Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787-1861

Posted in Books, History, Law, Media Archive, Monographs, Slavery, Social Science, United States, Virginia on 2013-03-06 18:31Z by Steven

Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787-1861

University of North Carolina Press
March 2003
360 pages
6.125 x 9.25, 1 genealogical chart, 4 maps, notes, bibl., index
Paper ISBN  978-0-8078-5440-2

Joshua D. Rothman, Associate Professor of History
University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa

Winner of the 2004 Outstanding Book Award, Organization for the Study of Communication, Language, and Gender.

Laws and cultural norms militated against interracial sex in Virginia before the Civil War, and yet it was ubiquitous in cities, towns, and plantation communities throughout the state. In Notorious in the Neighborhood, Joshua Rothman examines the full spectrum of interracial sexual relationships under slavery—from Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and the intertwined interracial families of Monticello and Charlottesville to commercial sex in Richmond, the routinized sexual exploitation of enslaved women, and adultery across the color line. He explores the complex considerations of legal and judicial authorities who handled cases involving illicit sex and describes how the customary toleration of sex across the color line both supported and undermined racism and slavery in the early national and antebellum South.

White Virginians allowed for an astonishing degree of flexibility and fluidity within a seemingly rigid system of race and interracial relations, Rothman argues, and the relationship between law and custom regarding racial intermixture was always shifting. As a consequence, even as whites never questioned their own racial supremacy, the meaning and significance of racial boundaries, racial hierarchy, and ultimately of race itself always stood on unstable ground—a reality that whites understood and about which they demonstrated increasing anxiety as the nation’s sectional crisis intensified.

Tags: , , , ,

Africa in Europe: Studies in Transnational Practice in the Long Twentieth Century

Posted in Africa, Anthologies, Anthropology, Books, Europe, History, Media Archive, Social Science, United Kingdom on 2013-03-06 17:02Z by Steven

Africa in Europe: Studies in Transnational Practice in the Long Twentieth Century

Liverpool University Press
January 2013
304 pages
Illustrations: 8 colour plates, 12 black and white illustrations
234 x 156 mm
Hardback ISBN: 9781846318474

Edited by:

Eve Rosenhaft, Professor of German Historical Studies
University of Liverpool, United Kingdom

Robbie Aitken, Senior Lecturer in History
Sheffield Hallam University, United Kingdom

This volume explores the lives and activities of people of African descent in Europe between the 1880s and the beginning of the twenty-first century. It goes beyond the still-dominant Anglo-American or transatlantic focus of diaspora studies to examine the experiences of black and white Africans, Afro-Caribbeans and African Americans who settled or travelled in Germany, France, Portugal, Italy and the Soviet Union, as well as in Britain. At the same time, while studies of Africans in Europe have tended to focus on the relationship between colonial (or former colonial) subjects and their respective metropolitan nation states, the essays in this volume widen the lens to consider the skills, practices and negotiations called for by other kinds of border-crossing: The subjects of these essays include people moving between European states and state jurisdictions or from the former colony of one state to another place in Europe, African-born colonial settlers returning to the metropolis, migrants conversing across ethnic and cultural boundaries among ‘Africans’, and visitors for whom the face-to-face encounter with European society involves working across the ‘colour line’ and testing the limits of solidarity. Case studies of family life, community-building and politics and cultural production, drawing on original research, illuminate the transformative impact of those journeys and encounters and the forms of ‘transnational practice’ that they have generated. The contributors include specialist scholars in social history, art history, anthropology, cultural studies and literature, as well as a novelist and a filmmaker who reflect on their own experiences of these complex histories and the challenges of narrating them.

