Mixed Race Studies

Love in black and white

Princeton Alumni Weekly
2009-04-22

Lawrence Otis Graham ’83

Martha Sandweiss examines racial passing in America

Clarence King, a celebrated explorer, geologist, and surveyor in 19th-century America, chose to set that identity aside — and live as a working-class black man during a time of harsh racial segregation in the United States. He did it for love.

King moved back and forth between two sides of the color line: as the very public white, Newport-born, Yale-educated cartographer and researcher of the American West, and at other times as the strangely private man pretending to be a black Pullman train porter and itinerant steelworker (using the alias “James Todd”) who married an African-American woman. Martha Sandweiss, who joined Princeton’s history department this semester, explores King’s double life in her book Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line, published by Penguin Press in February. 

“While racial passing was surely attempted by some light-skinned blacks who wanted to escape the economic disadvantages tied to black life at the time,” explains Sandweiss, “it was virtually unheard-of for whites to voluntarily choose to face social and economic discrimination and live as black people.” But after falling in love with a black nursemaid, Ada Copeland, in 1888, that is what Clarence King did for 13 years. His wife and their five children had no idea that he was, in fact, white, and that he was the famous Clarence King, until he confessed it on his deathbed in 1901…

Read the entire article here.

Woman finds out famous relative was black

The Toronto Star
2011-02-23

Megan Ogilvie, Health Reporter

Growing up in Georgetown, Catherine Slaney knew her great-grandfather had an important and interesting past.

She knew he was a respected doctor and a surgeon in the American Civil War. She knew he was a friend of Abraham Lincoln and had received a gift — the shawl Lincoln wore to his first inauguration — from his widow after the president was killed. She knew he was a coroner in Kent County, Ont., and that he was involved in politics.

But Slaney did not know Dr. Anderson Ruffin Abbott was black…

…The uncle — Slaney’s mother’s brother — knew Abbott was black. His youngest sister, however, had no idea previous generations of her family had passed as white. Or that some family members still kept the secret.

“The family my mother and father knew was white-haired and pale-skinned,” Slaney says. “The question of race just never came up.”

Slaney says finding out Abbott was black cast a new importance on the pieces of history she did know about him. Abbott wasn’t just a doctor — he was the first black Canadian to be a licensed physician. He wasn’t just a coroner — he was the first the first black Canadian to hold the office…

..Slaney turned her research and personal experience into a book, Family Secrets: Crossing the Colour Line, which was published in 2000. She also completed a PhD at the University of Toronto, focusing on racial identity and the practice of passing.

By exploring her past, and finding her black heritage, Slaney says her outlook on the world has expanded…

Read the entire article here.

Family Secrets: Crossing the Colour Line

Dundurn Publishing
February 2003
264 pages
6 x 9 in
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-89621-982-0
eBook (PDF) ISBN: 978-1-55488-161-1
eBook (EPUB) ISBN: 978-1-45971-478-6

Catherine Slaney

Foreword by:

Daniel G. Hill, III (1923-2003)

Catherine Slaney grew into womanhood unaware of her celebrated Black ancestors. An unanticipated meeting was to change her life. Her great-grandfather was Dr. Anderson Abbott, the first Canadian-born Black to graduate from medical school in Toronto in 1861. In Family Secrets Catherine Slaney narrates her journey along the trail of her family tree, back through the era of slavery and the plight of fugitive slaves, the Civil War, the Elgin settlement near Chatham, Ontario, and the Chicago years. Why did some of her family identify with the Black Community while others did not? What role did “passing” play? Personal anecdotes and excerpts from archival Abbott family papers enliven the historical context of this compelling account of a family dealing with an unknown past. A welcome addition to African-Canadian history, this moving and uplifting story demonstrates that understanding one’s identity requires first the embracing of the past.

Why did some of her family identify with the Black Community while others did not? What role did “passing” play? Personal anecdotes and excerpts from archival Abbott family papers enliven the historical context of this compelling account of a family dealing with an unknown past. A welcome addition to African-Canadian history, this moving and uplifting story demonstrates that understanding one’s identity requires first the embracing of the past.

