Mixed Race Studies

Looking back at lives of black GIs in Dorset

Dorset Echo
Weymouth, Dorset, England
2013-06-12

James Tourgout

A NEW exhibition is highlighting the stories of black soldiers in Dorset during World War Two.

It explores the lives of African American servicemen who headed to Dorset to train for D-Day and is showing at Weymouth library until June 14.

It comes in the week following the 69th anniversary of the D-Day landings in France.

The exhibition—entitled 1944 We Were Here: African American GIs in Dorset—was successfully launched last May at Walford Mill Crafts in Wimborne. Louisa Adjoa Parker, a Dorchester writer and poet of British and Ghanaian heritage, carried out the research into this part of local history, which has been little explored so far…

Louisa specialises in local black history and has written several books and exhibitions exploring the presence of black and minority ethnic people in Dorset. Louisa said: “This local history has not been explored in great detail until recently, and is arguably an important part of Dorset’s heritage.

“It was important to gather the stories now, as the GIs’ children and the local people who remember the GIs are getting older. “The African Americans’ presence here left behind a lasting legacy—cultural influences, memories and stories that have been passed down in families and become part of local folklore, and a number of their children as a result of relation-ships with local women.”

Read the entire article here…

Black Indians, Pompey Fixico w/ historian & author Dr. Katz

The Gist of Freedom
BlogTalk Radio
2013-05-16

Leslie Gist, Host

Join The Gist of Freedom as we welcome Pompey Fixico and William L. Katz.  Pompey Fixico ancestors fought US slave-catchers and military units for 42 years in Florida.

Mr. Katz and Mr.Fixico will discuss the three Seminole wars, their goals courage and achievements as seen through his ancestors.

The legacy of  Wild Cat and John Horse will also be discussed as it relates to how they brilliantly led the Seminoles!

Mr. Katz’s book Black Indians has three chapters on this unknown American story. Their current leader, William Dub Warrior, has said:

“Black Indians is not only one of the  most  thoroughly researched and accurate book on  the subject, it is he best written account I have  come across.”

William “Dub” Warrior, Chief of the John Horse Band, Texas and Old Mexico Seminoles

Listen to the episode here. Download the episode here.

Marriage, Melanin, and American Racialism

Reviews in American History
Volume 41, Number 2, June 2013
pages 282-291
DOI: 10.1353/rah.2013.0048

Heidi Ardizzone, Assistant Professor of American Studies
St. Louis University, St. Louis, Missouri

Adele Logan Alexander, Parallel Worlds: The Remarkable Gibbs-Hunts and the Enduring (In)significance of Melanin. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010. 375 pages. Photographs, notes, bibliography, and index.

Fay Botham, Almighty God Created the Races: Christianity, Interracial Marriage, and American Law. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. 288 pages. Notes, bibliography, and index.

Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Photographs, maps, notes, bibliography, and index.

The development of the multidisciplinary field of Mixed Race Studies over the last few decades has focused new attention on patterns of cross-racial unions and the experiences of people of mixed ancestry in the U.S. and elsewhere. Historians bring to this endeavor a rich understanding of the long history of racial mixing, documenting the tremendous variety of contexts for consensual and nonconsensual interracial sex, the diversity of cultural attitudes and policies towards such relationships, and the resulting spectrums of identity and social standing available to the children, families, and communities that resulted from these unions. While pundits and intellectuals debate the significance of the emergence of multiracial families and identities in the U.S., historians can attest that there is little new here. As George Sánchez has put it from the vantage point of Latino and Latin American history, “Welcome to the Americas!”€  The American past is full of examples of cross-cultural unions, people and communities of mixed ancestry, and marked shifts in racial and ethnic categories in response to demographic, economic, and political changes. So, too, new U.S. scholarship is providing rich contributions to ongoing debates of the meaning of race, racial identity, and racial mixing in the twentieth century and beyond.

