Mixed Race Studies

The Free Negro Family: A Study of Family Origins Before the Civil War

Fisk University Press
1932
72 pages
E185.86 .F84
Source: University of Michigan via The Hathi Trust Digital Library

E. Franklin Frazier (1894-1962), Professor of Sociology
Fisk University

CONTENTS

1. Origin, Growth, and Distribution of the Free Negroes
2. Character of the Free Negro Communities
3. The Free Negro Family
   • Selected Bibliography

TABLES

1. Growth of the Slave and Free Negro Population in the United States: 1790-1860
2. Distribution of the Free Negro Population According to States in 1830 and 1860
3. Number of Slaves and Free Negroes in the Total Population of Four Leading Cities in 1790
4. School Attendance and Adult Illiteracy Among the Free Negro Population in 16 Cities: 1850

MAPS

1. Percentage of the Negro Population Free in the Counties of Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia: 1860
2. Distribution of Free Negro Families: 1830

CHAPTER I: ORIGIN, GROWTH, AND DISTRIBUTION OF THE FREE NEGROES

A class of free Negroes existed in America almost from the time that they were first introduced into the Virginia colony in 1619. Contrary to popular belief, the free class may even be said to be prior in origin to the slave class, since the first Negroes brought to America, did not have the status of slaves, but of indentured servants. Contracts of indentured Negro servants indicate that the status of the first Negroes was the same as that of the white servants. Moreover, court records show that Negroes were released originally upon the completion of a term of servitude. The slave status, for which the white colonists had no model in England, “developed in customary law, and was legally sanctioned at first by court decisions.” Although it was not until 1662 that the first act of the Virginia slave code was passed, slavery by this time had apparently become established in practice. As early as 1651 we find a Negro, Anthony Johnson, who was probably enumerated among the indentured servants in the census of 1624, having assigned to him in fee simple a land patent for two hundred and fifty acres of land. Two years later this same man was the defendant in a suit brought against him by another Negro for his freedom from servitude, after having served “seaven or eight years of Indenture.” According to Russell, “The upper limit of the period in which it was possible for negroes to come to Virginia as servants and to acquire freedom after a limited period is the year 1682” Nevertheless, the free class continued to grow until the Civil War.

The free Negro population was increased through five sources: (1) children born of free colored persons; (2) mulatto children born of free colored mothers; (3) mulatto children born of white servants or free women; (4) children of free Negro and Indian parentage; (5) manumitted slaves. The increase in the free Negro population through the offspring of free colored parents, though difficult to estimate, contributed to the growth of this class until Emancipation. Likewise, the numerous cases of offsprings from white fathers and free colored mothers would indicate that from this source the free Negro population was constantly enlarged. Mulattoes born of white servant women and free white women were also a significant factor, for it was soon the cause for special legislative action. Virginia, in 1691, passed a law prescribing that “any white woman marrying a negro or mulatto, bond or free,” should be banished. Maryland, in 1681, provided in an act that children born of white servant women and Negroes were free. Eleven years later any white woman who married or became the mother of a child by either a slave or free Negro became a servant for seven years. Pennsylvania found it necessary to restrict the intermarriage of Negroes and whites through legislative action in 1725-1726, after having punished a woman for “abetting a clandestine marriage between a white woman and a negro” in 1722. This restriction was swept away, as well as the other restrictions upon the Negro, in 1780. Seemingly, mixed marriages became common, for Thomas Branagan complained:

There are many, very many blacks who . . . begin to feel themselves consequential . . . will not be satisfied unless they get white women for wives, and are likewise exceedingly impertinent to white people in low circumstances … I solemnly swear, I have seen more white women married to, and deluded through the arts of seduction by Negroes in one year in Philadelphia, than for eight years I was visiting (West Indies and the Southern States). I know a black man who seducted a young white girl. . . who soon after married him, and died with a broken heart. On her death he said that he would not disgrace himself to have a Negro wife and acted accordingly, for he soon after married a white woman . . . There are perhaps hundreds of white women thus fascinated by black men in this city, and there are thousands of black children by them at present.

It is difficult to determine to what extent the intermixture of free Negroes and Indians contributed to the growth of the free colored population. There was always considerable association between the Indian and Negro, both in areas given up to Indians and outside of these areas…

Read the entire book here.

Shades of Passing (AAS 340 / ENG 391 / AMS 340)

Princeton University
Fall 2012-2013

Anne A. Cheng, Professor of English and African American Studies

This course studies the trope of passing in 20th century American literary and cinematic narratives in an effort to re-examine the crisis of identity that both produces and confounds acts of passing. We will examine how American novelists and filmmakers have portrayed and responded to this social phenomenon, not as merely a social performance but as a profound intersubjective process embedded within history, law, and culture. We will focus on narratives of passing across axes of difference, invoking questions such as: To what extent does the act of passing reinforce or unhinge seemingly natural categories of race, gender, and sexuality?

