Omni Royal Orleans Hotel, 621 St. Louis St.
There is a fee to attend and registration is required.
From the early eighteenth century to the close of the Civil War, Louisiana possessed a tripartite racial classification system consisting of whites, slaves, and free people of color. Such stratified populations were present in many New World slaveholding societies, particularly in South and Central America and the Caribbean. Louisiana, with its longstanding cultural and historical ties to the French and Spanish Caribbean, was no exception. By 1810 free people of color—the group that had long occupied the middle ground between slavery and freedom—composed 29 percent of New Orleans’s population, a demographic unmatched by any other U.S. city or territory. On Saturday, February 5, 2011, The Historic New Orleans Collection will examine this critical topic in Louisiana’s history at the sixteenth annual Williams Research Center Symposium: Identity, History, Legacy: Free People of Color in Louisiana.