The three scholars considered here span this latest surge in U.S. historical studies of racial mixing and mixedness. Adele Logan Alexander is a pioneer in the field. Parallel Worlds: The Remarkable Gibbs-Hunts and the Enduring (In) significance of Melanin joins her previous books in focusing on communities and families of mixed—€”primarily black and white—€”ancestry. In her latest offering, Alexander rescues to historical memory the fascinating political careers of Ida Gibbs (1862-1957) and William Henry Hunt (1863-1951), whose activist and diplomatic work, respectively, brought them into close, if sometimes ambivalent, connection with African American and Pan-African communities in the late nineteenth through the early twentieth century. Like Alexander’s earlier works, Parallel Worlds spans multiple methodologies, this time offering a rich entre into an international world of shifting racial identities and political loyalties. Faye Botham’s Almighty God Created the Races: Christianity, Interracial Marriage, and American Law, on the other hand, is her first academic book, reworking a religious studies dissertation. Botham identifies a large and significant gap in historians’€™ collective approach to interracial marriage and its accompanying concerns with racial identity and categorization; social constructions of gender, race, and sexuality; and civil rights. Her work models a new direction of inquiry into the role of religious ideology and influence on what Peggy Pascoe calls miscegenation law, particularly the distinctive Catholic doctrine on marriage as a sacrament. In turn, Pascoe’€™s research for her recent publication spans this new age of historical scholarship. Begun in the early 1990s with a few pieces published as articles, the long-awaited and much celebrated What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America is a multilayered cultural, social, and legal history of post-Civil War legal prohibitions against interracial marriages and the enduring significance of the laws.

The books by Botham and Pascoe share an interest in legal and cultural sanctions against interracial marriage, but each author comes to the subject from vastly different training and experience. (Pascoe was a member of Botham’s dissertation committee, and that difference in academic maturity is evident in their works as well.) Botham’€™s analysis of the impact of American Catholic and Protestant theology on race and interracial marriage is strongest in her treatment of the Perez v. Lippold case (better known as Perez v. Sharp), which ultimately overturned California’s anti-intermarriage laws. Botham is especially interested in the longer history of Catholic influence on both Perez and the later Loving v. Virginia case, which respectively offer evidence of American Catholics’€™ support for and opposition to interracial marriage. The prominence of Catholics in bringing and opposing these legal challenges to laws against interracial marriage is most central to her analysis. But she returns to a focused treatment of the Perez case several…

‘Plessy v. Ferguson’: Who Was Plessy?

The Root
2013-06-10

Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor of History
Harvard University

100 Amazing Facts About the Negro: Learn about the man whose case led to decades of legal segregation.

Amazing Fact About the Negro No. 35: Who was the Plessy in the Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court case that established the separate-but-equal policy for separating the races?

‘How many mysteries have begun with the line, “A man gets on a train … “? In our man’s case, it happens to be true, and there is nothing mysterious about his plan. His name is Homer Plessy, a 30-year-old shoemaker in New Orleans, and on the afternoon of Tuesday, June 7, 1892, he executes it perfectly by walking up to the Press Street Depot, purchasing a first-class ticket on the 4:15 East Louisiana local and taking his seat on board. Nothing about Plessy stands out in the “whites only” car. Had he answered negatively, nothing might have.

Instead, as historian Keith Weldon Medley writes, when train conductor J.J. Dowling asks Plessy what all conductors have been trained to ask under Louisiana’s 2-year-old Separate Car Act—”Are you a colored man?”—Plessy answers, “Yes,” prompting Dowling to order him to the “colored car.” Plessy’s answer started off a chain of events that led the Supreme Court to read “separate but equal” into the Constitution in 1896, thus allowing racially segregated accommodations to become the law of the land.

Here’s what happens next on the train: If a few passengers fail to notice the dispute the first or second time Plessy refuses to move, no one can avoid the confrontation when the engineer abruptly halts the train so that Dowling can dart back to the depot and return with Detective Christopher Cain. When Plessy resists moving to the Jim Crow car once more, the detective has him removed, by force, and booked at the Fifth Precinct on Elysian Fields Avenue. The charge: “Viol. Sec. 2 Act 111, 1890” of the Louisiana Separate Car Act, which, after requiring “all railway companies [to] provide equal but separate accommodations for the white, and colored races” in Sec. 1, states that “any passenger insisting on going into a coach or compartment to which by race he does not belong, shall be liable to a fine of twenty-five dollars, or in lieu thereof to imprisonment for a period of not more than twenty days in the parish prison.”

It takes only 20 minutes for Homer Plessy to get bounced from his train, but another four years for him to receive a final decision from the United States Supreme Court. He is far from alone in the struggle. The 18-member citizens group to which Plessy belongs, the Comité des Citoyens of New Orleans (made up of “civil libertarians, ex-Union soldiers, Republicans, writers, a former Louisiana lieutenant governor, a French Quarter jeweler and other professionals,” according to Medley), has left little to chance.