Sample reading list:
William Faulkner, Light in August
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
Nella Larsen, Passing
Chang-rae Lee, A Gesture Life
Douglas Sirk (director), Imitation of Life (film, 1959)
Woody Allen (director), Zelig (film, 1983)

Biography of American Author Jean Toomer, 1894-1967

Edwin Mellen Press
2002
248 pages
ISBN 10:  0-7734-7088-3; ISBN 13:  978-0-7734-7088-0

John Chandler Griffin, Distinguished Professor Emeritus
University of South Carolina, Lancaster

This comprehensive biography of writer Jean Toomer, known as the Herald of the Harlem Renaissance, uses previously untapped sources, including lengthy meetings with Toomer’s widow and associates. It examines his ancestors and early life, the publication of Cane in 1923, and then the strange events of his later life, including his association with Waldo Frank and his wife Margery Naumberg, through whom he would come to be involved with Georges Gurdjieff, an Armenian mystic. It examines his marriages, his involvement with Quakerism, his declining health (and subsequent involvement with psychic healers such as Edgar Cayce and Ron Hubbard). The volume includes an interview with Marjorie Content Toomer, his widow, and a Jean Toomer bibliography.

Table of Contents

• Foreword
• 1. The Racial Enigma of Jean Toomer
• 2. A Search for Identity
• 3. A Literary Breakthrough
• 4. Waldo Frank and the Publication of Cane
• 5. Toomer Meets Margaret Naumberg and Georges Gurdjieff
• 6. Toomer Becomes a Gurdjieffian
• 7. From Rags to Riches
• 8. A Life in Decline An Interview with Margery Content Toomer
• A Jean Toomer Bibliography
• Index

The Negro in Washington: A Study in Race Amalgamation

Walter Neale, Publisher, New York
1930
332 pages
Original Classification ID: E185.93.D695
Source: University of California via The Hathi Trust Digital Library

A. H. Shannon, B. D., M. A.
Former Chaplain of the Mississippi State Penetentiary
Member, American Anthropological Association

CONTENTS

• A. A Personal Word to the Reader.
• B. Introduction.
• I. Statement of the Case.
• II. The Mulatto
• III. Illegitimacy
• IV. Isabella and Jamestown
• V. The Near-White.
• VI. The Poor-White
• VIII. Politics and the Race Problem
• III. Race and Religion
• IX. Colonization as a Solution of the American Race Problem
• X. Some Conclusions and a Forward Look

A PERSONAL WORD TO THE READER

The author of this book has been, for some years, a  close observer of race relations and a student of those  problems growing out of racial contacts. As Chaplain of the Mississippi State Penitentiary, he was called  upon to minister to several hundred Negro prisoners,  thus gaining a measure of intimate knowledge of the Negro criminal. As a teacher in the employ of the  Imperial Government of Japan, he was privileged to  make a brief study of an Oriental civilization. Here  was gained some knowledge of the Eurasian problem, so acute in some of the Asiatic countries and in evidence  wherever contact of East and West has occurred.

The chief interest of the author in the Negro problem has centered about the matter of racial intermixture—the Mulatto problem—and most of his writings have had to do with this evil. The present study, while endeavoring to ascertain and to state fact impartially, necessarily gives a large measure of personal reaction  to certain of the problems involved in present-day contacts of the two races, the black and the white, in the United States. Whoever really understands conditions now obtaining in North America is prepared to understand the situation wherever two dissimilar races occupy the same territory, or wherever casual racial contacts occur—as they now do throughout the greater part of the world.

There is a conscious and an intentional limiting of this study largely to those features of the situation which may well tend toward discouragement, if not toward hopeless pessimism. Since it now appears fashionable to approach the Negro problem from the standpoint of the invincible optimist, resolutely ignoring or consciously discarding those facts which, fairly faced, would shatter so many pleasing theories, it is well that some one should present the darker side of the picture, for there is a terribly dark side. The reader, once the situation is clearly analyzed and its elements indicated, may be trusted to interpret aright the issues unquestionably involved. Americans, white and black alike, are not awake to the real situation confronting them, a fact clearly evidenced by more than half century of silence and indifference touching the vital issue of race amalgamation and the conditions under which this is now occurring.

