The African American Experience in Louisiana

legislation proposed by rural representatives was an emblematic reversal of the first victory of
civil rights protest in New Orleans. 192
While politicians were busy rewriting laws and courts were deciding their validity, many
other elements were shaping the daily life of African Americans in Louisiana. Churches,
fraternal organizations, and benevolent societies were key social institutions, contributing to
community cohesiveness and independence by facilitating mutual aid, collaboration, and support
within communities. They also offered opportunities for cultural as well as spiritual enrichment
and expression. In the late postbellum era, churches were among the first institutions founded by
freed slaves. The Baptist church grew in popularity among African Americans as did, to a
smaller extent the Congregational, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches. By 1880, the
Methodist Episcopal Church and the African Methodist Episcopal Church claimed the most
African American congregants in New Orleans. 193
Although Catholicism remained the religion of many of Louisiana’s African Americans,
the church lost an estimated 20,000 members between the end of the war and 1890. 194 Possible
reasons for this drastic decline in membership may be the association of the church with the prior
regime of slavery and the postbellum culture of racism. 195 Catholic churches that had previously
offered unrestricted seating, began designating pews specifically for African Americans in the
late nineteenth century and racial conflicts began to occur during services. As a remedy, the
Catholic Church started creating separate parishes for African Americans, beginning with St.
Katherine’s in New Orleans in 1895. 196 A second African-American parish was formed in New
Orleans in 1909 by relocating white members of Mater Dolorosa Church to a new facility and
keeping black members in the old building, which became St. Dominic’s. 197 While African
Americans may have enjoyed having separate congregations of their own creation in protestant
AME or Baptist churches, such new imposition of segregation by the Catholic Church must have
reeked of the discrimination being experienced in public areas of daily life. African Americans
who remained devoted to their Catholic religion found ways to connect the liturgy with a vision
of the equality of all of humanity, even while human powers in the church allowed Jim Crow to
shape its built environment.
While churches were inarguably a center of black life in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, benevolent societies had African American memberships second only to the
churches. 198 Between Emancipation and 1880, over 200 African American benevolent or
fraternal organizations were recorded in New Orleans; while the 1912 and 1913 directories of
black businesses in the city list 150 benevolent societies. Just following the Civil War the
mortality rates of African Americans was disconcertingly high. An irony of emancipation was
192 Fischer, in Vincent, Part B, 336.
193 Reinders, in Vincent, Part A, 413.
194 Ibid.
195 Ibid.
196 Justin Poché, “Separate but Sinful: The Desegregation of Louisiana Catholicism, 1938-1962,” in Louisiana
Beyond Black and White: New Interpretations of Twentieth –Century Race and Race Relations ed. Michael S.
Martin (Lafayette: University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press, 2011), 37-38.
197 Ibid.
198 Claude F. Jacobs, “Benevolent Societies of New Orleans Blacks During the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth
Centuries,” in The African American Experience in Louisiana: Part C, ed. Charles Vincent (Lafayette: University
of Louisiana at Lafayette, 2002), 7, first published in Louisiana History 29 (1988): 21-33.
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