Empire of Sin by Gary Krist Page B

context in which white men and young mixed-race women (and usually the women’s mothers) could meet and come to mutually agreeable terms for a relationship. Such liaisons continued to occur well beyond the end of the Civil War, and were regarded, at least in some circles, as perfectly normal and acceptable.
    After Emancipation, of course, a steady migration to New Orleans of rural ex-slaves complicatedthe racial dynamics of the city. The newly arrived African Americans—far less educated and predominantly Protestant and English-speaking—tended to cluster in Uptown neighborhoods, while Creoles of Color remained mostly in their old neighborhoods on the other, downriver side of Canal Street. But although tensions and competition existed between the two groups, they often worked together for Reconstruction-era legislation granting rights to all people of color, whether black or mixed-race, African American or Afro-Creole.
    All of this had begun to change in the late 1870s, when the Compromise of 1876 brought the end of Reconstruction. With the removal of federal troops from the South, white “Redeemers” had acted quickly to assert political control over New Orleans and the rest of Louisiana. A new state constitution in 1879 removed many of the equal-rights provisions put in place right after the war. But even so, the Redeemers (many of whom eventually wound up on the Committee of Fifty that played such an important role in the Hennessy affair) were reluctant to do too much too soon.Fearing a return of federal military intervention, they did not begin to codify white supremacy (a term that in nineteenth-century Louisiana carried no pejorative connotation among most whites) for some time. Even as late as 1884–85, when New Orleans hosted the World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition, interracial contact was still relatively free. One prominent visitor of the day, writer Charles Dudley Warner, was pleasantly surprised by what he saw at the fair. “White and colored people mingled freely,” he reported. “On ‘Louisiana Day’… the colored citizens took their full share of the parade and honors. Their societies marched with the others, and the races mingled on the grounds in unconscious equality of privileges.”
    But starting in 1890—just around the time that Mayor Shakspeare and his allies had begun their campaign against the Italian underworld—Louisiana whites decided it wastime to reassert old racial hierarchies as well. And in this task the white elites had the full support of the white working class, now feeling the pinch of job competition from black workers. New steps were taken to assert an inviolable color line in everyday life, and at the same time to systematically erase the “middle-caste” distinction enjoyed by the city’s Creoles of Color. The most ominous of these efforts was a movement to institute a railroad segregation law. Naturally, political opposition to the proposed measure—Section 2 of the 1890 Louisiana Legislature’s Act 111—was fierce. But by the summer of 1890, Act 111 had been passed by the legislature, becoming the state’s first official Jim Crow law. Unfortunately, it would not be the last.
    The story of how this pernicious new law was tested bya young man named Homer Plessy, a light-skinned Creole from the Faubourg Tremé, is well known. Less well known is the fact that Plessy’s arrest on June 7, 1892, was entirely orchestrated by an organization of well-heeled Creoles of Color known as the Comité des Citoyens. Even the train conductor and arresting policeman were in on the plot, calmly apprehending the young shoemaker when he refused to leave the whites-only carriage of an East Louisiana Railroad train. But although Plessy’s court challenge would take years to work its way to the Supreme Court, the onslaught of Jim Crow in Louisiana just continued. Over the next few years, othernew laws were passed to suppress the status and freedom of the state’s black