The Historical Roots Of New Orlean's

5 Pages 1187 Words

5/2/04
The Historical Roots of New Orleans’s Jazz Funerals
The history of the colonization of Louisiana and, in particular, New Orleans, explains why Jazz funerals developed into racially diverse public displays of celebration. In the early 18th Century, a Creole culture emerged from the intermixing of African slaves, French settlers, Native Americans, French and Swiss soldiers, and indentured European workers. The intermixing of this diverse group resulted in ethnic alliances between Europeans, Native Americans, and African slaves that did not occur anywhere else in North America. The French colony of New Orleans was continually threatened by the potential revolt of nearby Native American tribes and its African labor force. In 1720, fifteen slaves and indentured servants were accused of attempting to escape the French colony; the accused “included an 18 year old Native American slave, a 15 year old runaway African slave, and a 27 year old French woman who had been sent to Louisiana by force” (Smith 21). A similar state of oppression caused African, European, and Native Americans to begin to cooperate in their struggle to escape the bondage of slavery. By the early 18th Century, New Orleans was already a diverse urban area where a multiplicity of different ethnicities living in a dense area began to form the New Orleans Creole culture that continues to be seen today in Jazz Funerals, Mardi Gras, Saints Days, and other public cultural events organized by New Orleans social clubs.
A French governor, D’Abbadie, characterized the early 18th Century New Orleans population as “a chaos of iniquity and discord” (Smith 22). The majority of New Orleans residents were enslaved, impoverished, and oppressed peoples who began to develop a Creole culture which valued pleasure as a means to escape the harsh reality of everyday life. “Garrison soldiers, convicts, loose women, planters, Indians, slaves and free negroes” formed a �...