As an answer to the ever-ready charge of ministering to, if not creating, racial antagonisms and hates—a charge behind which there sometimes lurks more of moral and of intellectual inertia than some good people are aware of—there is to be noted the difference between a clear statement of fact, a clear-cut challenge to the self-respect of each of two groups, and a maligning of one group by the other. If it has come to the pass that a calm facing of fact, a thorough analysis of a given situation, must be opposed because it reveals the destructiveness of an inherited unreasonable and unreasoned program, there should, at least, be a clear understanding of the attitudes displayed and a close scrutiny of the motives behind these attitudes.

Both races in America, especially in the United States, are confronted by facts demanding careful consideration; by problems the solution of which depends primarily upon thorough analysis as the basis for a full understanding of what is really involved. Various organizations, secular and religious, are in the field, voluntarily endeavoring to carry out programs which they are free to make what they will. Most of these would resent the charge that they are contributing directly to moral confusion and to racial degradation. Most of them would resent the charge that their work and the attitudes upon which it rests constitute the most destructive influence against which the full-blood Negro must contend at the present time. Can it be shown that such charge is untrue? If only there could be a general and an honest, dispassionate inquiry, bringing these matters into the realm of conscious thought and purposive program, there would be hope of constructive action. If this volume assists the reader to break with traditional lines of thought and the attitudes and the programs based upon these lines of thought, thus promoting independent analysis and rationally constructive programs, it will serve a useful and a timely purpose.

The author is forced into a position which is es sentially unpleasant. It becomes necessary to point out the grounds of criticism, the delinquencies, of those who, holding positions of leadership—political, educational, religious—have failed to see, or seeing have failed to meet, or have met with utter indifference, the problems here discussed. Upon the part of the leaders of both races there has been, at best, a light estimate of the trust reposed in their leadership. No further evidence is necessary to establish this fact than to call attention to present conditions and to the manner in which these conditions have grown up, without effective protest or warning, and that they are now generally accepted, without analysis, and without intelligent evaluation of their logical, their inevitable, results.

The thanks of the author are due to both Authors  and Publishers permitting the use of quotations appear ing in this volume. Credit is given in each case. Professor E. B. Reuter has been especially generous, permitting the unrestricted use of material the collection of which necessarily cost him much expense, in addition, to time and labor involved. His book, The Mulatto in the United States, is a very valuable statement of ultimate fact.

Read the entire book here.

Is Obama Now Black (Enough) Because He’s White?

The Huffington Post
2012-08-02

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

With the November election less than 100 days away, the Obama campaign continues to come up against questions about the president’s racial identity. Most recently, reports that the president is “passing,” or claiming that he’s representing himself as a member of a different racial group than the one(s) to which he belongs, have resurfaced. For instance, actor Morgan Freeman recently told NPR, “America’s first black president hasn’t arisen yet. He’s not America’s first black president — he’s America’s first mixed-race president.” The logic I see behind such claims is twofold. First, the president is not really African American because his American mother is white (and, by extension, his ancestors were not enslaved). Second, that “mixed-race” and “black” are mutually exclusive ways of being…

…The revelation that the president and his mother are descendents of the “first slave” provides us all with an opportunity to acknowledge racial relationships with all their problems and awkwardness. Perhaps now, rather than merely questioning the president’s racial identity, we can pose bigger questions about the meanings of race. Questions like: Is slavery still the defining experience of African American identity? If so, who says so? Is any racial identity—multiracial, African American, white—better understood as an idea that can change over time? Wouldn’t it be real progress to admit that an increasing number of people who identify with monoracial identities like black and white might also be mixed? How do we deal with the too often painful history of racial mixing in African American communities? How many families that we know as white might actually come from a history of racial mixing and passing?…

Read the entire article here.

Is Being Biracial an Advantage for Obama?

ABC News
2008-03-21

Emily Friedman

The son of a black man and a white woman, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., says he’s seen and heard it all.
 
From his grandmother’s fear of black men on the street to his former pastor’s perceived anti-American rants, Obama said Tuesday that after a lifetime straddling the line between black and white he remains hopeful that a “more perfect union” is, in fact, possible.
 
Several biracial individuals with similar backgrounds agreed that living both sides of the racial experience may offer an unique perspective on bridging the racial divide.
 
“All of us who have those experiences are given the gift of a life lesson in bridging artificial divisions to arrive at common hopes and values,” said Lise Funderburg who is biracial and the author of “Black, White, Other: Biracial Americans Talk About Race and Identity.”
 
“All of us who have that background have the opportunity to make this positive thing out of it, and Obama has seized that opportunity,” Funderburg said.
 
But not everyone was certain Obama’s views and motives were were so clear cut. Biracial writer Shelby Steele told ABCNEWS.com that he thinks Obama’s use of his background was “disingenuous.” He believes the ruminations about mixed heritage show Obama to be not an expert but rather a man confused about his racial identity.
 