Contents

  • Acknowledgements
  • List of Illustrations
  • List of Abbreviations
  • List of Contributors
  • 1. Introduction / Eve Rosenhaft and Robbie Aitken
  • I. Enacting Identity: Individuals, Families and Communities
    • 2. Prince Dido of Didotown and ‘Human Zoos’ in Wilhelmine Germany: Strategies for Self-Representation under the Othering Gaze / Albert Gouaffo
    • 3. Schwarze Schmach and métissages contemporains: The Politics and Poetics of Mixed Marriage in a Refugee Family / Eve Rosenhaft
    • 4. ‘Among them Complicit’? Life and Politics in France’s Black Communities, 1919–1939 / Jennifer Anne Boittin
    • 5. ‘In this Metropolis of the World We Must Have a Building Worthy of Our Great People’: Race, Empire and Hospitality in Imperial London, 1931–1948 / Daniel Whittall
  • II. Authenticity and Influence: Contexts for Black Cultural Production
    • 6. Féral Benga’s Body / James Smalls
    • 7. ‘Like Another Planet to the Darker Americans’: Black Cultural Work in 1930s Moscow / S. Ani Mukherji
    • 8. ‘Coulibaly’ Cosmopolitanism in Moscow: Mamadou Somé Coulibaly and the Surikov Academy Paintings, 1960s–1970s / Paul R. Davis
    • 9. Afro-Italian Literature: From Productive Collaborations to Individual Affirmations / Christopher Hogarth
  • III. Post-colonial Belonging
    • 10. Of Homecomings and Homesickness: The Question of White Angolans in Post-Colonial Portugal / Cecilie Øien
    • 11. Blackness over Europe: Meditations on Culture and Belonging / Donald Martin Carter
  • IV. Narratives/Histories
    • 12. Middle Passage Blackness and its Diasporic Discontents: The Case for a Post-War Epistemology / Michelle M. Wright
    • 13. Black and German: Filming Black History and Experience / John Sealey
    • 14. Excavating Diaspora: An Interview Discussing Elleke Boehmer’s Novel Nile Baby / John Masterson with Elleke Boehmer
    • 15. Afterword / Susan Dabney Pennybacker
  • Bibliography
  • Index
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Bengali Harlem: Author documents a lost history of immigration in America

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, History, Media Archive, United States on 2013-03-02 04:14Z by Steven

Bengali Harlem: Author documents a lost history of immigration in America

In America: You define America. What defines you?
Cable News Network (CNN)
2013-02-15

Editor’s note: CNN’s Moni Basu, a Bengali immigrant, was born in Kolkata, India.

Moni Basu

(CNN) – In the next few weeks, Fatima Shaik, an African-American, Christian woman, will travel “home” from New York to Kolkata, India.

It will be a journey steeped in a history that has remained unknown until the publication last month of a revelatory book by Vivek Bald. And it will be a journey of contemplation as Shaik, 60, meets for the first time ancestors with whom she has little in common.

“I want to go back because I want to find some sort of closure for my family, said Shaik, an author and scholar of the Afro-Creole experience.

That Americans like Shaik, who identify as black, are linked by blood to a people on the Indian subcontinent seems, at first, improbable.

South Asian immigration boomed in this country after the passage of landmark immigration legislation in 1965. But long before that, there were smaller waves of new Americans who hailed from India under the British Empire.

The first group, to which Shaik’s grandfather, Shaik Mohamed Musa, belonged, consisted of peddlers who came to these shores in the 1890s, according to Bald. They sold embroidered silks and cottons and other “exotic” wares from the East on the boardwalks of Asbury Park and Atlantic City, New Jersey. They eventually made their way south to cities like New Orleans and Atlanta and even farther to Central America.

The second wave came in the 1920s and ‘30s. They were seamen, some merchant marines.

Most were Muslim men from what was then the Indian province of Bengal and in many ways, they were the opposite of the stereotype of today’s well-heeled, highly educated South Asians.

South Asian immigration was illegal then – the 1917 Immigration Act barred all idiots, imbeciles, criminals and people from the “Asiatic Barred Zone.”

The Bengalis got off ships with little to their name.

They were mostly illiterate and worked as cooks, dishwashers, merchants, subway laborers. In New York, they gradually formed a small community of sorts in Spanish Harlem. They occupied apartments and tenement housing on streets in the 100s. They worked hard.

And they did all they could do to become American in a nation of segregation and prejudice.

A huge part of that meant marrying Latino and African-American women—there were no Bengali women around—and letting go of the world they left behind.

Unlike other immigrants of the time, they didn’t settle in their own enclaves. Rather, they began life anew in established neighborhoods of color: Harlem, West Baltimore and in New Orleans, Tremé.

By doing so, they also became a part of black and Latino heritage in America…

Read the entire article and view the photograph of “Bengalis and their Puerto Rican and African-American wives at a 1952 banquet at New York’s Pakistan League of America” here.

Tags: , , , ,

Spaniards, ‘pardos’, and the missing mestizos: identities and racial categories in the early Hispanic Caribbean

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Caribbean/Latin America, History, Media Archive on 2013-03-01 05:37Z by Steven

Spaniards, ‘pardos’, and the missing mestizos: identities and racial categories in the early Hispanic Caribbean

New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids
Volume 71, Numbers 1&2 (1997)
pages 5-19

Stuart B. Schwartz, George Burton Adams Professor of History
Yale University

Traces the history of the mestizos, the descendants of Spanish-Indian contacts during the early stages of Caribbean settlement. Author asks whether they constituted a separate ethnicity. He also looks at the question why the position of the mestizos in the Spanish Caribbean seems different from that in other areas in Spanish America.

