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Black Catholic History


M.SIGGA

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"I'd feel kinda silly telling people I was black."

Was black?

That sounds like your skin changed color in adolesence.

Har, har.

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ha, a lot of mine still pass for white so I only see them at weddings and funerals. when I become governor I plan to expose the masses :ph34r:

Excuse me sir, shouldn't that be "Masses"? With a capital "m"! :P

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That Kitchen looks just like our kitchen here in California. BTW I like the knights apron on that guy.

That's actaully the kitchen for the family room at my parish. :D

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Why's the Bishop standing with my Pawpaw?

hyper - unless you're Italian, you're not related......

That reminds me of a joke........A black bishop and an Italian 4th degree Knight of Columbus walk into a parish kitchen.....

Oh nevermind......

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The congregation in my parish church is a real mix of white, black, asian and hispanic. It's a beautiful mixture!

Everything being one colour is SOOO boring! :lol:

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I'm not sure if it can even be called passing anymore though..there aren't "one drop laws" anymore and i'd feel kinda silly telling people i was black...i do have a whole set of cousins in rochester new york though who i only found out about last year, rochester's where the family members that were too dark to pass went...although I don't really get why we lost touch, because its always been an open secret in South Alabama that anyone whose ancestry goes back to the French days is partly African in Ancestry.

I think we just established why there aren't more black Catholics...passing..

No sadly there really are people who started 'passing' and have to continue the lie because they married into white families, and the children don't have any idea they are part black or the husbands/wives - this happens in big Creole families. I have cousins in Louisiana and who moved to California "aka the promise land" who live as white who we can never visit talk to unless somebody dies. I have white cousins who come in town thinking they are friends of the family and I have cousins in school right now that I grew up with that pass to get into certain frats and sororities they otherwise wouldn't be able to. THey are nice people and everything, but still carry the slave-mentality and old school racism. Plus, the 1/32 drop law was never abolished in Louisiana, everywhere else though.

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cmotherofpirl

How sad that you are not allowed to just be "family"

I was amazed at the amount of prejudice I encountered when I had a black roomie in college. WE got rather defiant about it after awhile and tacked a big sign to our door "bleached and brown live here- enter at your own risk". But I had raised to believe that the only difference between people was the amount of tan God gave them.

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hyperdulia again

1/32...in 1850 in alabama my mother would've been legally defined as Creole...in Louisiana she is black and I am white...in Virginia she would white...strange...

We settled on my great grandmother being 1/8 black, because that's what makes the most sense, but actually it could be more or less...one generation would do the placage (plasage, plassage) thing and one would marry into les gens de couleur libre in Lousisiana, then another would marry Creole ("white") cousins in Alabama who were actually black....

But anyway the point of all of that wa to write a couple of sentences on misegenation (sp?) laws in Alabama...in 1819 the State defined as negroe anyone who could be proven to have one drop of "negro" blood even 1/1024 and beyond...then Some of the Scotch Irish in Northern Alabama realized that they wanted some of the land and money of the French in Southern Alabama, the only way to get this was to marry it, but if they married it their children would be black, so the changed the law again to invent an entirely new racial category, "Creole" which covered the French and Spanish planters in Southern Alabama, it was made up of people whose ancestry went back to French days...in 1900 the new constitution was written and it basically declared that if one's ancestors looked white, native, or hispanic in 1900 they were to be defined as white...so after having made everyone who was kind of confusing racially *white* they then defined black as anyone who wasn't white (which is why when the Lebanese moved to Birmingham in the 20's they were defined as black).

This is a great deal of information and I don't know why I put it here...:wacko:

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Ha mine is much more confusing. My father has a mixed Creole mother and a French (white) father. My mother has an Acadian-mixed Creole Mother and a French/Spanish Creole father, but her great grandfather was a German Jew. The African line is far and inbetween somewhere, no one really knows lol. All the siblings on both sides (11 from mom and dad) range from a light caramel with brown/green eyes to chalk white with blue eyes, some with wavy hair and the others is picket straight. A huge traditional family w/ more cousins than I can count and All strong Catholics, but surprisingly not a single vocation???

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hyperdulia again

we've just proved that we're related. my grandmother was 1/2 jewish. we are both descended from Abraham.

Father Abraham, ora pro nobis.

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hyperdulia again

Now let us take the case of my mother's paternal Grandmother, my great grandma.

She was the daughter of a woman who looks latin to me, but actually was the great granddaughter of a man named Charles Lafee (accent above the first e) who was the son of slaveholding black creoles in Haiti (his ancestry wa french, spanish, and african). he married Athenais Crenshaw Devalier (her father was Scotch Irish. her mother was french, spanish, filipino, black and german) she, Madame Devalier, was the widow of an elderly Frenchman who had moved to Mobile in the 1790's, he was an uncle of Napoleon's Josephine. Athenais and Charles had fifteen children in addition to the two Athenais had by her first husband.

Charles and Athenais had a daughter named Charlotte Aglae. Charlotte Aglae Lafee moved to New Orleans where she entered into a fifty year relationship with a white man. They had 11 children.

Their son Henri married a cousin from Mobile who was (French, native, Scotch Irish, Irish, black, and german).

Their daughter Madeleine married a free black shoemaker and had a son by him. Her family wouldn't have anything to do with her because she had married a dark man. She and her sonn left he husband and returned to her parents' house. She then met a cousin from Mobile (French, Spanish and Black). They couldn't marry, but thhey did live together quite happily for thirty years without marriage. They had seven children.

One of the girls, Marie-Louise, was auditing a class at Hrvard with her brother (who had lied aabout his race to get in). She looked accross the room and her eyes locked onto the eyes of an obviously Irish young man (green eyes, red hair, pasty). They fell in love. They told their parents. Their parents told their grandparents. They got engaged.

The families met and discovered that they were actually the *same* family. They had 12 twelve children, including my Grandfather.

Once aggain...this is a lot, but this is what people in mypart of the South do...we sit around and trace ethnic origins by seeinng how often people inbred.

There's a funny thing about my great grandfather too, he specifically went to Harvard and left Southern Alabama, because his mother told him the family needed "fresh blood." He went to Harvard to find anice girl that wasn't related to him. Instead he found a second cousin he didn't know, who was only visiting her brother for a week.

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ha! another possible trace. My father's mother's family was slaveholders in St. Domingue (now Haiti) before the Revolution when they were outed and sent away to Louisiana, Brazil, and France. Related to any Conti, Arceneaux, or Livaudais? The Conti line can be traced back to the House of Bourbon-Conti, who were part of the royal family. The line in France thinned after the Reign of Terror and the stragglers were all executed by Napoleon so only the New World line still exists today in Louisiana, Haiti, and Brazil - including my people. Our southern family likes to sit and chat about all the money our family used to have. lol.

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hyperdulia again

The Bourbon-Conti were a branch of the Bourbon-Conde (who were a branch of the Royal Line)and yes I'm related to them through a family down here called the Ygnazas* they are Spanish illegitimate offspring of the Prince de Conde who accompanied the yound Philip to Spain after Charles II died... anyhoo my grandfather's father's mother was the daughter of an Ygnaza.

*And through them I'm related to the Dukes of Manchester...Consuela Ygnaza was part of that flood of rich American women who married British Peers.

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