Tignon law

Common card · No. 368821

The Tignon Law was part of a larger edict enacted by the Spanish Governor of Louisiana Esteban Rodríguez Miró on June 2, 1786 and required free women of color to wear the same headscarves or wraps worn by enslaved women and later referred to as tignons. The word tignon itself does not appear in the edict, and it does not appear to have entered the local or vernacular Louisiana Creole lexicon until later; the earliest printed instances date to the second half of the nineteenth century.

Read on Wikipedia · Image François Fleischbein, PD