Hall bases her study on research in a wide range of archival sources in Louisiana, France, and Spain and employs several disciplines-history, anthropology, linguistics, and folklore-in her analysis. In this pathbreaking work, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall studies Louisiana's creole slave community during the eighteenth century, focusing on the slaves' African origins, the evolution of their own language and culture, and the role they played in the formation of the broader society, economy, and culture of the region. It still survives as the acknowledged cultural heritage of tens of thousands of people of all races in the southern part of the state.
This culture, based upon a separate language community with its own folkloric, musical, religious, and historical traditions, was created by slaves brought directly from Africa to Louisiana before 1731. While conducting research in a rural courthouse in southern Louisiana, she discovered a record book in which French colonial notaries had documented in precise detail the identities of thousands of enslaved Africans brought to Louisiana in the 18th century.Although a number of important studies of American slavery have explored the formation of slave cultures in the English colonies, no book until now has undertaken a comprehensive assessment of the development of the distinctive Afro-Creole culture of colonial Louisiana. Hall showed that this was not the case, at least in Francophone North America.
It was only at the end of that time, and later in retirement, that she left her true mark on the fields of colonial and African American history.įor much of the 20th century, most historians assumed there was little material to be found about enslaved Africans in the colonial era - their origins, and even many of their names, were assumed lost.ĭr. Hall led a colorful early life as a civil rights activist and spent the bulk of her academic career at Rutgers University, where she taught Latin American history.
Her son Haywood Hall said her death, at his home, came after a recurrence of breast cancer and a stroke.ĭr. 29 in Guanajuato, Mexico, about 200 miles northwest of Mexico City. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, who after years of digging through obscure libraries in Louisiana, Spain and France managed to rescue the identities of more than 100,000 enslaved people from archival oblivion and demonstrate the vast extent of African influence on America’s cultural heritage, died on Aug.
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