fair enough to pass. “You would scarcely know the woman from a white one,” remarks one of the characters.

Even as stories of tragic octoroons protested slavery, they reinscribed “race.” Neither “octoroon” nor other terms, like “mulatta” or “quadroon,” were meant to be precise; the point was “one drop” of “black blood” producing something hidden deep under white skin. This played into a prevailing 19th-century stereotype of upper-class white ladies as sexually pure, pious, and submissive; black women, free or enslaved, were imagined as the opposite—sexually passionate and depraved. The very word octoroon evokes white male racial and sexual domination over several generations, with a prurient twist. The octoroon’s dormant black blood held the promise of intense, and forbidden, sex. She may have looked “white,” but, to quote Beyoncé, she had “hot sauce in her bag.” By incorporating the story of the octoroon into her brand, Lulu White reoriented her tragic fate into a modern sexual fantasy, and promised its fulfillment at Mahogany Hall, also known as the “Octoroon Club.”

The second story White wove into her brand was that of the Caribbean diaspora in New Orleans, which she used to confound her own racial status. White was born in Alabama, but she often claimed to be from the West Indies. After a racetrack refused her entry, a newspaper reported White’s complaint that “some people take her to be colored, but she says there is not a drop of Negro blood in her veins. She says that she is a West Indian, and she was born in the West Indies.” White thus asserted control over her narrative by playing on the illegibility of race in New Orleans.

What did “West Indian” mean there? Several things. New Orleans had a large Caribbean-descended population, stemming from the migrations during the French Revolution, through what became the Haitian Revolution in 1804, and then exile from Cuba several years later. All tiers of Caribbean society entered New Orleans—free whites, enslaved blacks, and free people of color—adding to a diverse population that already had a substantial percentage of free people of color. New Orleans, unlike the South as a whole, was a three-caste society, where one’s “race” did not always accord with “free” or “enslaved” status or, later, heritage. There are instances on record of Creole women suing for libel after being labeled “colored.” White’s assertion of West Indian provenance left her “race” ambiguous.

It also increased her value, because when it came to women, “West Indian” signified sublime, ineffable beauty, seemingly created by the mixture of races and the environment. The New Orleans writer Lafcadio Hearn described the type as “certainly” among “the most beautiful women of the human race,” having “inherited not only the finer bodily characteristics of either parent race, but a something else belonging originally to neither, and created by special climatic and physical conditions.” Antebellum travelers to New Orleans rhapsodized at great length about the beauty of New Orleans “quadroons.” Some of these women participated in a kind of institutionalized concubinage, whereby they entered contracts with white men. The terms of the contract, Frederick Law Olmsted remarked, varied “with the value of the lady in the market.” The female creoles of color were thus imagined as quasi-free “tragic octoroons.” Instead of being fated to sexual slavery, these women were thought to “pass their life in a prostitution,” in the words of another visitor to the antebellum city.

Lulu White’s claim to be at once West Indian, not “Negro,” and “octoroon,” blurred the matter deliberately. In a sense, she claimed both the heritage of white male creoles and of their female creole of color mistresses. This blurring was integral to White’s brand, a selling point for her business. Perhaps Beyoncé is drawing on some of this history, too: “My Daddy Alabama; Momma Louisiana; you mix that Negro with that Creole make a Texas Bama.” Lulu White turned the history of Caribbean “creoles” in New Orleans to her own use at Mahogany Hall, where light-skinned black women were literally prostitutes. White was the proprietress there; she determined the value of the lady in the market.

This brings us to the third story White’s brand comprised: the self-made man. The story of the self-made man is among the oldest in American culture, beginning at least as early as Thomas Jefferson’s fabled yeoman farmer, and, of course, Alexander Hamilton. The turn-of-the-century version still reassured Americans that by hard work, honesty, and a bit of luck, anyone could rise from humble circumstances to achieve greatness—or at least a comfortable living. Northern businessmen had long come to New Orleans to make their fortunes. The New South desire to develop the region along the lines of Northern industry created new opportunities for strivers. Lulu White’s self-promotional brand encompassed the men she sought for customers. She could make their (American) dreams come true at Mahogany Hall—as she had her own.

