Mixed Race Studies

New Marker Unveiling this Saturday in Manteo!

Chowan Discovery Group
2013-08-07

Marvin T. Jones, Executive Director

For decades, [North Carolina] NC Highway markers in Manteo have honored English exploration, the Lost Colony and Confederate forts.  No reference to the local people has been acknowledged.  Well, this Saturday, the first town encountered by the English, in 1585, will get its own marker.  This NC Highway Historical Marker for the Roanoke Indian town of Dasemunkepuec will be unveiled.  (We call it “Dase”.)

Fannie’s legacy: How a mixed-race couple settled early Lake Worth

The Palm Beach Post
West Palm Beach, Florida
2013-08-06
pages D4-D5

Scott Eyman, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

They thrived until Jim Crow laws forced them from the town.

Before there was Lake Worth, there was a town called Jewell.

It wasn’t a big town — the initial population consisted of 13 people — but a town nonetheless, with those people mostly engaged in wrenching a living out of boggy soil, with a post office founded and manned by a black woman named Fannie James.

There are no extant photos of Fannie, or, for I that matter, of her husband Samuel, even though Fannie lived until 1915. But their immeasurable importance is attested to by the comments of their peers m the Jewell community as well as in the historical record. Historian Ted Brownstein reconstructs both of these lives and the town they helped found In “Pioneers of
Jewel,” recently published to celebrate the centennial of Lake Worth.

It’s a fascinating excavation of the past made possibly mainly by the profusion of on line databases that have become available in the last 20 years.

“The Post ran some articles about Fannie and Samuel in 1999, which is not that long ago,” says Brownstein. “At that time, It wasn’t known where they came from, whether they were black, Seminoles, or mulattos. There was nothing about their histories before they arrived at the Lake…

…Sam and Fannie were lightskinned, which probably worked to their advantage Sam’s death certificate states that his mother was Irish, more proof the early history of America was a place of fairly open intermarriage, far more than was acknowledged at the time, far, far more than was allowed In the 20th century, when the Jim Crow laws came down…

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Pioneers of Jewell: A Documentary History of Lake Worth’s Forgotten First Settlement (1885 – 1910)

Lake Worth Herald Publication
2013
254 pages
Paperback ISBN-10: 098326094X; ISBN-13: 978-0983260943
11 x 8.5 x 0.6 inches

Ted Brownstein

A documentary history of Jewell, Florida, a lost community of everglades pioneers founded in 1885 by Samuel and Fannie James, an African American couple, believed to be former slaves. Jewell eventually grew into the City of Lake Worth, its earliest history largely forgotten.

Pioneers of Jewell rediscovers the world of Fannie and Samuel James in the context of their neighbors and the wider context of Race and Segregation in the aftermath of the American Civil War. For the first time, groundbreaking research reveals the flight of Fannie’s family from North Carolina to Ohio during the Civil War along the track of the Underground Railroad, and traces the Jameses’ trek back south through Tallahassee and Cocoa, Florida, before taking up a homestead on the western shore of Lake Worth. Once in South Florida, the Jameses overcame many of the hindrances of race in those troubled times, and became the nucleus of a vibrant, mostly white, farming community.

Meet Dr. Harry Stites, a well-known physician who gave up a successful medical practice in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania to ‘rough it’ on the South Florida frontier. Meet Squire John C. Hoagland, the area’s first Justice of the Peace, who loved boating and spent much of his time sailing between Palm Beach and Jewell. Meet Michael Merkle, a hermit who lived an austere life in a lean-to west of Jewell, eating unseasoned fish and berries. Merkle, rumored to be a defrocked Catholic priest, was known to walk the pinewoods chanting in Latin when he thought no one was listening.

Relying upon primary historical sources, Pioneers of Jewell reveals:

• Bios of a dozen previously unknown Jewell pioneers.
• The dispute that challenged the Jameses’ land holdings.
• An in-depth look at the Jameses’ stunning financial success.
• Investigation of the Jameses’ slave background.
• The establishment of the Osborne Colored District.
• Klu Klux Klan activity in Lake Worth during the 1920s.
• The fate of Jewell and its pioneers.