In fact, every detail of Plessy’s arrest has been plotted in advance with input from one of the most famous white crusaders for black rights in the Jim Crow era: Civil War veteran, lawyer, Reconstruction judge and best-selling novelist Albion Winegar Tourgée, of late a columnist for the Chicago Inter-Ocean who will oversee Plessy’s case from his Mayville, N.Y., home, which Tourgée calls “Thorheim,” or “Fool’s House,” after his popular novel, A Fool’s Errand (1879). Even the East Louisiana Railroad, conductor Dowling and Detective Cain are in on the scheme.

Critically important to the legal team is Plessy’s color—that he has “seven eighths Caucasian and one eighth African blood,” as Supreme Court Justice Henry Billings Brown will write in his majority opinion, an observation that refers to the uniquely American “one drop rule” that a person with any African blood, no matter how little, is considered to be black. That Plessy’s particular “mixture of colored blood” means it is “not discernible” to the naked eye is not the only thing misunderstood about his case…

Read the entire article here.

Family Money: Property, Race, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century

Oxford University Press
November 2012
224 Pages
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780199897704

Jeffory A. Clymer, Professor of English
University of Kentucky

• Sophisticated interdisciplinary treatment of literature’s interaction with the law
• Dramatically revises scholarship on racial identity by emphasizing race’s connection to family and property rights
• Demonstrates that race was entwined with economics well beyond direct issue of slavery in the nineteenth century
• Nuanced, flexible, non-doctrinaire interpretations of both well-known and less familiar literary works

Family Money explores the histories of formerly enslaved women who tried to claim inheritances left to them by deceased owners, the household traumas of mixed-race slaves, post-Emancipation calls for reparations, and the economic fallout from anti-miscegenation marriage laws. Authors ranging from Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frank Webb, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Chesnutt, to Lydia Maria Child recognized that intimate interracial relationships took myriad forms, often simultaneously-sexual, marital, coercive, familial, pleasurable, and painful. Their fiction confirms that the consequences of these relationships for nineteenth-century Americans meant thinking about more than the legal structure of racial identity. Who could count as family (and when), who could own property (and when), and how racial difference was imagined (and why) were emphatically bound together. Demonstrating that notions of race were entwined with economics well beyond the direct issue of slavery, Family Money reveals interracial sexuality to be a volatile mixture of emotion, economics, and law that had dramatic, long-term financial consequences.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. “This Most Illegal Family”: Sex, Slavery, and the Politics of Inheritance
• 2. Blood, Truth, and Consequences: Partus Sequitur Ventrem and the Problem of Legal Title
• 3. Plantation Heiress Fiction, Slavery, and the Properties of White Marriage
• 4. Reparations for Slavery and Lydia Maria Child’s Reconstruction of the Family
• 5. The Properties of Marriage in Chesnutt and Hopkins
• Coda “Race Feeling”
• Notes
• Index

Seeing Beauty, Sensing Race in Transnational Indonesia

University of Hawai‘i Press
March 2013
192 pages
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8248-3664-1
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8248-3736-5

L. Ayu Saraswati, Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies
University of Hawai‘i

In Indonesia, light skin color has been desirable throughout recorded history. Seeing Beauty, Sensing Race explores Indonesia’s changing beauty ideals and traces them to a number of influences: first to ninth-century India and some of the oldest surviving Indonesian literary works; then, a thousand years later, to the impact of Dutch colonialism and the wartime occupation of Japan; and finally, in the post-colonial period, to the popularity of American culture. The book shows how the transnational circulation of people, images, and ideas have shaped and shifted discourses and hierarchies of race, gender, skin color, and beauty in Indonesia. The author employs “affect” theories and feminist cultural studies as a lens through which to analyze a vast range of materials, including the Old Javanese epic poem Ramayana, archival materials, magazine advertisements, commercial products, and numerous interviews with Indonesian women.

The book offers a rich repertoire of analytical and theoretical tools that allow readers to rethink issues of race and gender in a global context and understand how feelings and emotions—Western constructs as well as Indian, Javanese, and Indonesian notions such as rasa and malu—contribute to and are constitutive of transnational and gendered processes of racialization. Saraswati argues that it is how emotions come to be attached to certain objects and how they circulate that shape the “emotionscape” of white beauty in Indonesia. Her ground-breaking work is a nuanced theoretical exploration of the ways in which representations of beauty and the emotions they embody travel geographically and help shape attitudes and beliefs toward race and gender in a transnational world.

Photo of the Week: An Interracial Family in 1962

The Brooklyn Historical Society Blog
The Brooklyn Historical Society
2013-06-05

Sady Sullivan, Director of Oral History

The Bibuld Family, ca. 1962, V1989.22.14; Bob Adelman photographs of Brooklyn Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) demonstrations collection, V1989.002; Brooklyn Historical Society.

