Afro-Creole Teachers as Exiles: The Haitian Revolution and Public Education in New Orleans, 1809-1841

• In Event: (Re)membering Trans-Atlantic Creole Pedagogies: Black Fugitive Teachers From the New Orleans Archives

Abstract

Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1997) writes in Silencing the Past that the Haitian Revolution “entered history with the peculiar characteristic of being unthinkable even as it happened” (p.73). This paper focuses on the educational activism that emerged in the revolutionary Atlantic world in the aftermath of the French and Haitian Revolutions (Geggus, 2001; Genovese, 1979). Thousands of French emigrés and French Caribbean exiles, including free people of color, and enslaved Africans, sought refuge in the United States in numerous Atlantic port cities including Baltimore, Philadelphia, Charleston, and New Orleans. Almost immediately in Louisiana, they began the process of recreating communities through the establishment of mutual aid societies, literary and social organizations, masonic lodges and most importantly, schools. While the educational initiatives of these émigrés in the Northern port cities is relatively well documented, the educational initiatives in New Orleans have received less historical attention. However, for the thousands of free Africans and African descendant enslaved Haitian immigrants to Louisiana, its French and Catholic roots provided a familiar culture where they continued their revolutionary struggle for freedom, citizenship, and equality (Brasseaux & Conrad, 1992). In the wake of the revolution, Haitian émigrés reinvigorated a trans-Atlantic ideology and identity that sought full citizenship in the new American republic. The French and Haitian revolutions had abolished slavery and granted full citizenship to all people. For the newly arrived free people of color, whose status as citizens was uncertain, they immediately began the work of establishing their right to citizenship. Education was central to this claim. Ultimately, citizenship was denied, relegating these émigrés to a racial and national exile (Thompson, 2009).
One of these exiles was Joseph Bazanac, a free person of color, who arrived in New Orleans in 1809, and like many other émigrés immediately went about opening a “public” school in the French Quarter that welcomed students of all races. The early part of nineteenth century in New Orleans has been described by Alisha Johnson (2017) as a “liberated” space in which free people of color, while not full citizens, were able to garner respect through their educational attainment. While some engaged in education only briefly until they could secure more lucrative employment, many were committed educators who saw education as critical to creating an interracial, democratic public sphere through which human equality would be embodied. This commitment is exemplified by Jean Bazanac’s school on Dauphine Street, which welcomed students of all shades. His son, Joseph, would go on to be a renowned music teacher, who in the 1840s administered an interracial school in the Faubourg Marigny with Jean Louis Marciacq, a white, exiled Frenchmen. Drawing on numerous archival sources: newspapers, city directories, sacramental records, and Louisiana Territorial papers, this paper details the agency of Bazanac and others to create interracial schools as counter-public spaces which envisioned a universal citizenship. Ironically, these experiments in interracial, democratic education were hampered in 1841 when “public schools” were established in New Orleans as “white only,” marking the public sphere as a segregated space and constructing African Americans as noncitizens.

Author

• Petra Munro Hendry, Louisiana State University