The Alabama Cajans were an ethnic group of mixed-race descent, thought to originate from free black people, whites, and Native Americans in colonial Alabama.[4] They resided mostly in the counties of Mobile, Washington, and Baldwin. They socially assorted apart from local whites and Black people, as a population isolate in the racial hierarchy of Alabama. "Cajan" was an exonym which members of these communities often considered perjorative.[5] They instead preferred the name "Our People".[1]
The Cajans were given their label by a local politician, but were unrelated to the Louisiana Cajuns, due to not being of Acadian origin. The MOWA Band of Choctaw Indians consists of a portion of their descendants.[5]
Origins
In 1810, the initial reported spread of settlement in Alabama was along the lower Tombigbee and Mobile rivers, consisting of 500 whites and 250 black people, 59 of whom were free.[6] Free Black people never made up more than 1% of Alabamans, and their proportion shrunk over time.[7] Gary B. Miller notes that 67 percent of the "free people of color" who were able to pass as white in Alabama had some degree of Indian heritage.[7]
Genealogy
The Reed family ancestral to the Cajans initially settled near Tibbie. Daniel Reed was recorded to be a mixed man from the West Indies, identified as a free Negro on census documents, and his wife Rose Reed was recorded to be a former slave of mulatto descent, emancipated from a white master in 1818. She listed her birthplace as Mississippi.[1] The Reeds were initially some of the only people listed as mulatto or colored on the 1840-1850 censuses in the Washington and Mobile counties.[8]
The sons of the Reed family married the daughters of Jim and Dave Weaver, who were themselves recorded as free people of color on the 1830 Mobile County census, while their daughters were identified as mulatto.[1] They were documented to have migrated to Alabama from Georgia, with the Byrd family, also ancestral to the Cajans.[9]
Lemuel Byrd was reported to have initially migrated from North Carolina to fight in the Indian Wars under Andrew Jackson. Byrd appeared on the 1840 Mobile County census report as a free person of color, and married Anne Weaver.[1]
These families intermarried and rapidly expanded in number of individuals and households over the generations, according to census records, which typically labelled them as Black, mulatto, or free colored.[8] The Cajans were noted to not be related in origin to the Louisiana Cajuns, who are of Acadian descent.[10][4]
Areas of historic Alabama Cajan settlement, 1950[11]
Alabama Cajans inhabited a region straddling the Counties of Mobile and Washington, it reached the hills of Mount Vernon and Citronelle; to the east, to Tibbie and Mctintosh in the north.[11] They were noted to be starkly different from the nearby Alabama Creoles and Louisiana Cajuns, given that they were mostly Protestant and had English names.[12] They were seen to often live in inaccessible areas, forming small isolated communities.[4][10] Genealogical analysis suggests many of them emigrated from their initial tracts and assimilated into other populations.[13]
In 1920, Percy Reed, great-grandson of Rose Reed, was accused of miscegenation due to his marriage to a white woman. He denied having any black heritage.[5][14] Percy said Rose had been Native American, and Reuben Reed said Rose's husband Daniel Reed had been Spanish. The judge had also described Reed as having Spanish and Native American heritage. The prosecution initially charged Reed based on descriptions of Rose, but this was later dismissed as hearsay on an appeal, and Reed's conviction was quashed.[5][14]
Afterwards, in Weaver v. State, the Alabama court developed methodology to determine if a defendant was Black, via physical characteristics and social relations, such that
“if he associates with Negroes, in his social intercourse, attending Negro churches, sending his children to Negro schools, and otherwise voluntarily living upon terms of equality socially, such are acts which may be taken as admission”. [14]
The court decided Weaver was guilty due to his relatives having appearances indicating black ancestry, thus he and his wife were imprisoned.[14] Political scientist Julie Novkov states that Weaver v. State set the guidelines for determining blackness in Alabama, and effectively removed the category of mulatto from the state, creating a binary racial system of white and Black.[14] She said it is possible Weaver was related to Reed, since the Reed trial noted the existence of a mixed-race group with the surnames of Reed and Weaver in the locality, but that neither trial confirmed this and each relied on separate witnesses and law firms.[14]
Both Reed and Weaver claimed Native American heritage in their cases.[14] Novkov stated that some Black Alabamans attempted to escape segregation by claiming to have Native American ancestors rather than Black ones, giving Reed as an example.[15] Author Gary B. Mills noted that unlike in Latin American society, there was no mulatto "escape hatch" for Black people of mixed ancestry in anglophone Alabama; many light-skinned free Black people, which included those who had Native American or white heritage, could only move out of Black society by identifying as Native American.[7] By the 1930s, there were several similar mixed race communities – that identified more as Native American than black, and were also usually identified as such by their neighbors – that were also impacted by the "one-drop rule" across the South, East and Midwest.[14]
They initially raised livestock, typically on small, unimproved tracts, then moved into the lumber industry.[16] They were also prevalent in the turpentine industry.[4] Like the nearby Redbones and Dominickers, they were noted for distilling alcohol.[17] Cajan boys were observed to not eat in the homes of others, or in front of girls from other settlements, sometimes not eating for multiple days. Due to this, older Cajan girls saved food for them to eat later.[2] Cajan women were seen wearing bright colors, scarves around their hair, fashion jewelry, and more rouge than usual.[4][18]
They received the name "Cajan" from the Alabama State senator, L.W. McRae.[19] Being sensitive to the term "Cajan", they were observed to prefer referring to themselves simply as "Our people", a name also used by the Chestnut Ridge people.[1][20]
Beliefs
Cajans, like African-Americans in the South, were seen to be devout believers in Conjure, and were observed to place objects ontop of their graves, such as shards of fine china, broken pitchers, or empty bottles, a common practice carried down from African antecedents.[4][18][21][22]
They wore "tricks" to repel diseases and bad luck.[4] They were mostly Baptists or Methodists, and by the 1970s many became involved in the Holiness movement, such that half of the pastors leading Holiness congregations in the area were Cajan, rather than white.[1][18] They were observed to sing spirituals.[23]
Schools
Cajans had their own school system by the 1930s, as "special" white schools, due to normal ones sometimes not allowing them in.[24] In areas not served by Cajan schools, they went to black schools if they could not pass as white.[25] Cajans refused to allow black teachers in their schools, sometimes refusing to attend school if a black teacher was sent by the school board, but were known to have previously allowed lighter skinned women to teach.[18][1] Cajan school cohorts developed into unofficial "castes" over time, such that the attendees of different schools developed different ranked subgroupings relative to each other.[1]
By 1969, most Cajans went to desegregated schools, with only Reed Chapel school remaining as a Cajan school.[1]
12345678{{cite book |last=Novkov |first=Julie |date=2008 |title=Racial Union |url=https://www.fulcrum.org/concern/monographs/9019s3406 |location=Ann Arbor, MI |publisher=University of Michigan Press |pages=129, 131–133, 137-141, 281, 283 |isbn=978-0-472-02287-8 |quote=Percy Reed claimed that his grandmother Rose had been of mixed race, but not of black descent.|access-date=6 February 2026
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
