Sorry Azizi - just overlapped with your last post. Lomax's book about Morton makes out that there was a huge snobbery in New Orleans in the early years of the 20th century - with Creoles (some French ancestry) "looking down" upon black Americans with disdain. More up-to-date research indicates that either Morton, or more probably Lomax, grossly exaggerated this racial split to give the biography more dramatic effect.