Mixed Race Studies

Who Was the 1st Black Duke?

The Root
2013-05-13

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

Porträt des Alessandro de Medici by Pontormo, 1534-1535

100 Amazing Facts About the Negro: Meet the scion of a legendary Italian dynasty.

Editor’s note: For those who are wondering about the retro title of this black-history series, please take a moment to learn about historian Joel A. Rogers, author of the 1934 book 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro With Complete Proof, to whom these “amazing facts” are an homage.

I discovered the answer to the question above while visiting the Walker Art Museum’s exhibition “Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe,” now at Princeton University. I was astonished when I encountered Bronzino’s “Portrait of Duke Alessandro de’ Medici,” a mulatto by the sight of him who, the exhibit claimed, also happened to be a member of one of the most powerful families in history and the first Duke of Florence almost 500 years ago! 

Fascinated, I hurried home to see if Joel A. Rogers had included him in his various compilations of famous black people, many of whom were mixed race, liked this man appeared to be. Sure enough, Rogers listed him both in his 100 Amazing Facts and in Volume II of his The World’s Great Men of Color. His conclusion startled me: “That Alessandro was a tyrant there is no doubt whatever,” a remarkably frank assessment from Rogers, who had a tendency to romanticize the achievements of just about every person of even the proverbial “one drop” whom he discovered hidden in the shadows of world history. I wanted to know more about this man. Here are the highlights of what I learned.

A Pivotal Potentate

Like the first black president of Mexico, Vicente Guerrero, and our first black president, Barack Obama, Alessandro de’ Medici (1511-1537)—the first black head of state in the history of the modern Western world—was a mulatto. He was the son of an African slave and one of two Medici males, either a duke or a future pope. With the latter’s blessing, Alessandro served as duke himself—of Florence—from the age of 19 to his assassination at age 26 at the hands of his cousin. The reason the cousin gave: Alessandro was a tyrant out of step with his times, a military ruler in a republican age…

Read the entire article here.

Arthur Wharton: The first Black Footballer

BBC Tyne
Culture
October 2003

BBC

Over 100 years before Dyer, Jenas and Ameobi, the North East had the UK’s first professional black League player. Meet the legendary Arthur Wharton.

Arthur Wharton was born on 28 October 1865 in Accra, formerly the Gold Coast, now capital of Ghana, West Africa.

His father, Henry Wharton was a famous Methodist Minister and Missionary from Grenada in the West Indies and his mother was Annie Florence Egyriba, was related to the Fante Royal Family.

Both of Arthur’s paternal grandfather’s were Scottish traders. One of his great grandmothers was an African-Grenadian slave.

Arthur’s uncle on his mothers’ side was a successful businessman and owner of the Gold Coast Times…

Read the entire article here.

Casta Painting: Art, Race and Identity in Colonial Mexico (HI972)

University of Warwick
Coventry, England
Spring 2013

Rebecca Earle, Professor of History

This module explores the distinctive vision of colonial Mexico purveyed via the artistic genre known as the casta painting. Casta paintings depict the outcomes of different types of inter-ethnic mixing, and often come in series of 16, showing many different family groups. They are quite remarkable. Consider, for example, José de Alcíbar’s painting showing a family group consisting, we are told in the helpful label, of a Black father, and Indian mother and their ‘Wolf’ son:

Casta paintings can be seen as attempts at cataloguing the varied inhabitants of Spain’s colonial universe. They thus offer a visual taxonomy of colonial space. At the same time, they have been read as statements of local pride, and usually include a wealth of details about local customs and habits. In addition, they are rich and complex documents relating to the material culture of colonial Spanish America. In Alcíbar’s painting reproduced above we notice not only the domestic strife but also the beautiful china (which is endangered by the parental row) and food items such as the headless chicken. How are we to interpret and understand such images?

The module will introduce students to this artistic genre, and will explore different ways of interpreting these multi-valent images. Its educational aims, therefore, are to help students consider how to read artistic works produced in a colonial setting, how to use casta paintings as a body of source material, and how to explore the relationship between visual and textual depictions of colonial space…

For more information, click here.

The Art of Conversation: Eighteenth-Century Mexican Casta Painting

SHIFT: Graduate Journal of Visual and Material Culture
Issue 5, 2012
25 pages

Mey-Yen Moriuchi
Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania

Traditionally, casta paintings have been interpreted as an isolated colonial Mexican art form and examined within the social historical moment in which they emerged. Casta paintings visually represented the miscegenation of the Spanish, Indian and Black African populations that constituted the new world and embraced a diverse terminology to demarcate the land’s mixed races. Racial mixing challenged established social and racial categories, and casta paintings sought to stabilize issues of race, gender and social status that were present in colonial Mexico.