Postcard depicting Basin Street, once a hub of high-end prostitution. Courtesy of the New Orleans Public Library/Wikimedia Commons.

White’s narrative of self-made success presented a distorted, winking reflection. She was a woman of color; her business was selling sex. Yet, it scarcely mattered that “legitimate” New Orleans did not believe White’s self-creation myth. Her customers were unlikely to have believed it themselves. A promotional pamphlet touting the success of “this famous West Indian octoroon,” described Mahogany Hall as having cost $40,000 to erect, and called it “unquestionably the most elaborately furnished house in the city of New Orleans, and without a doubt one of the most elegant palaces in this or any other country.”

White operated in a netherworld of transgressive pleasure that flouted the morality of respectable society. Lulu White, the brand, was not diminished by newspaper reports deriding her and calling her “negress”; the notoriety amplified her appeal. And men seeking sex with lovely “octoroons” knew just where to go. As the historian Roland Marchand explains about the dawn of the consumer age, “popular convention permitted advertisers to exaggerate, as if all their statements were placed within qualifying ‘quotation marks.’” Lulu White’s keen marketing sensibility predicted the transformations in American mass culture ahead of their time.

Long before Beyoncé sang, “I dream it, I work hard, I grind ’til I own it,” Lulu White built a similar narrative of self-made ascendancy, and even a brand that allowed her to profit from the interweaving of historical narratives. And Beyoncé continues to play with these ideas, so that while her success is premised in part on her sexuality, no one imagines that she’s literally a prostitute, or that she’s really treating her lover to dinner at Red Lobster. Rather, Beyoncé embodies a fantasy, crafted from multiple stories, tinged with the hard realities of racial, sexual, and economic subordination, but, in the end, triumphant.

To be sure, the similarities between White and Beyoncé can be overstated. Lulu White was a real madam who trafficked in young women and girls for the purposes of prostitution; Beyoncé reimagines that role to inhabit all at once the prostitute, the madam, and even the pimp, while embodying a brand that is at once autobiographical and relatable to her millions of fans. If White pioneered this kind of self-packaging, Beyoncé, also known as “Queen,” perfected it.

Lulu White died in obscure poverty in 1931. But her brand has been revived over the years as an emblem of a mythic, romanticized Storyville. The older stories persist, too. At the end of the “Formation” video, Beyoncé lies atop a police car floating in the Mississippi River. She sings as the car sinks into the deep, an homage, perhaps, to the tragic octoroon.

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It is one of the great ironies of 20th-century American history: Hubert Humphrey, the foremost proponent of civil rights among American politicians, had little contact with African Americans until age 28.

Humphrey’s distance from people who would benefit from his legislative prowess was a result of biography and history. He was born in 1911 in the tiny prairie hamlet of Wallace, South Dakota, which had no African Americans. In 1919, he moved with his family 50 miles southwest to slightly larger Doland, where he encountered only a few African-American highway workers with whom he traded the newspapers he hawked for rides on their mule-pulled wagons, a practice his mother, Christine Sannes Humphrey, disapproved of.

But young Hubert’s pharmacist father, Hubert Sr., strongly encouraged his son toward a more liberal outlook by reading nightly to him and his three siblings from the works of Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and Woodrow Wilson. Demonstrating a strong commitment to democracy and social justice, Humphrey made his pharmacy into a meeting house for townspeople to debate local and national issues.

Still, even during young Hubert’s undergraduate years at the University of Minnesota—in a state where African Americans then made up less than .05 percent of the population—he recalled having only one serious conversation with an African-American student.

This changed when Humphrey, who graduated Phi Beta Kappa and won the University of Minnesota’s Forensic Medal for his debate skills, sought his Master’s degree in 1939 at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. He chose LSU because the chairman of its political science department was a friend of his Minnesota mentor, and offered him a paid fellowship.

