Free People of Color Museum

This guide to the Free People of Color Museum in New Orleans opens with an 1786 Spanish decree ordering free women of color to cover their hair in public, meant to mark them as plain and put them in their place. You'll hear how those women answered with starch, brooches, feathers and ribbon, turning the tignon into something else entirely. Inside an 1859 house on Esplanade Avenue, portraits collected over thirty years by Beverly and Dwight McKenna carry that same spirit, alongside figures like Mother Henriette DeLille and Marie Laveau. Stand in these rooms and look for the everyday objects that carried that same quiet defiance.