The Alabama Cajans were an ethnic group of free Black, white, Creole, and possible Native American ancestry in colonial Alabama.[1][4][7][8] They resided mostly in the counties of Mobile, Washington, and Clarke. 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 pejorative.[9] 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. The MOWA Band of Choctaw Indians consists of a portion of their descendants, while others integrated into white communities, both local and distant.[1][4][10][9]
Origins
Scholars generally consider the Cajans to have been an Alabama ethnic group of free Black, white, Creole, and possible Native American ancestry.[7][4][1] The "Cajans" of Alabama were given their name by a local politician who assumed they were related to the Louisiana Cajuns, but they were unrelated and not of Acadian origin.[11][6][1] Many saw the name as pejorative, and preferred to call themselves "Our People" instead.[9][1]
Official records of the Cajans describe them in different ways at different times. Until the middle of the 20th century, the three families ancestral to the Cajans were described in official documents as free Black, mulatto, or free persons of color, with certain individuals listed as white.[4][1] This includes the Reeds, Weavers, and Byrds, notable Cajan families.[12][13]
In 1920, it was noted that the Weavers and Reeds had intermarried with four local white families, with one testimony claiming they had blood or marital connections with two-thirds of the local county.[14] In 1950, census enumerators were allowed to use local designations. In Washington County, one investigator found 734 people listed as Indian and 361 listed as "Cajun". Using surnames and assumed family relationships, he estimated that 288 people listed as white and 449 listed as Black were also of Cajan lineage in the county. In Mobile County, using similar methods but not the terms Cajan or Cajun, enumerators estimated that 86 people of Cajan heritage were listed as Indian, 737 as white, and 137 as Black.[4]
By 1974, one of the families descended from the Reeds had mostly gained social acceptance among the white families of the area, and were marked white on an earlier census.[4] Others organized as the MOWA Band of Choctaw Indians or emigrated, assimilating into the dominant populations of urban areas.[9][4]
Notable families
The Reed family initially settled near Tibbie. Daniel Reed was locally described as a mixed-race man from the West Indies. He emancipated his wife, Rose Reed, a slave born in Mississippi, in 1818.[1][9] Later on, Daniel emancipated three of their children.[9][4] 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.[15]
The sons of Daniel and Rose Reed married the daughters of Jim and Dave Weaver.[1] They were documented to have migrated to Alabama from the Putnam and Greene counties in Georgia, where they lived from 1810-1820.[9] They migrated with Lemuel Byrd, who served in Putnam County and married their sister Anne Weaver.[16][9] Byrd was recorded to have migrated from North Carolina to fight in the Indian Wars under Andrew Jackson.[1][9] By the first half of the 20th century, census records indicate that these families had intermarried and rapidly expanded in number over the region.[15]
Areas of historic Cajan settlement in Alabama, 1950[17]
The Cajans inhabited a region straddling the Counties of Mobile and Washington, it reached the hills of Mount Vernon and Citronelle to the south, and Tibbie and Mctintosh in the north.[17][4] 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.[18] They were seen to often live in inaccessible areas, forming small isolated communities.[6][11]
Genealogical analysis suggests many of them emigrated from their initial tracts and assimilated into other populations by 1950.[10] By 1974, they were observed to have been frequently emigrating to nearby cities such as Mobile, New Orleans, and Houston. They were not seen as Black in these cities, and would marry into the dominant group of the area. Researcher Eugene Griessman notes that this outmigration and assimilation was mitigated by the high birthrate of the Cajans, and new families marrying into the isolate.[4]
By 1977, genetic and genealogical analysis suggested they had been outmarrying heavily compared to in the past.[8]
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.[9][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 Percy as having Spanish and Native American heritage.[9][14] Reed pointed out his sister's children went to white schools, but this did not convince the jury. Leslie Tucker noted this showed the difference in how race was defined by the community depending on the context.[19]
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.[9][14] Political scientist Julie Novkov noted some Black Alabamans had attempted to escape segregation by claiming to have Native American ancestors rather than Black ones, giving Reed as an example.[20]
In 1925, defending himself against miscegenation charges, Daniel Reed argued he was "Cajun", meaning a mix of "[Acadian], Indian, and Spanish" descent – although he did not have any Acadian heritage and was unrelated to the Louisiana Cajuns. This claim backfired, as the term "Cajun" was commonly associated with local population isolates of partial Black ancestry, and he was instead indicted for marrying a white woman.[21] His conviction was later reversed on appeal.[19]
While the cousins Daniel and Percy won their cases, their more distant relative Jim Weaver's conviction was upheld.[19] In Weaver v. State, the Alabama court developed methodology to determine if a defendant was legally Black, via physical characteristics and social relations. This methodology observed whether they attended Black churches, sent their children to Black schools, and "voluntarily" lived in equality with Black people.[14] Weaver had also claimed Native American heritage, but the court decided Weaver was guilty due to his relatives having appearances indicating Black ancestry.[14]