Concurrently, halfway across the world, another country’s artists were striving to find the visual vocabulary to represent its families, socio-economic class and genealogical lineage. I am referring to England and its eighteenth-century conversation pictures. Like casta paintings, English conversation pieces articulate beliefs about social and familial propriety. It is through the family unit and the presence of a child that a genealogical statement is made and an effigy is preserved for subsequent generations. Utilizing both invention and mimesis, artists of both genres emphasize costume and accessories in order to cater to particular stereotypes.

I read casta paintings as conversations like their European counterparts—both internal conversations among the figures within the frame, and external ones between the figures, the artist and the beholder. It is my position that both casta paintings and conversation pieces demonstrate a similar concern with the construction of a particular self-image in the midst of societies that were apprehensive about the varying conflicting notions of socio-familial and socio-racial categories.

Read the entire article here.

Blacks in Colonial Spanish Texas

Texas State Historical Association: A Digital Gateway to Texas History
2013

Jesús F. de la Teja, Jerome H. and Catherine E. Supple Professor of Southwestern Studies and Regents’ Professor of History
Texas State University, San Marcos

From the initial encounters between the Old and New Worlds following Christopher Columbus’s voyages of exploration, African-descent people have been part of the story of the Americas. The African diaspora, although overwhelmingly a forced emigration carried out as part of the international slave trade, contributed to the creation of the complex multi-racial societies of Hispanic America. Hundreds of thousands of enslaved sub-Saharan Africans were sold into slavery in Spanish and Portuguese America between approximately 1550 and 1821. Hispanic legal and religious traditions allowed for considerable numbers of Africans to achieve manumission through gift or purchase, marry people of other ethnicities, produce free offspring, and in the Spanish world constitute one element of what came to be called the castas (racial/ethnic groupings). By the time of Spanish settlement in Texas in the early eighteenth century, the black Mexican population was composed overwhelming of free people of color, mostly identified as mulatto, combining European and American Indian elements…

…The complex characteristics of race and ethnicity in the broader Spanish empire were reflected in Texas’s Hispanic society. Miscegenation was widespread, and members of subordinate groups strove to “whiten” as they climbed the social ladder. In the socio-racial hierarchy of the Spanish colonial world, Spaniards stood at the top, followed by the various castas, with Indians and Africans at the bottom. Lighter skin brought with it the possibility of “passing” either for oneself or for one’s children. An analysis of extant sacramental records from San Antonio indicates that casta labels were often applied in an arbitrary and inconsistent manner. Additionally, military service tended to mask the actual phenotypical background of soldiers who were consistently listed as “Spaniard” during their active service, but whose casta might then devolve to that of a color quebrado (broken color) upon retirement. Consequently, census figures, which are available for the last decades of the colonial period, offer only an approximation of the size of the Afro-Mexican portion of the Texas population. In 1792 for instance, the civil (excluding military personnel) census summary for the province listed 415 mulattoes and 40 blacks in a reported casta population of 2,961. It also listed a total of 367 individuals in an “other” category, which reflects the ethnic ambiguity of many mixed-blood members of Hispanic Texas society. Similarly at Laredo, which was not a Texas jurisdiction until 1848, there were 155 mulattoes in a total town population of 718, making them the second largest casta group behind those categorized as Spaniards. The collapse of the mulatto population and substantial increase in the number of mestizos reported in census records from the late 1790s onward attests to greater possibilities for upward ethnic mobility on the Texas frontier….

Read the entire article here.

Breaking the Color Barrier: Regina Andrews and the New York Public Library

Libraries & the Cultural Record
Volume 42, Number 4, 2007
pages 409-421
DOI: 10.1353/lac.2007.0068

Ethelene Whitmire, Associate Professor of Library & Information Studies
University of Wisconsin, Madison

Chicago native Regina Anderson Andrews (1901–93) was a librarian in the New York Public Library (NYPL) system for nearly half a century beginning in 1923 at the 135th Street branch (now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture) until her retirement from the Washington Heights branch in 1967. Andrews broke the color barrier by becoming the first African American supervising librarian in NYPL history. Her accomplishment was not an easy one. This article illustrates Andrews’s groundbreaking career as a librarian and activist, including her fight, with W. E. B. Du Bois as a powerful ally, against the NYPL administration for opportunities for promotion and equal pay.

“I’m American,” Regina Anderson wrote in 1923 on her application for a position in the New York Public Library (NYPL) when asked to give her race. Three or four days after she completed the application at the main branch on 42nd Street, Anderson received a request to return to discuss her answers—this one in particular. Asked again about her racial designation and stating firmly that she was American, Anderson was told, “You’re not an American. You’re not white.”

