Madame Couvent's Legacy: History, Memory, and New Orleans's Creoles of Color in the Jim Crow South

At the turn of the twentieth century, when white Americans had begun to memorialize the Civil War as a national struggle between brothers, Creoles of color in New Orleans sought to inscribe another kind of historical memory.  In the aftermath of the Plessy decision, they set out to record the historical accomplishments of free people of color in antebellum New Orleans.  One institution, in particular, became the focus for recording this history: the Couvent School for free children of color. Established in 1848, the school had been at the center of the Afro-Creoles’ vision for full rights and racial equality before the Civil War. In the early 1920s, Rodolphe Desdunes and René Grandjean, began to piece together the history of the school.  Desdunes had published, arguably, the first and only history of Afro-Creoles in 1911 and had attended the school as a child.  Grandjean, (a white man of French descent married to a Creole of color) was collecting historical documents on the city’s Creoles of color. In letters, Grandjean narrated his travels through the city, in search of the school (which, to Grandjean’s surprise, was still in operation) to Desdunes, who was living away from his native New Orleans. Through the Couvent School, these two men found a way to narrate an antebellum Creole history, at a time when the society around them aimed to make them obsolete.  In the process, they uncovered an institution that remained an anchor for the identity of Creoles of color in the Jim Crow South.