New book details racism faced by black soldiers who helped build Alaska Highway

Edmonton Journal
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
2013-08-02

Chris Zdeb

EDMONTON – Author John Virtue admits he knew “absolutely nothing” about The Black Soldiers Who Built the Alaska Highway, which is also the title of his latest book, before he started researching the topic six years ago.

He was inspired to write the story at the suggestion of Monte Irvin, a former New York Giant and a member of the baseball Hall of Fame, who Virtue met while writing a book about the role of the Mexican League in desegregating American baseball.

Virtue had never heard about the black soldiers who worked on the highway, even though he was raised in Edmonton, the staging area for the project.

You’d think it would be hard to miss 5,000 black troops, almost half of the 11,000 American soldiers who spent 18 months working on two of the biggest construction projects of the Second World War…

…The black soldiers should have been especially newsworthy, since they were the first African-American troops to be deployed outside of the U.S. mainland during the Second World War.

“The main reason why the contributions of the black soldiers was ignored during the war,” the former journalist says from his Miami Beach home, “is because of the power of congressmen from the southern states, who thought that anything that glorified the contributions of the blacks would cause problems back home. They might agitate for improvement of their conditions once the war was over and they were back home.”…

…There was immediate opposition from Brig.-Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner, Jr., commander in charge of the defence of Alaska, to black soldiers being sent to the far north. On receiving a letter from Brig.-Gen. Clarence L. Sturdevant, assistant of the Corps of Engineers, informing him that two black regiments would be sent to the Yukon and Alaska to help with the highway, Buckner minced no words in his reply.

“I have no objections whatever to your employing them on the roads if they are kept far enough away from the settlements and kept busy and sent home as soon as possible,” wrote Buckner, a southern aristocrat raised in rural Kentucky.

“The very high wages offered to unskilled labour here would attract a large number of them and cause them to remain and settle after the war, with the natural result that they could interbreed with the Indian and Eskimos and produce an astonishingly objectionable race of mongrels which could be a problem from now on.”…

Read the entire article here.

The Black Soldiers Who Built the Alaska Highway: A History of Four U.S. Army Regiments in the North, 1942-1943

McFarland
2013
228 pages
39 photos, notes, bibliography, index
Softcover (7 x 10)
Print ISBN: 978-0-7864-7117-1
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-4766-0039-0

John Virtue, Director
International Media Center at Florida International University

This is the first detailed account of the 5,000 black troops who were reluctantly sent north by the United States Army during World War II to help build the Alaska Highway and install the companion Canol pipeline. Theirs were the first black regiments deployed outside the lower 48 states during the war. The enlisted men, most of them from the South, faced racial discrimination from white officers, were barred from entering any towns for fear they would procreate a “mongrel” race with local women, and endured winter conditions they had never experienced before. Despite this, they won praise for their dedication and their work. Congress in 2005 said that the wartime service of the four regiments covered here contributed to the eventual desegregation of the Armed Forces.

Table of Contents

• Foreword by Monte Irvin
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Pondering a Pathway to Alaska
• 2. Highway and Pipeline Approved
• 3. The Second Emancipation Order
• 4. Blacks Rush to Enlist
• 5. Black Soldiers Voice Their Complaints
• 6. Army Reluctantly Assigns Black Regiments
• 7. Heading North
• 8. Japanese Attack Justifies the Alcan Highway
• 9. The 93rd and the 95th Start Off with Picks and Shovels
• 10. The 97th Completes the Highway
• 11. The 388th Does the Heavy Lifting
• 12. An Unexpectedly Severe Winter
• 13. Surviving Isolation
• 14. The Highway Is Praised, the Pipeline Criticized
• 15. Identifying Problems
• 16. News Coverage of Black Troops Suppressed
• Epilogue
• Chapter Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Mixed races, mixed messages

UWM News
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
2013-08-02

A recent Cheerios commercial featuring a white mother, black father and their daughter attracted a few nasty comments, followed by a huge outpouring of support, with 95 percent of viewers “liking” the commercial.

