Mixed Race Studies

The Forgotten Diaspora

The Official Gateway to Scotland
2008

Geoff Palmer, Professor Emeritus in the School of Life Sciences
Heriot-Watt University

I was born in Jamaica in 1940, the largest British island in the Caribbean. I emigrated to London in 1955 to join my mother and earn a living. She had emigrated in 1948.

In 1967 I completed a PhD at Edinburgh University. Now retired, I was a cereal grain scientist and lectured at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh on the science and technology of brewing and distilling. I have had the good fortune to represent Heriot-Watt and Scotland in these disciplines all over the world. A most memorable visit was to Africa to help with the growth and processing of the tropical grain, sorghum. Before a lecture a young African spoke to me in a local language believing I was a company representative. He was angry! Now, although my ancestors may have come from that part of Africa, I had no idea what was being said to me. One of my African ex-students over-heard the young man, laughed and explained he was asking, “Why is the company sending a Scotsman to speak to us?”

During a visit to Register House, Edinburgh last year I noticed a poster referring to “The distribution of Scottish people around the world”. With a smile I said to my host that I hoped people of Scottish descent in the Caribbean were included in this survey of the Scottish Diaspora. He turned and said goodbye quickly to get away from a Jamaican who had suddenly taken leave of his senses. Talking about Scottish-Caribbean history elsewhere in Scotland elicited similar responses.

In 2007, the British government decreed that the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the British slave trade should be commemorated, a trade which had started in 1562. Many commemorative events took place and I was asked to give lectures to Scottish historical societies and various organisations in Scotland and England.

In contrast to my knowledge of brewing, distilling and cereal grains, my knowledge of the history of British/Scottish slavery in the Caribbean was limited. To prepare myself for the lectures I did some research and completed a small book on the consequences of British slavery, especially with regard to Jamaicans…

…It is estimated that 20,000,000 African people were bought or captured in Africa and transported into New World slavery. Only about half survived to work on the plantations. However, even Adam Smith was impressed by the profitability of this free land, free labour, business called Chattel slavery. The terrible and unique feature of this slavery was that legally slaves had “no right to life”. The working life of a field slave was about five years. Those who compare this slavery with other kinds of inhuman behaviour such as trafficking are being unfair to all such terrible activities…

…How did the Scots join the slave business? Originally officially excluded from the English slave trade, Scots such as Colonel John Campbell left the failed Scottish colonial experiment in Darien, Panama and arrived in Jamaica between 1697 and 1700. He had a large family in Jamaica and died there in 1740, initiating the spread of the name Campbell all over the island. Today there are many more Campbells in Jamaica per acre than in Scotland. In 1707 Scottish politicians signed 25 Acts to unify the parliaments of Scotland and England. The Act that was signed first was Act 4 which allowed the Scots to join the English slave business. Young Scotsmen rushed to the Caribbean to make quick fortunes as slave masters, slave doctors and administrators. The great economic benefits of Caribbean slavery to Scotland were clearly apparent to Robert Burns who wrote a toast honouring the “Memory of those on the 12th that we lost’, commemorating one of the most gruesome and crucial naval battles fought between the French, Spanish and the British. The prize was Jamaica. Like other young Scotsmen who wanted to change their lives making money from slavery, Burns bought his ticket for Jamaica in 1786, intending to sail from Greenock with Highland Mary but his new book of poems sold well and he did not sail. Later, Burns’ new lady friend, Clarinda (Mrs McLehose), sailed to Jamaica to discuss the state of her marriage with her husband, a slave master. On her return she told Burns her husband told her to return to Edinburgh as he was quite happy in Jamaica with his “ebony woman and mahogany children”.

Many Scottish and English slave masters had children with their slaves. Robert Wedderburn (abolitionist) was the Jamaican mixed race son of Scottish slave master James Wedderburn and his black slave Rosanna. Many Caribbean people are of mixed race and many of us are descended from Scottish slave masters. It is therefore enlightening that the national motto of Jamaica is: Out of Many One People. My late mother’s family name is Larmond a mis-spelling of Lamont. The issue of surnames has been a matter of debate between the descendants of slaves but I feel that our lost African names and our present Scottish/British surnames are all part of a history that cannot be changed. My ancestors came out of a cruel slavery and chose the family surnames. I see no reason why I should alter the choice they made. I am proud that our slave ancestors endured and produced proud nations of black people in the New World. My mother’s forefathers, like others who gained a small piece of land after slavery, described themselves as “planters” the same name used to describe white slave-plantation owners. A small but significant statement of ‘equality in position’…

Read the entire article here.

