By Sean Yoes,
Special to the AFRO
“In Francois Boguille’s home district the free men of Color formed a national guard. Unrepentant followers of Oge (a father of the Haitian Revolution), they recruited men from the nearby plantations and the threat of their alliance prompted the Whites in the district to act…In response, the free soldiers of color wrote a declaration of war against, ‘These monsters from Europe for far too long have we served as play things of their passions and their insidious maneuvering. For far too long we have groaned under the yoke. Let us destroy our oppressors and bury ourselves with them down to the slightest vestige of our shame. Let us tear up by its deepest roots this tree of prejudice.’”
-Excerpt from, “Economy Hall: The Hidden History of a Free Black Brotherhood”
Francois Boguille experienced the fiery, incipient stages of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) in the colony of Saint-Domingue at the age 14 years old. Eventually, he made his way to Louisiana, like scores of others in the wake of the only slave uprising in history to ultimately birth a country free of slavery and led by non-Whites and former slaves.
Nearly 150 years after the emergence of the sovereign nation of Haiti, an astonishing narrative of the revolutionaries who settled in Louisiana and their descendants lie in the back of a trash truck in New Orleans, moments from destruction.
“A friend of my father was one of the last members of the Economy Society. And they were emptying out the building because they were going to sell the building,” said Fatima Shaik, a native of the Economy Society community in New Orleans, recalling the last days of the legendary Economy Hall, the venue where jazz was born. The building also served as headquarters to an extraordinary group of men of Color, members of the Societe d’ Economie et d’Assistance Mutuelle.
“They (the journals) sat on the back of a trash hauler and he told my dad about it and my dad went to get the journals and he brought them home,” added Shaik, author of “Economy Hall: The Hidden History of a Free Black Brotherhood.”
It took Shaik, a former reporter with the New Orleans Times-Picayune, decades of journalistic detective work (she began combing through the thousands of pages of minutes from the meetings of the Economy Society in 1997) to craft a meticulous tome illuminating the lives of the men who helped build one of the most vibrant, multi-ethnic Black communities in America. The author focuses on the life of the story’s protagonist Ludger Boguille, the son of Francois, and his family and friends: world travelers, entrepreneurs, educators, soldiers and creatives. They birthed Economy Society in the American cauldron of White supremacy in the 18th and 19th centuries, navigating the end of slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow and the omnipresent threat of White racist terror.
“It took me until I had finished writing a few books and I was looking for something to write about, my next book,” Shaik said. “And I went to the journals. I don’t think he (Shaik’s father, Mohamed Shaik) imparted the details to me, like that they had started in 1836, or anything. I looked in the journals and what I saw at the time was the surnames of the people that were in my community. I recognized the last names,” said Shaik, who dates the journals to the time span between 1836 to 1935.
“They were free men of Color. So, that means they were people of African descent who were legally free. Legally free in Louisiana meant they could do certain things. They could buy and sell real estate. They could have bank accounts. They could read and write. But, they could not teach other people to read and write. They couldn’t become doctors or professionals, they couldn’t be lawyers. There were limits on what they could do.”
According to Shaik, the journals written in French were recovered by her father in the mid 1950’s, when she was about five years-old. The family was traveling back and forth between New Orleans and Canada while her father pursued a doctorate, a somewhat implausible task for a man of Color in the deep South in the mid 20th century.
“My Dad would sit around the kitchen table and he was always trying to teach me something. He was telling me these books were really important and at some point maybe he was going to use them for his thesis,” said Shaik, an author of six previous works of fiction. “Economy Hall,” her seventh book, is her first of nonfiction.
Ultimately, Mohamed Shaik did not utilize the journals in his pursuit of a doctorate and placed the journals in a closet where they collected dust for decades, until his daughter unearthed them at the end of the 1990’s.
Through her decades-long examination Shaik discovered a community often under siege and suspicion.
“They were always suspect because of the Haitian Revolution. So, what happened in Haiti is we know that free people and the enslaved people got together and created the revolution. So, people in Louisiana were always scared that was going to happen,” Shaik said. “So even though they were free they were always suspected that they were going to do something. They might be radicals. Here are these people with businesses and money,” she added.
Through the White racist lens, the Economy Brothers were the embodiment of “uppity,” a label that routinely made Black people the target of violence, murder and mayhem in America, especially the deep South. Yet, the Economy Society of New Orleans did not suffer the tragic fate of other formidable Black communities in the South, like those in Tulsa, Oklahoma and Wilmington, North Carolina among others.
“Because they were the majority of people,” Shaik said concisely. “If you look at the statistics…if you look at Louisiana you will see that two-thirds of the people in New Orleans were Black people, were people of African descent all the way through to the 1850’s. So, they outnumbered the Whites number one,” she added.
Number two, half of the Black people in New Orleans were free. It’s 45 percent almost consistently, from the time the Americans came over until the 1850’s. Half of the Black people are free people of Color. So, the Whites were outnumbered.”
Still, in the 1850’s, the climate of oppression in the South in particular pushed down on Black people with tectonic pressure.
“People were trying to consider what slavery was, and whether to continue it. There was ferment about the (Haitian) rebels coming up and making a separate country. People were trying to figure out what they were going to do next,” Shaik said.
In 1857, the Brothers completed the construction of the Economy Hall, their headquarters, which served as the foundation for a century of Black progress in New Orleans. “July of 1857, they completed the meeting hall (they had been collecting money to do so since the 1930’s according to Shaik). The meeting hall was two stories high, it had room for a theater. It had meeting rooms, there was a ballroom for dancing,” Shaik said. “They also started getting visited by police. I saw in the minutes, little asides…a little note that says, “police entering the meeting.” Police were coming in and out of their meetings. So, there was more scrutiny on them,” Shaik observed.
The year 1857 was also the time of the infamous Dred Scott decision, in which the United States Supreme Court declared the U.S. Constitution did not extend American citizenship to people of African descent and they had no access to the rights, privileges and protections the Constitution provided American citizens.
Through it all the Economy Society survived and in many ways thrived.
“In my journey (to write this book) I think I realized that Black people had been doing so much in the society from the very beginning. So much that we didn’t know about and we heard about orally, I found that it was all true,” Shaik said. “I knew Black men. I knew my Dad and my uncles and my cousins—they were really nice people, good people and hard working people,” Shaik told the AFRO. “Nobody saw them like that. And when I saw their surnames in the book I said these Black men have been doing this for generations.”
“I think that everyone can learn that there needs to be more documentation,” Shaik said. “There need to be more stories. People need to know the history of the country and not shy away from it.”
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