Nearly half of Baton Rouge’s population was African-American, and strict segregation was the order of the day. Humphrey’s sensibilities were jarred when he saw “WHITE” and “COLORED” signs at every public facility. We don’t know if Humphrey made any African-American friends in Baton Rouge; he makes no mention of friends other than Russell Long, the son of Louisiana’s populist governor Huey Long, who was a campus politician and later a colleague of Humphrey in the U.S. Senate. And he spent much of his time on campus, engaged in his research.

But he couldn’t help but notice that wealthy whites lived in stately mansions, middle-class whites resided in neatly painted homes, and African Americans lived in unpainted shacks near open sewage ditches.

He realized, as he recalled in his autobiography, The Education of a Public Man, that he was a “conventional northern liberal,” and that he had thought of blacks only as a group and had not been aware of institutionalized white paternalism. He also recognized that his classmates, living in a city with African Americans, weren’t any more connected; they avoided most blacks. The one exception was an LSU classmate who told Humphrey he loved his “mammy,” an African-American employee of his parents who had brought him up and done more for him than his own mother.

Humphrey’s Louisiana experience convinced him that no one could view black life in Louisiana—Southern segregation—without “shock and outrage.” But it also opened his eyes to prejudice in the North that he had not recognized. His “abstract commitment” to civil rights became one of “flesh and blood,” he recalled in his autobiography.

It was hardly a full awakening to racism. Humphrey wrote his Master’s thesis on “The Political Philosophy of the New Deal,” in which he heaped praise on President Franklin Roosevelt’s willingness to use the federal government to undertake bold experiments intended to stabilize society, preserve capitalism, and establish basic economic security for everyone, especially those most in need. But Humphrey said nothing about the New Deal’s failure to advance civil rights or race relations significantly.

Returning to the University of Minnesota to pursue a doctorate in 1940, the always cash-strapped Humphrey took a Works Progress Administration job directing its Twin Cities Worker Education Program. He traveled the state and soon began speaking out against the deplorable working conditions of lumberjacks, miners, and factory workers—as well as against racial and religious discrimination. He was in favor of establishing a federal committee to ensure fair employment practices, which FDR created in 1941. This work led several public and labor union officials to urge him to run for mayor of Minneapolis.

On his second try, in 1945, Humphrey won. His coalition included strong support from African-American and Jewish communities (though they comprised just 1 and 5 percent of the city’s population, respectively), as well as from organized labor, which provided campaign funds and volunteers. In addition, key members of the business community—including John Cowles, owner and publisher of three major Minneapolis newspapers, including the Star Journal, the Morning Tribune, and the Times—backed Humphrey in the belief he would work to rid the city of its organized crime units.

Humphrey soon forged an urban New Deal that brought significant reform to a corrupt police force, improved labor-management relations, and regulated housing sales and rental practices. He also succeeded in shutting down many illicit business operations run by organized crime.

Above all Humphrey sought to root out discrimination in Minneapolis, which journalist Carey McWilliams had labeled the “capital of anti-Semitism in America.” He established a Mayor’s Council on Human Relations that organized a major self-survey drawn by Fisk University sociologists; the effort sent 600 volunteers to survey businesses, labor unions, and realtors about racial attitudes and discriminatory practices. This was a groundbreaking idea, advanced by an African American university that was a premier educator of teachers in 1947.

He ultimately convinced the city council to urge real estate developers needing its approval not to put restrictive covenants in deeds—which was one way neighborhoods were segregated by race and ethnicity.

Humphrey gained his most significant breakthrough in January 1947 when he persuaded the city council to pass a fair employment practices ordinance that outlawed discriminatory practices in hiring, firing, promotion, and compensation of employees, and established a commission to enforce its ruling with fines or jail sentences. (This was the nation’s first municipal fair employment practices commission.)

Similarly, Humphrey sought to desegregate bowling alleys, one of America’s most popular after-work facilities at the time. He succeeded in Minneapolis. In 1948, he had the Minneapolis and St. Paul Committee on Fair Play in Bowling sponsor a nondiscriminatory “All American Bowling Tournament.” But, despite a lobbying campaign, he was unable to persuade the American Bowling Congress to induce the owners of the nation’s 75,000 bowling alleys to open their lanes to all players.