Novkov stated 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]
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] By 1950, Census enumerators estimated that people of Cajan lineage in Washington County had marked themselves down as "Indian" more often than as the "Cajan", "White" or "Negro" categories individually, but in Mobile County the majority were classified as white.[4]
They initially raised livestock, typically on small, unimproved tracts, then moved into the lumber, and later turpentine, industries.[22][6] They were seen to be reliant on these industries and typically had only one wage-earner per family.[23]
The Cajans were noted to speak in a unique patois.[5] Like the nearby Redbones and Dominickers, they were known for distilling alcohol.[24] 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.[6][25] Their society was noted to be similar to those of the nearby whites of the Upland South.[26]
They received the name "Cajan" from the Alabama State senator, L.W. McRae.[27] 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][28] While some younger members of the group attempted to reclaim the name in the 1970s, with slogans such as "Cajan Power", and "Cajans are Beautiful", only a minority of the group had been recorded to identify as Cajan on the 1950 census.[1][4]
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.[6][25][29] Believing in signs and "ha'nts", they wore "tricks" to repel diseases and bad luck.[11][6]
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][25] They were observed to sing spirituals.[30]
Schools and segregation
Cajans had their own school system by the 1930s, modelled as "special" white schools, due to standard white schools excluding a portion of them.[31] For a period before the institution of Cajan schools, many Cajans received no or minimal schooling due to refusing to attend Black schools. In areas not served by Cajan schools, they went to Black schools if they could not pass as white.[32] Cajans were noted to reject Black teachers from 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.[25][1] The separate Cajan schools and churches were noted to function as community centres for their settlements.[26] The schools were noted to be underfunded, but improved over time, hiring more locals as teachers.[4]
Social stratification
Social status among Cajans was noted to centre heavily around degree of alleged Black ancestry.[8] Cajan school cohorts developed into unofficial "castes" over time, such that the attendees of different schools developed different ranked "sub-castes" relative to each other.[1] Separate "neighborhoods" consisting of extended Cajan families surrounding and attending a specific school would sometimes not associate with Cajans attending other schools, preferring to maintain their own. Marriage between Cajans from different neighborhoods would be spoken of in terms of marrying "up" or "down" to a different sub-caste, depending on the relative status of the neighborhood in question.[4]
Desegregration
By 1969, most Cajans went to desegregated schools, with only Reed Chapel and another school remaining as Cajan schools, both only serving elementary students by 1974.[4][1] By this time, most students instead went to desegregated schools in McIntosh or Citronelle, improving their schooling conditions. The student body of these schools was mostly Black in McIntosh and mostly white in Citronelle.[4]
By 1974, local industries also began to hire Cajans, offering them prosperity and mobility previously denied to them in the lumber industry most had been employed in. Many younger Cajans emigrated to work in areas outside the zone of Cajan settlement for new job offerings.[26] Local businessmen preferred to hire Cajans instead of Black people, which scholar G.H. Stopp suggested was to "ease the shock of forced integration" after civil rights legislation, as whites would have preferred other non-whites to Black people.[33][34] The social status of the Cajans was noted to have surpassed that of local Black people post-desegregation, partially due to their improved schooling.[4]
12Rose Bird, Stephanie (2009). Light, Bright, and Damned Near White. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers. p.47. ISBN9780275989545. Retrieved 22 February 2026. ...These groups that have fought hard to encapsulate their fierce sense of pride and singular identity. They have a rich, varied, and colorful patchwork-quilted history in the United States. Still, it is often thought that groups such as the Red Bones and Melungeons began ancestrally as White people who then mixed with Native Americans and African Americans. Some groups started immediately from the union of an interracial couple and continue the strain by intermixing racially to this day....the Cajan group of people was founded when a Jamaican man married a biracial (Black/White) woman, so it is another case of an entire group formed from a single interracial union. The Cajans married in with the Red Bones and 'colored' Creoles expanding their numbers and genetic pool.
↑Renée, Ann Cramer (2005). Cash, Color, and Colonialism: The Politics of Tribal Acknowledgment. Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press. pp.116, 119.
Matte, Jacqueline Anderson (2018). They Say the Wind Is Red: The Alabama Choctaw - Lost in Their Own Land (Reviseded.). Montgomery: NewSouth Books. ISBN978-1-58838-079-1.
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