The recent advertisement is just one reflection of America’s long history of strong feelings about interracial relationships.

Greg Carter, an assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, traces the history of how such relationships have been both demonized and praised in “The United States of the United Races: A Utopian History of Racial Mixing.”  The book looks at the ways Americans have thought about racial mixing from Colonial times to the present.

“There has been a lot of attention, and an increase in visibility of people of mixed racial heritage,” says Carter. President Barack Obama and golf champion Tiger Woods, in particular, have raised the profile of people of mixed race in recent years. In addition, the Census Bureau and other government agencies have broadened the number of choices people have in filling out the “race” box on federal forms…

Read the entire article here.

The Colors of Zion: Blacks, Jews, and Irish from 1845 to 1945

Harvard University Press
February 2011
272 pages
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
20 halftones
Hardcover ISBN: 9780674057012

George Bornstein, C. A. Patrides Professor of Literature, Emeritus
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

A major reevaluation of relationships among Blacks, Jews, and Irish in the years between the Irish Famine and the end of World War II, The Colors of Zion argues that the cooperative efforts and sympathies among these three groups, each persecuted and subjugated in its own way, was much greater than often acknowledged today. For the Black, Jewish, and Irish writers, poets, musicians, and politicians at the center of this transatlantic study, a sense of shared wrongs inspired repeated outpourings of sympathy. If what they have to say now surprises us, it is because our current constructions of interracial and ethnic relations have overemphasized conflict and division. As George Bornstein says in his Introduction, he chooses “to let the principals speak for themselves.”

While acknowledging past conflicts and tensions, Bornstein insists on recovering the “lost connections” through which these groups frequently defined their plights as well as their aspirations. In doing so, he examines a wide range of materials, including immigration laws, lynching, hostile race theorists, Nazis and Klansmen, discriminatory university practices, and Jewish publishing houses alongside popular plays like The Melting Pot and Abie’s Irish Rose, canonical novels like Ulysses and Daniel Deronda, music from slave spirituals to jazz, poetry, and early films such as The Jazz Singer. The models of brotherhood that extended beyond ethnocentrism a century ago, the author argues, might do so once again today, if only we bear them in mind. He also urges us to move beyond arbitrary and invidious categories of race and ethnicity.

Table of Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Races
• 2. Diasporas and Nationalisms
• 3. Melting Pots
• 4. Popular and Institutional Cultures
• 5. The Gathering Storm: The 1930s and World War II
• Notes
• Index

They Wouldn’t Allow Us to Use Daddy’s Last Name: A Family Historian’s Curiosity Leads to Revolutionary Results

Bayou Talk Newspaper
Volume 25, Number 7 (July 2013)
pages 1-8

Anita R. Paul

Most family history researchers know that surnames are an important key to finding ancestors. They also know that names can often lead to dead ends due to misspellings and other misinformation. For Michael N. Henderson, a retired Lieutenant Commander in the U.S. Navy, the spelling of a family surname sparked his curiosity and eventually led to a nearly 30-year journey to uncover a hidden truth about his Louisiana roots.

“It all began when I was a kid,” recalls Henderson, a native of Algiers—a neighborhood in New Orleans, Louisiana—who now lives near Atlanta, Georgia. “I asked my mom why her mother’s maiden name was spelled Mathieu instead of Matthew.” She credited it to the family being Louisiana Creole and simply chose to spell the surname that way. Fortunately for Henderson, that answer did not satisfy him, so he sought a more suitable explanation. In the midst of his searching, which became a hobby and eventually an obsession during much of his naval career, he uncovered one fact after another about his family’s history and soon became the family historian, a role that did not always meet with genuine excitement from his relatives.