History 101.020: Betwixt and Between in the United States: Boundaries and the People who Defy Them

University of California, Berkeley
Spring 2013

MacKenzie Moore, Visiting Lecturer

This 101 seminar is geared toward any student who wants to study the boundaries among and between people, nations, or states, broadly defined. It is also perfect for those wishing to explore what happens when such barriers are (inevitably) ruptured, questioned, or otherwise revealed to be unstable. Some, but by no means all, possible topics include: immigrant history, Native American/colonial contact, the history of American sexuality, frontier environments, mixed-race communities or individuals, the US/Mexico Borderlands, religious synthesis, or urban communities.  We will begin the semester by exploring theoretical approaches to the question of boundaries and categories and the power that sustains them. We will also discuss what such categories mean to people as they construct communities, nations, and identities. We will then consider specific examples of people who, out of choice or circumstance, defy those boundaries. The rest of the semester will be run as a writing and reading seminar. We will support and encourage each other through peer editing, research partners, and other boundary-crossing activities.

AAS 490: Special Topics in Black World Studies: Section 008: Race and “Black Indians”

University of Michigan
Winter 2013
Theme Semester Courses

Tiya Miles, Professor of American Culture, Afroamerican and African Studies, and Native American Studies

This seven week mini course is a special winter 2013 offering for the LSA Theme Semester on Race. The course will introduce students to a range of issues and experiences related to the topic and identity category of “Black Indians.” Popularized in the 1980s by a book of the same title, the term “Black Indians” is often used to identify and describe people of mixed-race African American and Native American ancestry. It is also applied to people with strong bi-cultural connections across these groups who may or may not have Black and native “blood” ties. This class will explore and analyze three major aspects of our subject matter:

1. historical contexts for the interactions of Africans, African Americans and Native Americans;
2. personal experiences stemming from mixed race and bi-cultural Afro-Native identities;
3. meanings and effects of “racial stories” that have been crafted and told about “Black Indians” over time.

Major themes and ideas that will emerge in our discussions include: indigeneity, European and U.S. colonialism, slavery, racial formation and racial hierarchy, mixed-race coupling and family making, tribal sovereignty, personal and community identities, and racial and cultural authenticity.

Textbooks/Other Materials

• Confounding the Color Line, Author: Brooks, James F.
• Black Indians: A Hidden Heritage, Author: written by William Loren Katz.
• Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: the African diaspora in Indian country, Author: edited by Tiya Miles and Sharon P. Holland.
• IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas, Author: general editor, Gabrielle Tayac.

For more information, click here.

Children of the Occupation

Radio National
Big Ideals
Australian Broadcasting Corporation
2013-03-11

For a decade following the end of the Second World War, foreign troops occupied Japan.  During that time, thousands of mixed race children were born, the result of relationships between the occupying servicemen – Australians, Americans, Brits – and Japanese women.  What became of those children after their fathers returned home?  Former ABC Tokyo based correspondent, Walter Hamilton, has been finding out.

Listen to the episode here. Download the episode here.

Letter documenting the struggle of two children’s attempt to attend school

Special Collections
University of Southern Mississippi Libraries
Item of the Month
March 2010

Jennifer Brannock, Special Collections Librarian

The Mississippi Department of Archives and History: Sovereignty Commission Online

[Note from Steven F. Riley: For more on Newton Knight, Rachel Knight, and the “Free State of Jones,” please read Victoria E. Bynum’s excellent monograph, The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War.]

In 1964, 9-year-old Edgar and 8-year-old Randy Williamson had never attended a day of school. The debate over their admittance stems from the fact that they are 1/16 or 1/32 African American. They are the great, great grandchildren of Newt Knight and a slave woman, Rachel. Newt Knight is a well-known historical figure who was the man behind the “Free State of Jones.” Rachel was a slave owned by Knight’s uncle. Even though Knight was married, it is believed that he left his wife and lived with Rachel until her death.