Through a Glass Darkly: The Persistence of Race in Education Research & Scholarship

Educational Researcher
Volume 41, Number 4 (May 2012)
Pages 115-120
DOI: 10.3102/0013189X12440743

Gloria Ladson-Billings, Professor of Curriculum and Instruction and Educational Policy Studies
University of Wisconsin, Madison

Although education researchers understand that race is a problematic concept of spurious value, the concept persists in our research and scholarship. Each of the social sciences that contribute to the field of education has a history of racialized understandings that make their way to both our research and practice. Until we begin to carefully examine the way race and racialized thinking influence our work, we will continue to perpetuate destructive thinking about the capabilities of learners based on race.

Read or purchase the article here.

A Classic Study of the History of Caribbean Women

H-Caribbean Reviews, H-Net Reviews
December 2008

Barbara Bush

Lucille Mathurin Mair. A Historical Study of Women in Jamaica, 1655-1844. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2006. 496 pp. $60.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-976-640-166-5; (paper), ISBN 978-976-640-178-8.

I first encountered Lucille Mathurin Mair’s work during the 1970s when I read her seminal article, “The Arrivals of Black Women,” published in Jamaica Journal in 1975. Her work, which influenced me and a number of other pioneering historians in the field, was seminal in developing research in gender and slavery. Mair’s research, however, went beyond Jamaican slave women of African origin; it also embraced white and mulatto, or “brown,” women, slave and free. Her doctoral thesis, supervised by Elsa Goveia, the first woman professor of history at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, Jamaica, was awarded in 1974. Mair (née Waldrond) went on to become a well-known Jamaican historian, author, teacher, activist, and diplomat, but her dissertation remained unpublished. Verene A. Shepherd and Hilary McD. Beckles, both professors of history at the University of West Indies who have made a significant contribution to gendered perspectives on Caribbean history, are thus to be commended for transforming this monumental study into a published monograph.

The book is divided into three main sections that map Mair’s original structure. Part 1 addresses the origins of Jamaican society and examines female arrivals from 1655 to 1770. Part 2 focuses on creole slave society, while the final part, “Postscript, 1834-1844,” explores the beginnings of a free society. Each section weaves together the lives of white, black, and mulatto women, and explores their relationships to each other as well as to white, black, and mulatto men. Shepherd and Beckles have skilfully and sensitively edited the original text, making the minimum of changes. Their introduction effectively contextualizes Mair’s study in relation to developments in the field of women’s, gender, and feminist history since the 1970s, and its impact on the postcolonial historiography of slave and post-slave societies…

…One of Mair’s most interesting contentions is that the “original creole matriarch may not have been black but brown” (p. 292). Free brown women, she argues, tended to live in families dominated by women and looked down on black women and brown men, whom they regarded as “helpless.” These matriarchies may reflect the particular location of mulatto women in slave societies. Brown women were the cultural conduits between black and white worlds, as the mistresses of white men and as “grog house” keepers. But, observes Mair, their position in Jamaican society was ambivalent. As the object of white male desire, they could prosper but they could never match the ideal of white womanhood and achieve respectability. Religion was the other end of the spectrum of approved means of brown upward mobility, but, argues Mair, before the abolition of slavery in 1838, there does not seem to have been the same development of philanthropy and sense of civic duty as was found among the Barbadian urban free colored population. With emancipation, however, there was a decline in concubinage, a reflection of the pervasive emphasis on “respectability” in post-slavery society that separated the “civilized” and aspiring mulattos and blacks from their “primitive” African past…

Read the entire review here.

Cultural Inversion and the One-Drop Rule: An Essay on Biology, Racial Classification, and the Rhetoric of Racial Transcendence

Albany Law Review
Volume 72, Issue 4 (2009)
Pages 909-928

Deborah W. Post, Professor Emeritus of Law
Touro College, Jacob D. Fuchsberg School of Law
Central Islip, New York

The great paradox in contemporary race politics is exemplified in the narrative constructed by and about President Barack Obama. This narrative is all about race even as it makes various claims about the diminished significance of race: the prospect of racial healing, the ability of a new generation of Americans to transcend race or to choose their own identity, and the emergence of a postracial society. While I do not subscribe to the post-racial theories that have been floated in the press and other media, I do believe that something of great cultural significance occurred which made the candidacy and the election of Barack Obama possible. This essay is an attempt on my part to consider what that change might have been by examining the relationship between science and social change, language and cultural categories, and the role law has played, if any, in dismantling the structures of racism.