Later in 1948, Humphrey, then an aspiring candidate for the U.S. Senate and a speaker at the Democrats’ national convention, stepped dramatically onto the national political stage. His address, delivered despite threats from the White House that he would hurt the party and his own career, called on Democrats to “get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.” This speech galvanized the convention to adopt the first civil rights platform in the Democrats’ history; it called for equal employment opportunity, equal treatment in the military, protection of voting rights, and safety from lynching.

These advances had political costs. Humphrey’s speech caused some Southern Democrats to bolt the convention and form the Dixiecrat Party. But it also energized President Harry Truman’s campaign—in part by drawing African-American voters in big cities in crucial states—and was greatly responsible for his stunning upset victory over the Republican nominee, New York Governor Thomas Dewey. Humphrey also won his election to the Senate over incumbent Republican Joseph Ball by campaigning on civil rights and “health care for all.”

Humphrey’s 1948 efforts had put civil rights on the nation’s agenda and it would stay there for decades. The senator would keep pushing, despite suffering many bitter verbal attacks from Southern Democrats. Through the middle of the 20th century, he would be the nation’s political leader in advancing the historic civil rights acts of 1957, 1964, 1965, and 1968. These laws were intended to assure every American the right to full and fair participation and equal treatment in every aspect of life, including voting, employment, home ownership, schooling, and military service.

He would lose the presidential election in 1968—the campaign for which he may be best remembered—but he then returned to the U.S. Senate in the 1970s to continue advancing legislation for rights. He became the leading voice of American liberalism and, as Vice President Walter Mondale said upon his death in 1978, “the country’s conscience.”

The post How the South Made Hubert Humphrey Care About Race appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Wilson rode home alongside the winding Mississippi River, where he was confronted by a group of armed white men on horseback. He was aware that freed people had been killed the day before, but wrongly assumed that the carnage had ended. The men ordered him to dismount, and one of them struck his jaw with the butt of a shotgun. Wilson was thrown into a wagon with other captive freedmen and transported to a makeshift prison.

Later that evening, Wilson and a few others were dragged out of their cells, lined up, and blasted with shotguns. Everyone was killed except Wilson, who somehow crawled into a nearby cane field and waited for three days until he felt safe. Over the next few days, white men tore through the parish, attempting to eliminate any further threats, leaving behind them a trail of black corpses. Estimates of the massacre range from 35 to more than 100 murdered.

Historically, this event has usually been labeled “the St. Bernard riots.” It should be termed the 1868 St. Bernard Parish Massacre—one of the most brutal episodes of racist violence in U.S. history, as well as one of the most forgotten. I first came across it while working as a Louisiana history teacher in St. Bernard Parish, looking for events that my students would be able to relate to their own lives.

What I discovered was that a murderous rampage had occurred in my hometown, and almost no one knew. The perpetrators never discussed their atrocities. Local records were lost due to numerous floods, including Hurricane Katrina in 2005. I researched these events for years, driving to and from work, down roads and past former cane fields that were once the bloody battleground of Reconstruction.

Not only did I live in the very parish where the massacre took place, but the surnames of the assailants and the victims matched those of some of my students, both black and white, who worked together, played sports together, and shared lunches. As I delved deeper into U.S. Congressional archives, I uncovered investigations commissioned by the Freedmen’s Bureau and the Louisiana State Legislature, and correspondence with then-President Andrew Johnson. But my most startling discovery was that several of my students were the descendants of those involved, victims and perpetrators alike.

The racial tension that sparked the massacre was not unique to St. Bernard Parish. By 1868, the South had lost the Civil War and was struggling to rebuild its battered economy, which had depended heavily on an enslaved population. Louisiana was under federal military occupation during Reconstruction, and black males had obtained the right to vote.

The stakes were high for Southern elites in the presidential election, the first since the end of the war. If they could solidify a win for Horatio Seymour, a “Copperhead” Democrat who had promised to roll back Reconstruction policies, they might regain some of the power they had lost. Seymour railed against “Negro supremacy” and proudly painted himself as the “White Man’s” candidate. Whites believed that a victory by Seymour’s Republican opponent, Ulysses S. Grant, former commander of the Union Army, would pave the way for racial equality, leading to the collapse of economic and political systems that favored whites in the South.