This photograph from the Brooklyn Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) collection shows the Bibuld family: parents Elaine and Jerome, and their three children Melanie, Carrington, and Douglass (L to R).

The Bibulds, an interracial family, lived in Crown Heights in the early 1960s and the children attended a neighborhood school that had a Gifted and Talented program and enrichments like art, music, and field trips.  After their home caught fire in the fall of 1962, the Bibulds moved to Park Slope, and the children’s new neighborhood school had substandard academics and few enrichments — and the student body was more than 70% African American and Puerto Rican.

Elaine and Jerry Bibuld, both members of the Brooklyn chapter of CORE, were angered by this educational inequity and concerned for their children who were very bored at their new school. So, they pulled their children out of this racially segregated public school and sat them in an all-white school in the Bath Beach section of Brooklyn. Technically, the children were not enrolled in school and the City considered them truants, which opened the parents up to imprisonment for parental neglect. For roughly three months, the Bibuld protest was the most important desegregation case in the city…

Read the entire article here.

Black in Latin America

New York University Press
July 2011
270 pages
50 illustrations
Hardback ISBN: 9780814732984
Paperback ISBN: 9780814738184
eBook ISBN:

Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor of History
Harvard University

12.5 million Africans were shipped to the New World during the Middle Passage. While just over 11.0 million survived the arduous journey, only about 450,000 of them arrived in the United States. The rest—over ten and a half million—were taken to the Caribbean and Latin America. This astonishing fact changes our entire picture of the history of slavery in the Western hemisphere, and of its lasting cultural impact. These millions of Africans created new and vibrant cultures, magnificently compelling syntheses of various African, English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish influences.

Despite their great numbers, the cultural and social worlds that they created remain largely unknown to most Americans, except for certain popular, cross-over musical forms. So Henry Louis Gates, Jr. set out on a quest to discover how Latin Americans of African descent live now, and how the countries of their acknowledge—or deny—their African past; how the fact of race and African ancestry play themselves out in the multicultural worlds of the Caribbean and Latin America. Starting with the slave experience and extending to the present, Gates unveils the history of the African presence in six Latin American countries—Brazil, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Mexico, and Peru—through art, music, cuisine, dance, politics, and religion, but also the very palpable presence of anti-black racism that has sometimes sought to keep the black cultural presence from view.

In Brazil, he delves behind the façade of Carnaval to discover how this ‘rainbow nation’ is waking up to its legacy as the world’s largest slave economy.

In Cuba, he finds out how the culture, religion, politics and music of this island is inextricably linked to the huge amount of slave labor imported to produce its enormously profitable 19th century sugar industry, and how race and racism have fared since Fidel Castro’s Communist revolution in 1959.

In Haiti, he tells the story of the birth of the first-ever black republic, and finds out how the slaves’s hard fought liberation over Napoleon Bonaparte’s French Empire became a double-edged sword.

In Mexico and Peru, he explores the almost unknown history of the significant numbers of black people—far greater than the number brought to the United States—brought to these countries as early as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the worlds of culture that their descendants have created in Vera Cruz on the Gulf of Mexico, the Costa Chica region on the Pacific, and in and around Lima, Peru.

Professor Gates’ journey becomes ours as we are introduced to the faces and voices of the descendants of the Africans who created these worlds. He shows both the similarities and distinctions between these cultures, and how the New World manifestations are rooted in, but distinct from, their African antecedents. “Black in Latin America” is the third installment of Gates’s documentary trilogy on the Black Experience in Africa, the United States, and in Latin America. In America Behind the Color Line, Professor Gates examined the fortunes of the black population of modern-day America. In Wonders of the African World, he embarked upon a series of journeys to reveal the history of African culture. Now, he brings that quest full-circle in an effort to discover how Africa and Europe combined to create the vibrant cultures of Latin America, with a rich legacy of thoughtful, articulate subjects whose stories are astonishingly moving and irresistibly compelling.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Brazil: “May Exú Give Me the Power of Speech”
• 2. Mexico: “The Black Grandma in the Closet”
• 3. Peru: “The Blood of the Incas, the Blood of the Mandingas”
• 4. The Dominican Republic: “Black behind the Ears”
• 5. Haiti: “From My Ashes I Rise; God Is My Cause and My Sword”
• 6. Cuba: The Next Cuban Revolution
• Appendix: Color Categories in Latin America
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author

Coming Out As Black

The Blog
The Huffington Post
2013-05-24

Elaine Vilorio, High School Senior
Northern New Jersey

I’m Black. After many years in the closet, after many years of breathing that stale air of self-denial, I can finally say this.