What I have to say has very little to do with biology, except to the extent that racial classification is a cultural practice that sometimes deploys biological arguments strategically. Early in the Twentieth century sociologists and anthropologists noted that in the United States, race was more a matter of caste than class and that, unlike other caste systems, it is not cultural, but “biological.” In a racial caste, one sociologist argued, “the criterion is primarily physiognomic, usually chromatic, with socio-economic differences implied.”  Another noted that “American caste is pinned not to cultural but to biological features—to color, features, hair form, and the like.” Biology was used in this early sociological literature on race in a way that made it synonymous with physical appearance or physical characteristics. In politics and legal discourse at the time, racial purity was about “blood” and rules of descent…

…In this article, my thesis is simple. If racial caste has been upended by changes in legal rules that created a hierarchical racial structure, its demise also has been hastened by the use of symbols, a strategy of cultural inversion with respect to the meaning of race.  The operative terms of a centuries-old debate have been inverted. Instead of policing racial purity with arguments about blood and biology or the modern version of them, DNA and genes, these instruments of exclusion, the tools of white supremacists and segregationists, have been used effectively, most recently by Barack Obama, to demonstrate the physical connection between groups that are still treated discursively, politically and socially, as racially distinct…

…The movement to escape the one-drop rule, the rule that examines blood lines as far back as five generations or more, if that is what the multiracial movement is all about, is not, as far as I know, a movement that began in the black community. A major proponent is a white woman, Susan Graham, founder of “Project RACE,” which is the acronym for Reclassify All Children Equally.  What Susan Graham demands is that the children of parents who come from different races be acknowledged as the product of both groups. In other words, this white mother of a child or children whose father is a black man demands that the public, the discourse, the political  instrumentalities, the private institutions, acknowledge the status of her child as white as well as black…

…The demand for multiracial identity for the children of interracial marriage, however, may be explained in terms of a desire for status as long as we live in a society in which there is still a clear racial hierarchy. The demand that multiracial children be recognized as partly white did not come from blacks.  Nor is it surprising that Susan Graham, a major advocate for the multiracial category on the United States Census found an ally in Newt Gingrich, who opined that such a category might “‘be an important step toward transcending racial division.’” The enthusiasm for such alternative classifications leads skeptics to believe that this system of reclassification and the rhetoric of transcendence will make it easy to ignore the reality and the structure of racism.

It may be that the promotion of a multiracial identity provides some white parents with the assurance that they have not been rejected by their own children. Their children are part of them and, therefore, partly white. People who cross racial lines to marry do not leave behind all of their attitudes towards race; their internalized assumptions about racial characteristics and racial hierarchy can be a source of misunderstanding, a vulnerability that at the very worst can injure or divide family members…

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BLACK, TRIGUEÑO, WHITE…? Shifting Racial Identification among Puerto Ricans

Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race
Volume 2, Issue 2 (2005)
pages 267-285
DOI: 10.1017/S1742058X05050186

Carlos Vargas-Ramos, Research Associate
Center for Puerto Rican Studies
Hunter College, City University of New York

The use of U.S.-oriented racial categories in the 2000 decennial census conducted by the Census Bureau in Puerto Rico provided results that may not accurately reflect social dynamics in Puerto Rico, more generally, and inequality based on race, in particular. This work explores how variations in racial typologies used for the collection of data in Puerto Rico and the methodology used to collect such data produce widely ranging results on racial identification that in turn affect the measurement of the impact of “race” on social outcomes. Specifically, the analysis focuses on how the omission of locally based and meaningful racial terminology from census questionnaires leads to results on racial identification that differ markedly from those found in survey data that include such terminology. In addition, differing strategies to record the racial identification of Puerto Ricans on the island (i.e., self-identification versus identification by others), lead to variations that highlight the changing effect of race on socioeconomic status. Who identifies a person’s race affects analyses of how race affects the life chances of individuals in Puerto Rico.