“Obama is a black man with a white mother. Being biracial is an impossibility,” said Steele, who said that no matter what, when Obama walks down the street he is viewed as a black man. “How could you possibly live as both? If you didn’t know his mother was white, you’d say he’s black and you wouldn’t have a second thought.”
 
“He’s confused,” said Steele of Obama. “Are you really black or are you playing the biracial card?”
 
Henry Louis Gates Jr., professor and director of the WEB Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University, is considered one of the country’s leading black intellectuals and he believes politics was the major motivation at play in the Tuesday appeal…

…Being biracial, said Funderburg, allows a person insight into two very different worlds … a useful tool when trying to mediate issues between them…

Read the entire article here.

What Miscegenation is! And What We are to Expect Now That Mr. Lincoln is Re-elected

Waller & Willets, Publishers, New York
c. 1865
8 pages
Source: Harvard University via The Hathi Trust Digital Library

L. Seaman, LL. D.

“What, is Miscegenation?” is an oft repeated inquiry. A word not recognized by Webster, Johnson, or Worcester, and yet in general use. The following definition is according to the popular acceptation of the term:

Miscegenation, noun—The act of mixing or state of being mixed; a mass or compound of different ingredients; in logic, thought of in relation to an actual existence; opposed to abstract.

Miscegenate, verb transitive—Literally, to unite and blend as one common brotherhood different races; to blend promiscuously; to coalesce.

It is unnecessary for us to enter into a lengthy definition of the word as the artist who engraved our frontispiece portrays that which our pen fails to accomplish. Our illustration represents an “intelligent gentleman of color” affectionately saluting a pretty white girl of sixteen, with auburn hair and light complexion; the different shades of complexion of the two contrasting beautifully and lending  enchantment to the scene. The thick tufts of wool of the one lends beauty to the long, waving auburn hair of the other, and the sweet, delicate little Roman nose of the one does not detract from the beauty of the broad, flat nose, with expanded nostrils of the other—while the intellectual, bold and majestic forehead of the one forms an unique, though beautiful contrast to the round, flat head, resembling a huge gutter mop, of the other. Contrast is the order of the day: a desire for sameness was an hallucination of the ancients, but we of the Nineteenth Century are going to bring about a new order of things…

…Actual Miscegenationists were first discovered in the South, but the atrocious crime was not popular although it was committed to a considerable extent, and men have been known to sell their own children into slavery, simply because of the supposed attaintment of the offspring from its mother. But such beasts are only to be found in the South. Here in the North, we have a finer sense of the beautiful. Dark blood, in the estimation ot the Northmen, instead of attainting, purifies. A man whose veins are coursed by a certain amount of dark blood, and whose skin is correspondingly dark, is believed to be a superior being.

Many of our best orators have been advocating this mixture for some time. Wendel Phillips can’t see why a negro is not the equal of a white man, and, in many instances, why he has not proved himself superior. When coalescesion takes place he believes that the excellent properties of Sambo’s component parts are intensified and the sluggish material of the white man purified and renovated…

Read the entire pamphlet here.

Mixed Messenger
The New York Times
2008-03-23

Peggy Orenstein

A few weeks ago, while stuck at the Chicago airport with my 4-year-old daughter, I struck up a conversation with a woman sitting in the gate area. After a time, she looked at my girl — who resembles my Japanese-American husband — commented on her height and asked, “Do you know if her birth parents were tall?”

Most Americans watching Barack Obama’s campaign, even those who don’t support him, appreciate the historic significance of an African-American president. But for parents like me, Obama, as the first biracial candidate, symbolizes something else too: the future of race in this country, the paradigm and paradox of its simultaneous intransigence and disappearance.

It’s true that, over the past months, Obama has increasingly positioned himself as a black man. That’s understandable: insisting on being seen as biracial might alienate African-American leaders and voters who have questioned his authenticity. White America, too, has a vested interest in seeing him as black it’s certainly a more exciting, more romantic and more concrete prospect than the “first biracial president.” Yet, even as he proves his black cred, it may be the senator’s dual identity, and his struggles to come to terms with it, that explain his crossover appeal and that have helped him to both embrace and transcend race, winning over voters in Birmingham, Iowa, as well as Birmingham, Ala…

…But the rise of multiracialism is not all Kumbaya choruses and “postracial” identity. The N.A.A.C.P. criticized the census change, fearing that since so few in the black community are of fully African descent, mass attrition to a mixed-race option could threaten political clout and Federal financing. Mexican-Americans, a largely mixed-race group, fought to be classified as white during the first half of the 20th century; during the second half, they fought against it.

