This thesis asserts that Marcus Bruce Christian (1900-1976), a New Orleans, Louisiana, black poet, writer, and historian, used his diary and notes as a site of rhetorical education and as a space in which he constructed and reinforced a Duboisian ethos, a particular type of black identity and character shaped by the political rhetoric of W. E. B. Du Bois. Maintaining this ethos, Christian, an autodidact throughout most of his life, negotiated a society strangled by white supremacist ideology and resisted being interpellated into the negative black identity constructed by a hostile and stifling Jim Crow South.

Louisiana's unique social and cultural history with its three-tiered racial system (rather than the biracial system that governed much of the United States) left the region and the history of its black inhabitants, outside of familiar narratives of United States black history. Marcus B. Christian, the self-trained intellectual, sought to research, and make public, the history of blacks in Louisiana. His career demonstrates the importance of training, economic status, and geographical focus in the production of African American history. Many of the stories he told, through writing and research, retrieved the largely forgotten history of Creoles of color. In fact, his own story was an extension of the black intellectual traditions of that Creole population. Even as his work revealed black Louisiana's unique culture, it also served as the foundation for Christian's own intellectual legacy, one with both material and intellectual dimensions.

In 1942, in New Orleans a group of intellectual and artistic African-Americans, led by Marcus B. Christian, formed an art club named Les Cenelles Society of Arts and Letters. Les Cenelles members both looked to New Orleans’s Afro-Creole population as the pinnacle of African American artistic achievements and used their example as a model for artists who sought to effect social change. Many of the members of Les Cenelles wrote for the Louisiana Federal Writers’ Program (FWP). A key strategy the members of Les Cenelles used to accomplish their goals was gaining the support of white civic leaders, in particular Lyle Saxon. Christian and Saxon’s relationship was unusual in the 1940s Jim Crow era in the sense that it was built upon mutual respect and admiration. This thesis examines both the efforts of Les Cenelles and the black division of the FWP, as well as Christian and Saxon’s relationship.