Authors Probe Roots of U.S. Far Right

Southern Poverty Law Center
Intelligence Report
Winter 2009, Issue Number: 136

Heidi Beirich

Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant
By Jonathan Peter Spiro
Burlington, Vt.: University of Vermont Press, 2009
$39.95 (hardback)

The Color of Fascism: Lawrence Dennis, Racial Passing, and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism in the United States
By Gerald Horne
New York: New York University Press, 2009
$22.00 (hardback)

A bumper crop of works on influential early 20th century American racists, fascists and eugenicists has been hitting the bookshelves in 2009. Two of the most interesting are on Madison Grant (1865-1937), perhaps the most important conservationist of his time and so pernicious a racist and anti-Semite that he helped inspire Hitler’s policies, and Lawrence Dennis (1893-1977), the biggest defender of fascism in the 1930s, who was, surprisingly, a black man passing for white.

Jonathan Peter Spiro’s biography of Grant, a very rich member of the American WASP elite, is eye opening. It is astonishing to realize how many major American figures of the early 1900s were so rabidly racist and anti-Semitic — and perfectly willing to use the power of the state to sterilize those they saw as lesser beings. Spiro’s book is fundamental to understanding how profoundly our nation has been shaped by racist and anti-Semitic ideas…

…Grant’s most important work, The Passing of the Great Race, was first published in 1916 by the elite Charles Scribner’s Sons. Its basic thesis, still popular among American white supremacists today, is that miscegenation and immigration were destroying America’s superior “Nordic” race. In their time, Grant’s beliefs were popular, even meriting a mention in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (the celebrated author and Grant shared the same Scribner editor).

Presaging Hitler’s infamous words, Grant called Nordics “the Master Race.” To protect that race, Grant was quite clear that restrictions curtailing Jewish and Southern European immigration were necessary. Eugenics, too, were required. He wrote that the effort should begin by sterilizing the “criminals,” the “insane” and the “diseased,” followed by the “weaklings” and, ultimately, all “worthless race types.”…

…American Fascist

Gerald Horne’s The Color of Fascism is a much slimmer volume on the unlikely career as an American fascist of Lawrence Dennis, a far-right thinker who passed as white and whose ideas are still prized today by radical right activists, including veteran anti-Semite Willis Carto.

Dennis was an interesting character. He was born in Atlanta of a black mother and white father in 1893 and was a child prodigy. Before the age of 10, Dennis wrote a book on his Christian beliefs and preached his religion to massive crowds in the U.S. and Europe—never hiding his black mother, who shepherded him around the world. But as he grew older, the light-skinned Dennis made a decision to leave his far darker-skinned mother behind and to begin to pass for white. By the 1920s, he had achieved the unthinkable for a black man of the time, graduating from Exeter and then Harvard and going on to make careers for himself in the State Department and on Wall Street, where he was one of the few who predicted the 1929 stock market crash. That prediction led to a profitable run of speaking engagements for Dennis in the 1930s and vaulted him into the upper-class social circles of the far right, where he became particularly close to Charles and Anne Lindbergh.

By the 1930s, Dennis had evolved into the public face of American fascism, making connections with American extremists and traveling to Europe to meet with Mussolini, whom he later said he was “less impressed with” than Hitler. In 1941, Dennis was named “America’s No. 1 Intellectual Fascist” by Life.

So what made Dennis an adherent of an ideology that most certainly would have oppressed him and other African Americans? Horne theorizes that Dennis may well have been attracted to fascism simply because it stood starkly opposed to American “democracy,” which then so openly oppressed blacks living under Jim Crow. He wrote often and eloquently of the impending ascendancy of the fascist model, and regularly ascribed America’s decay to its racist policies — a point that oddly seemed missed by his many racist allies…

Read the entire review here.

Brazil’s top court backs racial quotas in universities

The Australian
2012-05-01

BRAZIL’s Supreme Court has ruled unanimously that racial quotas used in universities are constitutional and are meant to redress inequalities stemming from centuries of slavery.

The ruling issued by the 10-member court concerned the case of the University of Brasilia which in 2004 set up quotes to reserve 20 per cent of admissions to black, mixed-race and indigenous students…

…The court ruling followed an appeal lodged in 2009 by the right-wing DEM party which argued that the University of Brasilia quota policy ran counter to the principle of equality and fostered racism by creating privileges based on racial criteria.

But the judges countered that quotas were a legitimate method to redress slavery-derived inequalities and discrimination that still continues to affect Afro-Brazilians…

Read the entire article here.