Edgar and Randy Williamson’s great, great grandmother was African American which meant that they were 1/16 African American. According to Mississippi law at the time, a person had to be less than 1/8 African American to be considered white. In the case of the Edgar and Randy, their mother, a direct descendant of Newt and Rachel, was listed as black on her birth certificate (she was 1/8 African American) with Edgar and Randy as white (their father was white). The people in Stringer, a community in Jasper County, considered the children to be African American since their mother was. Due to these beliefs, school officials at the white school in Stringer anticipated strong objections and possible violence if the children were admitted…

Read the entire article here.

The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War (Scarborough review)

Civil War History
Volume 49, Number 1, March 2003
pages 72-74
DOI: 10.1353/cwh.2003.0026

William Kauffman Scarborough, Professor Emeritus of History
University of Southern Mississippi

The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War. By Victoria E. Bynum. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Pp. 316. Cloth.)

For generations the so-called legend of the “Free State of Jones” has circulated throughout Mississippi and, to a lesser extent, beyond the borders of the state. Anti-Confederate elements within this piney-woods county in south Mississippi, so the story goes, actually seceded from the Confederacy and established a small independent republic. As previous historians have discovered, the story is entirely apocryphal. In actuality a band of Confederate deserters led by Newton Knight formed a company in the fall of 1863 that subsequently gained control over much of this predominately non-slaveholding county and engaged in a number of skirmishes with Confederate cavalry units over a period of more than a year. The Knight Company was pretty well decimated during what the author term’s an “infamous” Confederate raid into the county in April 1864 led by Col. Robert Lowery, later a two-term governor of Mississippi (115). By the time the skirmishing ended, ten of the Jones County deserters had  been hanged, and most of the remainder had either fled to the swamps, returned to the Confederate army, or joined the Union army in New Orleans.

Those expecting to read a detailed account of the Civil War activities of Newt Knight and his intrepid band of dissident warriors will be disappointed with this book. Only two of the eight chapters (thirty-four pages in all) are devoted to the war. Instead, the author concentrates primarily on the background of the families that settled in this rural piney-woods county and on the interracial liaisons that resulted in the so-called community of “white Negroes” after the war. Indeed, as the dust jacket proclaims, this is actually an account of the “origins and legacy” of the legendary Jones County rebels from the American Revolution to the twentieth-century civil rights movement. With a heavy emphasis upon the currently fashionable theme of race, class, and gender, Bynum traces the movement of such families as the Knights, Collinses, Welborns, Bynums (the author’s father was a native of Jones County), Sumralls, Welches, and Valentines from their antecedents in the Carolinas, where they were allegedly influenced by the Great Awakening and the Regulator Movement, to their settlement in south Mississippi during the first third of the nineteenth century. It was these independent-minded nonslaveholding yeomen who opposed secession in 1861 and ultimately took up arms against the Confederacy, aided in no small measure by the female members of their families.

One of those women was Rachel Knight, a mulatto slave who had supported the Knight Company during the war and who later had a long-term intimate relationship with Knight, apparently bearing him at least two sons. Whatever the true relationship between Newt and Rachel, it is clear that the older children of the two intermarried beginning about 1878, thereby giving rise to a mixed-race community in Jones County that endures to this day. The ambiguous racial identities in the county were illuminated in 1948 when Davis Knight, a great-grandson of Rachel Knight, was convicted of violating the anti-miscegenation laws then on the books in Mississippi because he had married a white woman two years before. Although his conviction was overturned by the state supreme court, the case illustrates the complexity of the family relationships that resulted from the interracial unions inaugurated by Knight and his black paramour.

