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St. Landry (Landericus)
11th century
Landry, a monk of the Benedictine monastery of Novalese, Italy, served as a parish priest in the French villages of Lanslevillard and Bonneval. He traversed both villages to tend to his parishioners, consoling the suffering and reconciling enemies. In Bonneval, Landry encountered obstinate sinners who, despite all his efforts to win them back to the practice of their faith, stubbornly clung to their vices. Some of these were so enraged by Landrys priestly admonitions that they ambushed him and threw him to his death in the Arc River. It was then that the church bells in the village of Lanslevillard began to ring miraculously on their own. As the people gathered to learn what was happening, they witnessed another prodigy. The churchs processional cross was seen advancing on its own toward the village gate, as if carried by an invisible bearer. Thereupon the villagers, led by a priest, followed the cross as it continued down a path toward the Arc River. The cross came to a stop near a riverside cavern, inside of which the people discovered the body of their martyred pastor.
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Louisiana Police Regulations of Saint Landry Parish
Homer A. LaTour - Pres. Board of Police, Opelousas (1873)
Like the Black Codes, police regulations restricted the freedoms and personal autonomy of freedmen after the Civil War in the South. The Saint Landry Parish, Louisiana police regulations offer merely one example of the lengths Southern legislatures went to in preserving as much of the master-slave dynamic as possible. Louisiana possessed a large free black population prior to the Civil War, concentrated primarily in New Orleans, and offered more rights and freedoms to them than many Northern states. A virulent racism still pervaded the state, however, as freedmen were characterized as children in need of care and supervision by White employers, clergymen, and public officials. Some Louisiana politicians desired to expel all Blacks from the state following the war, but a commitment to maintaining as much of the antebellum status quo as possible prevailed. Slavery and the ideology on which it was based had ceased to exist only in name.
The regulations strove to hinder freedmen's ability to move about freely, binding them as much to the direct oversight and authority of the employer as possible. In many cases the employer was actually the employee's former master, effectively negating any real differences from slavery. The regulations sought to limit economic freedom and ensure that each former slave was in constant employment of "some White person," therefore effectively proscribing any chance of upward economic mobility and autonomy. In addition, laws enacted to keep freedmen from meeting "after sunset" and from preaching "to congregations of colored people" betrayed a deep-seated fear of African-American political and social organization that would pose a threat to White authority and order.
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