The lessons of slavery: Discourses of slavery, mestizaje, and blanqueamiento in an elementary school in Puerto Rico

American Ethnologist
Volume 35 Number 1 (February 2008)
pages 115-135
DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2008.00009.x

Isar P. Godreau
Institute of Interdisciplinary Research
University of Puerto Rico, Cayey

Mariolga Reyes Cruz
Institute of Interdisciplinary Research
University of Puerto Rico, Cayey

Mariluz Franco-Ortiz
University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras

Sherry Cuadrado
Institute of Interdisciplinary Research
University of Puerto Rico, Cayey

On the basis of ethnographic research conducted in an elementary public school in Puerto Rico, we maintain in this article that subduing and narrowing the history of slavery is instrumental in the reproduction of national ideologies of mestizaje in Afro-Latin America. We explore how school texts and practices silence, trivialize, and simplify the history of slavery and conclude that these maneuvers distance blackness from Puerto Rican identity and silence racism while upholding racial democracy and blanqueamiento as a social value.

Shortly after 2:00 p.m. on an average school day, one of us (Isar) walked into the small air-conditioned social worker’s office at the Luisa Rodrıíguez Elementary School in Cayey, Puerto Rico. A young, uniform-clad teenage girl sat at the desk, talking in flirtatious tones on the school’s phone. Isar greeted the social worker as she stood next to her commandeered desk, and they began to discuss an upcoming conference about the history of slavery in Cayey. “There were slaves in Cayey?” the social worker asked, “Really!?” Before Isar could answer, she heard the young girl telling her phone interlocutor in a high-pitched voice: “I am not prieta!” (prieta is a popular synonym for black) “I am not prieta!” The social worker turned to Isar and said, “You see? That is related to what you study.” The girl looked up to ask what theywere talking about. Isar explained she was conducting a study about racism in schools. “I am not racist,” she said, “but this guy is calling me prieta and I am not prieta!”

These two events—a young girl’s rejection of a black identity and a school official’s unawareness of the history of slavery in her community—might seem apparently unrelated. However, this article maintains that the silencing of slavery and the distancing of individuals from blackness are, in fact, key interdependent manifestations of the ideology of race mixture (mestizaje) in Afro-Latin America.

Researchers of national ideologies of mestizaje in Latin America and the Caribbean have underscored how notions of race mixture operate within very specific structures of power that often exclude blacks, deny racism, and invalidate demands for social justice against discrimination (cf. Burdick 1992; Hale 1999; Helg 1995; Price 1999; Whitten and Torres 1998; Wright 1990). Scholars have pointed out, for example, that the celebration of racial mixture through an ideology of mestizaje serves to distance Afro-Latinos from blackness through the process of blanqueamiento, or “whitening.” They have also highlighted the ways in which the idea of mestizaje is mobilized as evidence for national ideologies of racial democracy that claim that because the majority of the population is mixed, “race” and racism are almost nonexistent in these societies (cf. Betances 1972; Hanchard 1994; Sawyer 2006; Telles 2004; Wade 1997). This article contributes to this literature by arguing that one important, albeit underexplored, area of inquiry for understanding the social reproduction of such national ideologies in Afro-Latin America is the “containment” or “taming” of the history of slavery. Specifically,we maintain that national ideologies of mestizaje in Latin America, and particularly in the Hispanic Caribbean, are sustained by dominant politics of public representation that silence, trivialize, and simplify the history of slavery and its contemporary effects.

Slavery is a thorny, problematic topic for nation building projects. Although ideas of slavery, “race,” modernity, colonialism, capitalism, and nationalism are historically and conceptually bound (see Anibal Quijano in Santiago-Valles  2003:218), Western narratives about the past produce their legitimacy precisely by silencing those connections (Trouillot 1995). National discourses of mestizaje in Afro-LatinAmerica are no exception. Thus,we argue that one important mechanism through which discourses of mestizaje deny legitimacy to experiences of racism and to the affirmation of black identities is by silencing the historical connections between slavery and contemporary racial disparities.