After the Civil War ended, many impoverished whites faced increased economic hardship. Wealthier whites exploited their fears and blamed freed blacks as the cause of their ills. Newspapers owned by these elites were full of anti-Republican and racialized propaganda. Many poor whites perceived Reconstruction as a form of government occupation that disadvantaged them while favoring freed people. Conditions were ripe for dangerous rhetoric to turn lethal.

Violence in St. Bernard Parish started a pre-election pro-Seymour rally on Sunday, October 25, 1868. As white marchers passed by Eugene Lock, a freedman, they yelled for him to “hurrah” for Seymour. Lock refused. Someone grabbed Lock to intimidate him into submission, but as Lock remained steadfast, the crowd grew increasingly agitated. One white man tried to stab Lock with a knife, while another shot at him, narrowly missing his target. Lock drew his own pistol and fired back, hitting the shoulder of the man who had fired at him. Outnumbered, Lock tried to escape, but was shot in the head and mortally wounded before finally being stabbed. As news of the altercation sped through the small community, men grabbed their arms and prepared for battle.

Yet there was no battle, only a one-sided rampage by marauding whites. Throughout the week, armed white militias hunted freed people like Louis Wilson, as if for sport. In his testimony to an agent of the Freedmen’s Bureau shortly after the tragedy, Wilson said of the parish that he once called home: “This is such a cold place, I am afraid I will die here.”

According to an 1868 report by the Freedmen’s Bureau and an 1869 report by the Louisiana General Assembly, white mobs broke into homes and shot residents at close range, conducted executions in the streets, and killed those who tried to intervene. They plundered former slave quarters and stole items they found useful, most notably registration papers. A black pregnant woman was hacked to death by men with bowie-knives next to the courthouse. A white police officer was murdered by mobs for trying to keep the peace. It was 19th-century terrorism.

And it succeeded. While countless numbers of freed people fell victim to the violence, one white man, Pablo San Feliu, was killed by freed blacks in retaliation. Any legitimate supervisor of the presidential election was jailed, executed, or fled. Grant received only one vote in St. Bernard Parish as Seymour swept the state. According to historian John C. Rodrigue, “Republicans captured the presidency in 1868, but white terror carried the day in Louisiana.”

Despite the federal investigation, no one was arrested for the killing of the freed people. Black survivors identified white neighbors as their assailants, but no justice was sought. Instead, more than 100 freed people were arrested by local authorities and vigilantes for the killing of Pablo San Feliu. Over time, the massacre faded into obscurity. To this day, its only physical reminder is the tombstone of Pablo San Feliu, located in St. Bernard Cemetery, which reads:

The inaccuracies on San Feliu’s tombstone misrepresent the circumstances surrounding his death. The incorrect date suggests that it was erected a significant amount of time after the massacre, perhaps memorializing his death as if he were a martyr. The engraver referred to the freed people as “slaves.” Most importantly, by placing blame on carpetbaggers, the derogatory term applied to Northerners and other outsiders who had migrated to the South during Reconstruction, the inscription implies that San Feliu was an innocent murder victim.

Headstone of Pablo San Feliu in St. Bernard Cemetery. Photo courtesy of Rhett Pritchard.

Nearly a decade after the massacre, Reconstruction officially ended. By 1877 Louisiana had returned to “home rule,” which meant that the black population was no longer protected by federal occupation. The new state government focused on suppression of black voters. The new state constitution allowed for arbitrary literacy tests and issued poll taxes, while also granting grandfather clauses that allowed white people to circumvent these obstacles to voting. By 1898, the black voting bloc had declined from 164,000 to a mere 1,342. By 1910, that number dropped to 730, less than a half-percent of eligible black men. Their political voice was silenced throughout Louisiana.