Among Asians, Japanese-Americans in Northern California have argued over “how Japanese” the contestants for the Cherry Blossom Queen must be (the answer so far: 50 percent, which is less rigid than San Francisco’s Miss Chinatown U.S.A., whose father must be Chinese, but more strict than the 25 percent Chinese required to be Miss Los Angeles Chinatown)…

Read the entire article here.

Mississippi Black Code (1865)

America’s Reconstruction: People and Politics After The Civil War
Digital History: using new technologies to enhance teaching and research
2011

The Civil Rights of Freedmen in Mississippi (Approved November 25, 1865)

Section 1. Be it enacted by the legislature of the State of Mississippi, That all freedmen, free Negroes, and mulattoes may sue and be sued, implead and be impleaded in all the courts of law and equity of this state, and may acquire personal property and choses in action, by descent or purchase, any may dispose of the same, in the same manner, and to the same extent that white persons may: Provided that the provisions of this section shall not be so construed as to allow any freedman, free Negro, or mulatto to rent or lease any lands or tenements, except in incorporated town or cities in which places the corporate authorities shall control the same.

Sec. 2. Be it further enacted, That all freedmen, free Negroes, and mulattoes may intermarry with each other, in the same manner and under the same regulations that are provided by law for white persons: Provided, that the clerk of probate shall keep separate records of the same.

Sec. 3. Be it further enacted, That all freedmen, free Negroes, and mulattoes, who do now and have heretofore lived and cohabited together as husband and wife shall be taken and held in law as legally married, and the issue shall be taken and held as legitimate for all purposes. That it shall not be lawful for any freedman, free Negro, or mulatto to intermarry with any white person; nor for any white person to intermarry with any freedman, free Negro, or mulatto; any person who shall so intermarry shall be deemed guilty of felony and, on conviction thereof, shall be confined in the state penitentiary for life; and those shall be deemed freedmen, free Negroes, and mulattoes who are of pure Negro blood, and those descended from a Negro to the third generation inclusive, though one ancestor of each generation may have been a white person…

Read the entire code here.

An Imperative Duty

Broadview Press
March 2010 (Originally Published in 1891)
200 pages
ISBN: 9781551119144 / 1551119145

W. D. Howells (William Dean Howells) (1837-1920)

Edited by:

Paul R. Petrie, Professor of English
Southern Connecticut State University

An Imperative Duty tells the story of Rhoda Aldgate, a young woman on the verge of marriage who has been raised by her aunt to assume that she is white, but who is in fact the descendant of an African-American grandmother. The novel traces the struggles of Rhoda, her family, and her suitor to come to terms with the implications of Rhoda’s heritage. Howells employs this stock situation to explore the newly urgent questions of identity, morality, and social policy raised by “miscegenation” in the post-Reconstruction United States. The novel imagines interracial marriage sympathetically at a time when racist sentiment was on the rise, and does this in one of Howells’s most aesthetically economical performances in the short novel form.

Appendices to this Broadview Edition include material on the “tragic mulatta” in literature, interracial marriage, the “science” of race in the nineteenth century, and Howells’s literary realism.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• W.D. Howells: A Brief Chronology
• A Note on the Text
• An Imperative Duty
• Appendix A: Contemporary Reviews and Responses
• Appendix B: The “Tragic Mulatta” in Literature
  1. From Grace King, “The Little Convent Girl” (1893)
  2. From Matt Crim, “Was It An Exceptional Case?” (1891)
  3. W.D. Howells, “The Pilot’s Story” (1860)
• Appendix C: Interracial Marriage & the “Science” of Race
  1. From Joseph-Arthur, Comte de Gobineau, Essay on the Inequality of Human Races (1853)
  2. From J.C. Nott, Types of Mankind (1854)
  3. From Frederick L. Hoffman, The Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro (1896)
  4. Pace v. State of Alabama, 1883
  5. From Henry W. Grady, “In Plain Black and White” (1885)
  6. From Charles W. Chesnutt, “The Future American” (1900)
  7. From W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Conservation of Races” (1897)
• Appendix D: W.D. Howells’s Theory of Realism—The “Editor’s Study” Columns
  1. May 1886 [Realism and Romance]
  2. November 1886 [Aesthetics and Ethics]
  3. April 1887 [Art, Truth, and Morality]
  4. September 1887 [Realism and Democracy]
  5. Dec 1887 [The Real and the Ideal Grasshopper]
  6. March 1888 [Can Fiction Help the People It Depicts?]
  7. December 1888 [Christmas Literature]
• Select Bibliography

Read the entire novel here.