Like untold numbers of U.S. citizens, Anderson came from a multicultural background requiring a roadmap to follow. Her father, William Grant “Habeas Corpus” Anderson, a prominent criminal lawyer in Chicago, was the son of a Swedish immigrant and his American Indian wife. Her mother, Margaret Simons, was the daughter of Henry Simons, the son of an Arkansas Confederate general and an immigrant Jewish woman. Henry’s wife, Regina’s maternal grandmother, was the offspring of a  Madagascar woman and an East Indian man. Regina considered herself an American.

In December 1924, a year after the application incident, this “pert olive-skinned girl” would grace the cover of Messenger magazine’s issue that featured “Negro women who are unique, accomplished, beautiful, intelligent, industrious, talented and successful.”

The NYPL hired Anderson, but because of her color, her interviewer told her, “We’ll have to send you to Harlem.” Besides determining her…

Yokohama Yankee: My Family’s Five Generations as Outsiders in Japan [Presentation]

German Institute for Japanese Studies (Deutsches Institut für Japanstudien)
Jochi Kioizaka Bldg. 2F
7-1 Kioicho
Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 102-0094, Japan
Wednesday, 2013-06-12, 18:30 JST (Local Time)

Leslie Helm, Seattle Business Magazine

The DIJ Social Science Study Group is a forum for young scholars and Ph.D. candidates in the Social Sciences. Presentations on a scholar’s research project are about 45 minutes, followed by about 45 minutes of Q&A. The DIJ Social Science Study Group usually meets once a month, on a Wednesday from 6:30 to 8:00 p.m.

Leslie Helm’s decision to adopt Japanese children launches him on a personal journey through his family’s 140 years in Japan, beginning with his German great-grandfather, who worked as a military adviser in 1870, married a Japanese woman and started a stevedoring and forwarding business in Yokohama. The family operates a successful business across two world wars by having sons take German, Japanese and U.S. citizenship, and transferring management among the sons as Japan shifts its alliances from the U.S. and Britain to Germany and Italy. While the business survives, the family suffers from its mixed-race identity and the inability to ever truly establish a sense of belonging in Japan. The book draws a contrast between the Helm family, and the family of Leslie’s mother, Barbara Schinzinger, whose father, Robert Schinzinger, taught German in Japan for sixty years but always maintained a strong identity as a German national with a duty to teach the Japanese about “the true Germany.”

In this presentation I am presenting my recently published book on this topic. My family history and our story of a multinational, biracial merchant family serves as historical document, shedding light on the political, economic, cultural, and racial interactions and tensions between Japan and the United States for more than a century and a half, right up to the present day.

For more information, click here. View the program here.

A Conversation with Lawrence Hill

Callaloo
Volume 36, Number 1, Winter 2013
pages 5-26
DOI: 10.1353/cal.2013.0072

Winfried Siemerling, Professor of English
University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

When Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic offered an alternative account of modernity that placed transnational, black transatlantic lives and cultures at the center, Canada was not on his map. Slavery, however, did not stop at the borders first of New France and then the Canada’s until it was abolished in the British Empire in 1834, and the Underground Railroad made Canada an important site of black writing especially after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. To be fair, the current surge of impressively strong African Canadian writing, heralded by some authors and anthologies since the 1960s and 1970s, was still gathering steam in the early 1990s.

Lawrence Hill, a novelist and nonfiction writer whose parents immigrated to Canada from the United States after WWII, has become one of the most important contributors to black culture here. His first novel, Some Great Thing (1992), was followed by Any Known Blood (1997), a multi-generational border-crossing novel in which the allusively named Langston Cane V explores his own mixed race and family. In the process, he uncovers a forebear’s slave narrative that recounts his involvement in John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. Hill’s third novel, The Book of Negroes (2007), is a neo-slave narrative in its entirety that redraws the map of Gilroy’s black Atlantic. The protagonist Aminata, abducted in West Africa, flees first from slavery in South Carolina, then from Americans taking control of New York in 1783, and finally from Nova Scotia to return to Africa. She travels to Sierra Leone in 1792, and from there sails to London to support the abolition of the slave trade. In Hill’s transfiguration of these historical events, Aminata herself becomes a scribe of Guy Carleton’s “Book of Negroes,” recording the 1783 black exodus from New York. The use of the word “Negroes” in Hill’s title, although taken from that historical document, has proven controversial, and the novel appeared in the United States, New Zealand, and Australia as Someone Knows My Name. A breakthrough for Hill internationally, the novel won among other awards the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.

Hill’s work offers United States readers an especially inviting entrance into contemporary black Canadian literature, not only because of his fiction’s frequent transborder thematic but also since his nonfiction—€”for example Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada—often speaks to issues of race from a United States-Canadian comparative perspective. The following interview conversation, though concentrating on the novels, seeks to provide an introduction to his entire career, including his formative travels in Africa. It is divided by short subtitles for orientation and ease of reading.