Growing up, I dreaded the question “What are you?” I always proudly answered that I was Hispanic. In fact, I made it a point to emphasize my Hispanicity simply because I knew what was coming next. “I’m Hispanic; I speak Spanish; my parents come from Dominican Republic. I’m Hispanic. And, just to clarify, I’m Hispanic.” To this, the other person confessed: “Oh… I thought you were Black. You definitely look Black.” The problem was I perceived the identification of “Hispanic” outside the realm of Blackness; but then, I wasn’t the only one. Take note that the other person in my scenario thought the same thing. Right after my declaration of Hispanicity, he/she stripped away the “Black” label with the phrases “I thought” and “You definitely look.”

The conventional definition of “Black” completely leaves out Hispanics, and this is because the latter is ashamed of African ancestry. As a result of this shame, American society has excused Latinos from identifying themselves as Black or African American. I recently read Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s Black in Latin America, and I’m amazed at what I learned. Eleven million Africans survived the Middle Passage and came to the Western Hemisphere. Out of this almost unfathomable number, only 450,000 Africans came to the United States. Gates expresses the significance of these numbers nicely: “The ‘real’ African American experience…unfolded in places south… of Texas, south of California, in the Caribbean islands and throughout Latin America.” [1] Why, then, has the stereotypical Hispanic comprised mostly European and Indigenous features? Where did the Black go? It was buried under unofficial segregation, under whitening campaigns of populations and national histories, under racism…

Read the entire article here.

What Makes you Black?

Ebony Magazine
Volume 38, Number 3 (January 1983)
pages 115-118

Vague definition of race is the basis for court battles

Imagine going to get a passport so you and your spouse can take a vacation in South America. Its all a formality, you reason; people just want to make sure you’re who and what you say you are. You fill out the form and, to your bewilderment, a clerk tells you she can’t give you the passport because you’re of a different race than what you claim to be.

It happened to 48-year-old Susie Guillory Phipps, who lives in Sulphur, La. She had been thinking all along that she was White, but her birth certificate indicated she was “Colored.”

“I was sick,” she later told reporters. “I couldn’t believe it.” She said she went home crying and told her husband she didn’t want to take the trip. It was the beginning of a 5-year court battle to get the State of Louisiana to change her birth certificate and the certificates of her six brothers and sisters. She also wants the states racial classification law declared unconstitutional. The law, approved by the Louisiana legislature in 1970, states that a person is Black if he or she has “1/32 Negro blood.” Louisiana is the only state with a race classification law.

So far, Mrs. Phipps has spent some $20,000 to change her racial status to White. A genealogist hired by the state has concluded she is 3/32 Black.

Mrs. Phipps’ case (Susie Smith vs. the State of Louisiana), which might be decided very soon, is the latest of a number of similar cases that have occurred over the years. A celebrated case developed during the 1920s when Leonard Kip Rhinelander failed to get an annulment of his marriage to Alice Jones, who admitted to having “some Negro blood.” Rhinelander, the son of millionaire society leader Philip Rhinelander, contended his wife deceived him about her race before their marriage. In a later case, Ralph Dupas, a prizefighter who fought and lost to Sugar Ray Robinson in 1963, was barred from fighting Whites in Louisiana in the late 1950s when word surfaced that he was Black. (Louisiana at that time didn’t allow interracial athletics). He failed in his bid to prove he was White. Earlier, another Louisiana prizefighter, Bernard Docusen, wasn’t allowed to fight Whites in Louisiana because of reports that his mother was Black. He was later recognized as White when it was discovered his mother was White.

Just what does make a person Black? The fundamental problem here, according to experts interviewed for and cited in this article, is that there is no generally accepted scientific definition of race. Another related problem is the inconsistency in the classification of people in the three traditional racial groupings — Negroid, Caucasoid and Mongoloid. In current practice, Black genes define and dominate White genes. One Black ancestor, for example, makes an Anglo-Saxon or a Chinese person “Black.” But, for some strange reason, the rule doesn’t work the other way, and one Chinese or Anglo-Saxon ancestor doesn’t make a Black person Chinese or Anglo-Saxon. And it is interesting to note that if the “one-Black” rule were applied to the other races, the racial composition of the United States would change markedly. Dr. Munro Edmonson, a professor of anthropology at Tulane University, says the average American White person has five percent traceable Black genes and the average American Black person has 25 percent traceable White genes…

Read the entire article here.