Bynum, who clearly sympathizes with Knight and his company of anti-Confederates, contends that the Civil War dissident has been stigmatized unfairly by his postwar defiance of racial customs. If he was not quite the Robin Hood figure depicted by his son, Thomas J. Knight, in a 1935 biography, he was certainly not the villainous traitor described by his segregationist grandniece, Ethel Knight, in what…

Muddied Waters: Race, Region, and Local History in Colombia, 1846–1948

Duke University Press
2003
320 pages
Illustrations: 9 b&w photos, 5 maps
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-3092-9
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-3080-6

Nancy P. Appelbaum, Associate Professor of History
Binghamton University, State University of New York

Colombia’s western Coffee Region is renowned for the whiteness of its inhabitants, who are often described as respectable pioneer families who domesticated a wild frontier and planted coffee on the forested slopes of the Andes. Some local inhabitants, however, tell a different tale—of white migrants rapaciously usurping the lands of indigenous and black communities. Muddied Waters examines both of these legends, showing how local communities, settlers, speculators, and politicians struggled over jurisdictional boundaries and the privatization of communal lands in the creation of the Coffee Region. Viewing the emergence of this region from the perspective of Riosucio, a multiracial town within it, Nancy P. Appelbaum reveals the contingent and contested nature of Colombia’s racialized regional identities.

Nineteenth- and twentieth-century Colombian elite intellectuals, Appelbaum contends, mapped race onto their mountainous topography by defining regions in racial terms. They privileged certain places and inhabitants as white and modern and denigrated others as racially inferior and backward. Inhabitants of Riosucio, however, elaborated local narratives about their mestizo and indigenous identities that contested the white mystique of the Coffee Region. Ongoing violent conflicts over land and politics, Appelbaum finds, continue to shape local debates over history and identity. Drawing on archival and published sources complemented by oral history, Muddied Waters vividly illustrates the relationship of mythmaking and racial inequality to regionalism and frontier colonization in postcolonial Latin America.

Table of Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Riosucio: Race, Colonization, Region, and Community
• Part 1. Country of Regions, 1946-1886
  • 1. Beauty and the Beast: Antioquia and Cauca
  • 2. Accompanied by Progress: Cauca Intermediaries and Antioqueno Migration
  • 3. By Consent of the Indigenas: Riosucios Indigenous Communities
• Part 2. The White Republic, 1886-1930
  • 4. Regenerating Riosucio: Regeneration and the Transition to Conservative Rule
  • 5. Regenerating Conflict: Riosucios Indigenas in the White Republic
  • 6. Riosucio on the Margins of the Model Department
• Part 3. Remembering Race, Region, and Community
  • 7. Remembering Riosucio: Imagining a Mestizo Community
  • 8. Remembering San Lorenzo: Imagining an Indigenous Community
• Conclusion: Reimagining Region and Nation
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Hist7362: Histories of Exclusion: Race and Ethnicity in Latin America

University College of London
2013

Paulo Drinot, Senior Lecturer in Latin American History

This course examines race and ethnicity, and processes of racialised and ethnic exclusion, in Latin America in historical perspective. It invites us to consider the historical role played by race and ethnicity in hierarchically structuring Latin American societies and reproducing patterns of exclusion from full citizenship in a number of contrasting case studies from the wars of independence until c. 1950. Among some of the topics to be considered are: the role of Afro-descendants and the indigenous in the region’s independence from Spain and Portugal, the persistence of slavery in Brazil and Cuba in a context shaped by ostensibly liberal ideas, the so-called Indian question and its place in liberal thought in the nineteenth century, debates over desirable and non-desirable immigration and on immigration’s impact on the ‘racial stock’, the adoption and adaptation of scientific racism and eugenics by Latin American thinkers as well as the critiques that such approaches to race engendered, the rise and demise of indigenista ideas, policies, and cultural expressions in both Mesoamerica and the Andes, the development of the notion of ‘racial democracy’ in post-slavery Brazil and Cuba and of ‘whiteness’ in the Southern Cone and their role in shaping racialised social policies. More generally, the course considers the ideological and practical construction of ‘racial states’ throughout Latin America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries…

..Course structure

1. Introduction
2. Independence and Race
3. Slavery in Brazil and Cuba
4. Liberalism and the Indian Question
5. Immigration: Europeans, Asians, Jews and Arabs
6. The Science of Racism
7. Indigenismo in Mexico and Central America
8. Indigenismo in the Andes
9. Racial Democracy in Brazil and Cuba
10. Race in the Southern Cone

For more information, click here.