Early Writing and Travels in Africa

Siemerling:

In your last novel, The Book of Negroes (named after a historical document but published in the United States as Someone Knows My Name), you thematize the back-to-Africa journey of 1,200 people from Nova Scotia to Sierra Leone in 1792, and you talk about the fact that it is the first one historically. We also know that for many people still today it is a very emotional and important event, to “go back” to Africa.

Hill:

Yes, and many people of African American or African Canadian origin are seeking some sort of validation from or connection with the motherland. It’s a connection with one’s extended family, metaphorically. Of course, why should a typical African who is selling coffee in his street stand in Niamey, Niger, look at some kid from Toronto and say “hey, here’s my brother.” Sorry, that’s just not going to happen, especially with the way I look, which to many of them was white. Many African Americans and African Canadians have observed this kind of rocky reception that they received. When I went there, I wanted to be welcomed as one of the race and have my blackness celebrated. I wanted to be brought into the arms of my people, in a way. And it’s a natural thing for a twenty-two-year-old to…

The Forging of the Cosmic Race: A Reinterpretation of Colonial Mexico. [Book Review]

The Journal of San Diego History
Volume 27, Number 3 (Summer 1981)

W. Michael Mathes (1936-2012), Professor of History
University of San Francisco

The Forging of the Cosmic Race: A Reinterpretation of Colonial Mexico. By Colin M. MacLachlan and Jaime E. Rodríguez O. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Bibliography. Illustrations. Index. Maps. 362 pages.

In general, Mexico’s colonial past has been interpreted as a negative experience by modern scholars. Within Mexico this interpretation is based primarily upon political concepts which idealize pre-Cortesian culture and condemn Spain as a cruel, autocratic nation which forcefully imposed itself upon Aztec civilization through bloody conquest. Foreign scholars either adhere to this “Black Legend” concept or, in a more revisionary sense, simply condemn colonialism as an institution. This new study presents a positive approach to the three centuries of Spanish domination in Mexico as an integral part of national evolution, not as a better-to-be forgotten period of darkness.

The basis for the development of Colonial Mexico, New Spain, is seen as mestizaje, the fusion of Indian and European culture which began with the conquest in 1519. In that Aztec and Spanish society shared more similarities than differences, mestizaje produced a dynamic new race, referred to by José Vasconcelos as “Cosmic,” the “Mexican.” As an integral part of society within New Spain, the mestizo is seen as the prime mover of economic growth and cultural homogeneity…

Read the entire review here.

The Forging of the Cosmic Race: A Reinterpretation of Colonial Mexico

University of California Press
December 1980
408 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9780520042803

Colin M. MacLachlan, Professor of History
Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana

Jamie E. Rodríguez, Professor of History
University of California, Irvine

“The Forging of the Cosmic Race” challenges the widely held notion that Mexico’s colonial period is the source of many of that country’s ills. The authors contend that New Spain was neither feudal nor pre-capitalists as some Neo-Marxist authors have argued. Instead they advance two central themes: that only in New Spain did a true mestizo society emerge, integrating Indians, Europeans, Africans, and Asians into a unique cultural mix; and that colonial Mexico forged a complex, balanced, and integrated economy that transformed the area into the most important and dynamic part of the Spanish empire.

The revisionist view is based on a careful examination of all the recent research done on colonial Mexican history. The study begins with a discussion of the area’s rich pre-Columbian heritage. It traces the merging of two great cultural traditions—the Meso-american and the European—which occurred as a consequence of the Spanish conquest. The authors analyze the evolution of a new mestizo society through an examination of the colony’s institutions, economy, and social organization. The role of women and of the family receive particular attention because they were critical to the development of colonial Mexico. The work concludes with an analysis of the 18th century reforms and the process of independence which ended the history of the most successful colony in the Western hemisphere.

The role of silver mining emerges as a major factor of Mexico’s great socio-economic achievement. The rich silver mines served as an engine of economic growth that stimulated agricultural expansion, pastoral activities, commerce, and manufacturing. The destruction of the silver mines during the wars of Independence was perhaps the most important factor in Mexico’s prolonged 19th century economic decline. Without the great wealth from silver mining, economic recovery proved extremely difficult in the post-independence period. These reverses at the end of the colonial epoch are important in understanding why Mexicans came to view the era as a “burden” to be overcome rather than as a formative period upon which to build a new nation.

Contents

• List of Illustrations and Maps
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One
  • 1. The Setting
  • 2. Ancient Mexico
  • 3. The Mexica-Aztecs
  • 4. The Birth of New Spain, 1519-1530
• Part Two
  • 5. The Institutional Process
  • 6. The Economy
  • 7. Society
  • 8. Women and the Family
• Part Three
  • 9. Rationalization, Reform, and Reaction
  • 10. The Process of Independence
  • 11. A Rejected Legacy
• Bibliographical Essay
• Sources for Illustration
• Index