Depending on how the history of this period is told, slavery can destabilize nationalist representations that celebrate mixture and the so-called whitening of the nation from various standpoints. To evoke slavery is to recognize that one racial segment of the population used “race” to exploit and dehumanize another sector of the population for more than 300 years in the Americas. Racial mixture did take place during this time, but mostly through violent means, such as rape, which provide little motive for celebrating mestizaje. Furthermore, the history—not just of men and women in bondage but also of the large and vibrant communities that were formed by free people of color during the slave period—challenges nationalist renditions of history that belittle the impact of African heritage in Puerto Rico and elsewhere. Finally, an awareness of the socioeconomic legacies of the system of slavery on contemporary society can serve to challenge “colorblind” arguments that characterize black people’s failures in the socioeconomic order as the result of a lack of individual achievement, and not as the product of historical–structural inequalities.Understanding the history of slavery, its long-termeconomic and ideological repercussions repercussions, elucidates the roots of contemporary racial inequalities and related racial identities. Addressing the ideological effects of slavery can thus challenge nationalist premises of celebrated mixture, desired blanqueamiento, and declared colorblindness by bringing to the fore the tensions, cracks, and dissonances of nations that are not as harmonious, whitened, or democratic as discourses of mestizaje would suggest…

Read or purchase the article here.

“A Class of People Neither Freemen nor Slaves”: From Spanish to American Race Relations in Florida, 1821-1861

Journal of Social History
Volume 26, Number 3 (Spring, 1993)
pages 587-609

Daniel L. Schafer, Professor of History emeritus
University of North Florida

This essay examines the status of free blacks in Florida, focusing on the transition from mild and flexible three-caste race policies under the Spanish prior to their departure in 1821 to the harsh and rigid two-caste policies brought by the Americans. Comparison of Cuba and East Florida shows that Spain followed parallel policies in these two colonies, yet the status of free blacks in Cuba plummeted after 1800 while their counterparts in East Florida retained their places in a seignorial caste system. Local conditions rather than metropolitan laws, institutions, and religions explain these divergences. Free blacks who remained in Florida after 1821 saw their rights decline sharply. By 1829 a rigidly discriminatory two-caste policy was in place that severely restricted future manumissions. Implementation of the new laws was effectively circumvented until the 1850s, however, as the local plantation elites, mostly holdovers from the Spanish era and fathers of free mulatto children, monopolized political offices and ignored two-caste race policies in favor of their older traditions. Case studies drawn from local records explore the fate of free blacks caught in this transition. In the 1850s cotton and lumber prices escalated along with political controversies; white supremacist attitudes and policies became the general will. Were elderly women in the past by definition dependent on their family and on charity, or was it possible for these women to build up an independent living to some extent? Research into the place of women within the household is one of the methods to gain insight into the degree of independence of elderly women. Research has shown that the elderly (women and men) did not necessarily have a dependent position within the household. A large proportion of the elderly headed their own households. This article deals with the composition of households of elderly women in the Dutch capital Amsterdam in the second half of the nineteenth century. It analyses whether elderly women could retain their independence within the household to some extent. The degree of independence is related to the position within the household, i.e. whether these women were members or heads of a household. The main source used to reconstitute the households of elderly women is the population register of Amsterdam of the period 1851-1892.

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Frau Doktor Nancy Stafford of Georgia: From Slave to Physician

The African Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter
March 2009
ISSN: 1933-8651
95 pages

Mary R. Bullard

Tracy Moxhay Castle

Chapter 1

In 1850 a cotton planter named Robert Stafford fathered a daughter (later named Cornelia) by a woman named “Juda.” Three years later Juda bore him a second daughter (later named Nancy). On an inventory made for Stafford’s tax records they were simply young females, listed only by age, not by name or family. One was six years old, the other was nine years old. They were the only female mulattos in their age group. All the others in their age group were black. “Mulatto” indicated to the county tax assessor that, in this case, their father was a white man.

Their first appearance in the historical record was in an 1860 inventory in Camden County, Georgia. It was a slave inventory. They were slaves because Juda was a slave.

These events were not so unusual on the southern plantations of the United States, but ensuing developments were remarkable. This paper focuses upon Nancy’s life, for she grew up to follow a career. It was an unusual one for an African-American girl born before the Civil War. Considering that she was born of a slave mother, her choice of career was downright incredible. The child grew up to became a physician, to practice in Europe. She died in 1933. The location of her grave is unknown. Although her descendants told us she was buried in London, no confirming evidence has appeared.

The story is also one of Robert Stafford, an independent thinker, who did not follow the usual pattern of slave master. Nonetheless, he was a southerner and a Georgian. The location of his plantation is important for it throws some light upon the special circumstances of Nancy Stafford’s life. The people with whom Robert Stafford grew up were unenthusiastic about slave ownership, although its usefulness for them was absolute…

Read the entire article here.