A massacre of this magnitude deserves a place in history. In researching a book on the incident, I sought the assistance of locals who were aware of the ordeal, some from oral histories. Subsequently, I incorporated the story of the St. Bernard Parish Massacre into my teaching curriculum, so that students could be made aware of their community’s history and its relevance today. Other teachers also have the book in their classroom and discuss it with their students, examining how dangerous rhetoric can lead to deadly actions and the dire consequences of racist scapegoating.

My students are often shocked when they learn about this chapter of their community’s history. But it provides opportunities to have open dialogue with one another about their roots, and to bring these conversations into their own homes.

I have been criticized by some in the community for unearthing buried history. Some have claimed that the timing was inappropriate, that it would worsen existing racial tensions. However, the overwhelming majority of people in the community have been supportive and eager to know more.

The progress that has brought my students closer together in the classroom can only be honored through a deeper understanding of history. These relationships epitomize how far race relations in Louisiana have advanced due to people pushing against barriers, from that lone man who voted for Grant in St. Bernard Parish to those who waged the nation’s first major bus boycott in Baton Rouge nearly a century later.

However, the reversal of many gains made by black Louisianans after Reconstruction reminds us that these advances are not inherently linear or permanent. The continuing problems of mass incarceration, police brutality, and educational inequity underscore the effects of the disenfranchisement of huge swaths of the black population.

Understanding complex historical events like the St. Bernard Parish Massacre shows how we can continue to bridge racial divides today. Communities should not hide from such history, but embrace it.

The post Unraveling a Forgotten Massacre in My Louisiana Hometown appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Most Americans know and love pecans as the signature ingredient in a classic Thanksgiving pie, served with cranberries, sweet potatoes, turkey, and dressing. Few of us give much thought to the nut’s unique history.

The domestication of the pecan was a relatively recent event, accomplished during the 19th century in large part by one man: a gardener named Antoine, who toiled in slavery on a Louisiana plantation. As is often the case with enslaved people, we don’t know much about him. But it is certain that he was tremendously skilled. Antoine was the first person to figure out how to propagate individual pecan trees—creating offspring that shared desirable characteristics with a parent—paving the way for the uniformity necessary to cultivate a commercial crop.

For centuries, pecans had been a dietary staple of the Native American tribes who lived among the forested lowlands along the Mississippi River and its tributaries, from Illinois down to the Gulf Coast, into Eastern Texas and Mexico. Carried to the Eastern Seaboard by fur traders from the frontier, pecan kernels generated a great amount of interest among early explorers and America’s Founding Fathers. George Washington planted pecans at Mount Vernon in 1775. Thomas Jefferson planted them at Monticello in the 1790s. Washington was known to carry them in his coat pockets as a snack.

But growing productive pecan trees wasn’t easy. The earliest pioneers of pecan domestication were settlers along the Mississippi who experimented by planting nuts from their favorite trees. It took the trees a long time to bear nuts compared to most fruit trees. Early planters soon grew frustrated, too, when they hit another roadblock. Like many fruit and nut trees, when left to nature’s devices to multiply, no two pecan trees end up alike. You could plant 1,000 nuts from a single tree and every one of them might produce another tree that varies from its parents and siblings in a multitude of ways—leaf shape; branching pattern; size, quality, consistency, and timing of its nut production; and so on.

Would-be pecan farmers did just that, planting entire orchards of nuts from a favored tree, and wound up shocked when the nuts from the resulting trees were quite different. It didn’t take long for them to start looking for solutions.

One of the first breakthroughs came from the French explorer and botanist Andre Michaux, who observed stands of wild pecans managed by Native Americans near Kaskaskia, Illinois in 1819. Michaux was convinced of the value of the pecan nut and believed the pecan might be more rapidly adapted to commercial production in the East if its twigs were grafted onto black walnut trunks, which he falsely believed grew more quickly than pecans did.

Pecans, which are native to the U.S., grow in many shapes and sizes. Photo courtesy of Lenny Wells.

Michaux’s black walnut idea didn’t go anywhere, but his observation that joining two separate plants together could make pecan farming more profitable was a crucial one. For any crop to be successful, it must be consistent in quality and yield, and one way to achieve uniformity is through grafting. Even in ancient times farmers had figured out that joining plant tissues from two species together—one that took root and grew well in a particular region, for example, and another that produced dependably desirable flowers and fruit—allowed them to propagate entire vineyards, fields, or orchards of a single variety.