“When you start digging into the past, some family members get nervous. They’re afraid you might uncover some deep, dark secret that’s been buried for generations,” Henderson explains. Others, mostly those of the younger generation, simply shrugged off Henderson’s many attempts to share his findings. “My nieces and nephews have never been keen on listening to my ancestral stories, except, of course, when the time came for a school project.”

As his genealogy research continued, a conversation with a distant cousin opened a genealogical can of worms that caused Henderson to delve deeply into the unique three-tiered social structure of French and Spanish colonial Louisiana. He studied the Code Noir (Black Code) that regulated relationships between Europeans, Native American and African enslaved people, and the distinct class of free people of color…

…Uncovering this relationship revealed the answer to a haunting statement that had been in Henderson’s family for generations: “They wouldn’t allow us to use Daddy’s last name.” As Henderson discovered, Agnes assumed the first name of her French consort, Mathieu, as her own surname and passed it on to their mixed-race children and the generations following. This answered the question about the spelling of Henderson’s maternal grandmother’s surname and consequently exposed the answer to the generations-long lament about not being able to use “Daddy’s last name.”…

Read the entire article here.

Medical Experimentation and Race in the Eighteenth-century Atlantic World

Social History of Medicine
Volume 26, Issue 3 (August 2013)
pages 364-382
DOI: 10.1093/shm/hkt011

Londa Schiebinger, The John L. Hinds Professor of History of Science
Stanford University

This article examines medical experimentation with humans in the Atlantic world. Physicians in this period tended to use bodies interchangeably in medical trials; subjects were scarce and, for the most part, used with extreme care. Experimentalists in this period, however, faced a paradox. In the second half of the eighteenth century naturalists across Europe began focusing attention on what they perceived to be racial differences. At the same time medical experimentalists required that human bodies be fully interchangeable if results were to hold universally. The dilemma, then, was this: on the one hand, physicians tended to emphasize racial difference with respect to the science of race; on the other hand, they assumed uniformity across humans with respect to developing drug therapies. It was in this context that important questions arose about whether experiments done among Caribbean slave populations were valid for Europeans.

Read or purchase the article here.

Interracial Families in 18th-Century Mexico

The Root
2013-07-23

Unknown artist working in New Spain (Mexico), De español y negra mulata, oil on canvas, 36 by 48 cm (Museo de America, Madrid)

Image of the Week: A painting captures the multiethnic population in New Spain, now Mexico.

One of the most typical, revealing products of colonial Spanish culture was the casta painting. This Iberian term means “lineage,” or “race,” and in art refers to the comprehensive representation of mixed-race couples and their offspring. Produced in a series usually consisting of 16 family groups, casta paintings categorize the uniquely complex degree of racial variation that arose within the multiethnic population of the viceroyalty of New Spain, now Mexico. These works were produced almost exclusively in the major artistic and governmental centers of Mexico City and Puebla during the 18th century. About 100 sets of casta paintings survive today from what must once have been a considerably larger number.

Casta sets were commissioned primarily by members of the ruling elite of New Spain. Their audience consisted of a fairly limited but discerning group of officials, clergy and scholars on both sides of the Atlantic. In some cases the sets were directly presented to the king in Madrid as a visual record of the diversity of his overseas realm. The miscegenation recorded in these series is also reflected in the origins of the artists themselves. With only one known exception, all identified casta painters were born in Mexico, not Spain, and many were themselves of mixed race.

In all casta series, the couples consist of men and women from the three main ethnicities living in New Spain: white, Indian and black. Those represented are types, not specific individuals. All known series begin with the union between a white man, described as a Spaniard (español), and an Indian, producing a mestizo. The sequence then continues with a new category produced by the pairing of a mestizo with another Spaniard, producing a castizo. In the next case a white man is the father as well, and so the complexion becomes lighter, and therefore of greater advantage in the racially ordered hierarchy of colonial life. The child is, in fact, described as español, the same as his or her father…

Read the entire article here.