The War's end brought prolonged occupation to Louisiana by Union troops and untold changes.
The economy was devastated for more than a century; the population was divided
and segregated by color. The Creoles were by and large financially
ruined and socially disfigured.

Changes in the state constitution and losses by the Louisiana Republican party brought
the Democrats to power and a new state constitution disfavoring the Creoles was instituted.
This constitution came to be known as the Redeemer Constitution. It was an irony. It paved
the way for "separate but equal" laws and the advent of "Jim Crow."
Anyone with any trace of African blood to the 10th generation back was subject to disfranchisement.

The modern struggle for civil rights thus began in New Orleans after the end
of Union occupation, about 1877.

"In the early nineteenth century, Creole identity formed itself defensively against American and
European immigrants and the "foreign French" who flooded into New Orleans from St. Domingue
[now Haiti] after the revolution there. Although outsiders often associated Creole identity with
racial mixture, Creoles themselves were primarily concerned with differentiating themselves
from Americans— up until the Civil War.

"Nativity was all" to white Creoles, historian Joseph Tregle explains, because local birth signified
superior civic power; white supremacy was such an ingrained belief among whites that they gave
little thought to differentiating between white and black Creoles for the benefit of the outside world.

However, in the wake of the Civil War, white supremacy was definitively challenged by Southern
blacks and some Northerners. The Creoles' political and economic downslide accelerated as they
were increasingly outnumbered by Anglo-Americans, Irish and German immigrants.

A manifestation of the shift from a tripartite to binary social structure in New Orleans was the formation
of a Parti Blanc, or White League, in 1873. A deadly riot resulted in 1874 at the foot of Canal street between
this white pro segregation organization and the Metropolitan Police, many of whom were black. There were 32
persons killed and civic buildings were occupied. Beginning in this period and continuing to the present,
Creole identity, which had always implied a class-status in Louisiana, has been a spark of racial conflict."
5paraphrased