In 19th-century America, farmers achieved great success using grafting to produce apples and peaches but they hadn’t yet made the leap with pecans. The first person known to attempt propagating pecans was Dr. Abner Landrum, who joined small patches of pecan buds to young hickory trees in Edgefield, South Carolina in 1822. Some of his attempts were successful, but there was no viable market in the area to support his efforts. As a result, they were largely dismissed and quickly forgotten.

It took a larger commercial center—New Orleans—to propel the development of the pecan as a cash crop. Oak Alley Plantation, originally named Bon Sejour, was established in 1837 by Jacques Telesphore Roman, and is still recognized today by its plantation house, lying at the terminus of two rows of massive, aged live oak trees along the old River Road, southwest of Louisiana’s Lake Pontchartrain.

Oak Alley’s neighbor across the Mississippi River, the Anita Plantation, was home to a verdant pecan tree that regularly produced large, thin-shelled nuts. Sometime in the early 1840s, a local pecan enthusiast, Dr. A.E. Colomb, attempted to graft twigs from this tree onto other pecan trees. Unsuccessful, he grew exasperated, and eventually crossed the river to consult with J.T. Roman. Colomb had heard there was a talented gardener at Oak Alley.

Roman’s records show that he owned 113 slaves, 93 of whom labored in the fields. One of these workers was a 38-year-old man known only as Antoine. Roman’s ledger valued Antoine at $1,000, a lot of money for a slave at the time—although of course placing any price on a human life is horrifying. Antoine had a reputation as a master of plants and was employed in Oak Alley’s gardens.

Dr. Colomb gave pecan graftwood cut from his beloved tree to Roman, who in turn passed it on to Antoine, who began grafting an unknown number of trees near the great mansion. Sixteen of his initial grafts were successful. Eventually, Antoine grafted 126 trees at Oak Alley. We don’t know anything more about Antoine’s life.

After the Civil War ended, Oak Alley went through a rapid succession of owners who cut down many of the pecan trees to make way for sugarcane. But enough productive trees remained in 1876 for the latest of the new owners, Hubert Bonzano, to exhibit pecans at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. The nuts were displayed alongside Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, the Remington typewriter, Heinz ketchup, and the right arm and torch of the Statue of Liberty. Professor William H. Brewer, Chair of Agriculture at Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School, awarded Bonzano a certificate for his pecan, commending its “remarkably large size, tenderness of shell, and very special excellence.”

Their presence at the exhibition led Antoine’s trees to be named “Centennial,” and to become the world’s first acknowledged pecan variety. An enslaved man’s grafting technique had allowed the selection and propagation of superior pecan trees. Others copied his work, and the commercial pecan industry was born. Farmers made a profusion of new selections around the turn of the 20th century, and propagated and planted the new varieties across the South, as an alternative to King Cotton. In the non-native state of Georgia alone, pecan production grew to 20 million pounds by 1936. Georgia is now the top state in the nation for pecan production with more than 100 million pounds produced annually.

Pecans remained a local commodity for a long time, enjoyed mainly in the South, but global demand for them has skyrocketed in the last decade. Much of the emerging marketplace is in China, where the nuts are cracked, soaked in a salty or sweet solution, baked in the shell, and then enjoyed as a snack around the Chinese New Year celebration. Domestic demand is on the rise too. Scientists have discovered that pecans’ golden kernels are heart-healthy, with antioxidant effects, and help to lower bad cholesterol.

J.T. Roman’s notations regarding Antoine state only that he was “a Creole Negro gardener and expert grafter of pecan trees.” But Antoine, like so many enslaved individuals hidden from the world, was much more. His skill ultimately made possible the propagation of more than 1,000 different pecan varieties, which today are planted commercially in 14 states and on every continent except Antarctica. Our nation’s history of slavery cannot be glossed over—but within that tragedy are countless examples of courage, perseverance, and contribution which have made America what it is today. Antoine’s story is but one of these.

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