On arrival in Puerto Rico today, one can not but help noticing the way in which the term criollo has become a descriptive adjective denoting things local or indigenous to the island: café criollo, comida criolla, müsica criolla, pan criollo, etc. The word criollo has become a way of claiming authenticity and a distinctive island identity. In the Americas, the term “criollo” had a complex history, many uses, and considerable regional variation. Used in Brazil (crioulo) and in early Spanish America as a designation for American-born black slaves, the term was often employed generically for anything locally-born. Hence usages such as ganado criollo (native cattle) or even, as in the case of Guatemala, of references to mestizos criollos (Megged 1992:422-24; Garcia Arévalo 1992a). The traditional usage of the term in colonial mainland Spanish America—as a designation a white person of European heritage born in the colony—had begun to take hold in the 1560s (Lavallé 1986, 1993; Lockhart 1994) but it had never fully taken hold in the islands. Father Agustfn Inigo Abbad y Lasierra (1971: 181-84) reported in the 1780s: “They give the name criollo without distinction to all those born on the island regardless of the caste or mixture from which they derive.” Clearly a fusion of categories of social and racial differences was summarized in this term. In it, an identity and a history are claimed (Sider 1994).

In the Hispanic Caribbean with its peculiar early demographic history of elimination of the indigenous population, low levels of European immigration, and the large-scale importation of Africans, the process of classification had a distinctive character and form in which whites, blacks, Indians, and people of mixed origins were grouped and categorized in different ways at different times. This study seeks to explore a small part of this process by examining the mestizos, the descendants of Spanish-Indian contacts during the early stages of Caribbean settlement. Mestizos, there from the outset, seem to fade from sight. What happened to them? Did they constitute a separate ethnicity, and why does their position in the Hispanic Caribbean seem different from that in other areas of Spanish America?…

…The word “mestizo” itself appeared in the Caribbean as early as the 1520s but it was rarely used, a fact surprisingly paralleled in early Peru and Paraguay where less pejorative terms like genizaro or montanés were preferred at first. In a place like Puerto Rico, for example, it is difficult to find any references to mestizos despite the fact that many already existed by the 1530s. The Lando census of 1530 enumerated Spaniards, Indians, and blacks but made no mention of persons of mixed origin. Over a century later, in the 1645 synod of San Juan there was no reference to mestizos, and the presiding Bishop, Damian López de Haro, in describing the island’s population made no mention of them. Still, modern historian Francisco Scarano (1993:199) has argued that by the seventeenth century mestizos “were probably more numerous than the Spaniards themselves.” What may be at stake here is not the definition of “mestizo,” but rather the definition of “Spaniard.” Mestizos, especially those born legitimately and who lived according to accepted colonial norms were being accepted as “Spaniards,” a term that now no longer indicated place of origin alone, but was being expanded to indicate status and a level of acceptance based on cultural attributes and probably to some extent on appearance (Schwartz 1995)…

Read the entire article here.

Tags: , , ,

Opportunities for Academic Research

Posted in History, Media Archive, United States, Wanted/Research Requests/Call for Papers on 2013-02-28 18:49Z by Steven

Opportunities for Academic Research

Chowan Discovery Group
2013-02-25

Marvin T. Jones, Executive Director

The Chowan Discovery Group is inviting academics to partner with us to study the Winton Triangle.

The Triangle is a 260 year-old mixed race community of landowners in central Hertford County. Around 1960, its population was in the hundreds, and the land dimensions are 8 by 10 miles from east to west, and 8 miles from north to south with over 20 roads and streets. The Chowan Discovery Group has collected photographs, documents, interviews, books and maps. However, demographic and economic studies are needed. The incomes and occupations of Winton Triangle people were diverse, and the land ownership is estimated at over 20 square miles.
 
Please contact Marvin T. Jones at info@discovery.org or 202.726.4066.

Tags: , , ,

‘Brown Babies:’ Post-war Germany’s Mixed-race Children

Posted in Articles, Europe, History, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, United States on 2013-02-28 04:18Z by Steven

‘Brown Babies:’ Post-war Germany’s Mixed-race Children

The Washington Informer
Washington, D.C.
2012-02-27

Barrington M. Salmon

For much of his adult life, Daniel Cardwell has been immersed in a search for his identity and his past.

He told an audience at Bowie State University recently that he remembers a childhood where he was never hugged or shown love by the couple who adopted him, and it was a childhood filled with “confusion, questions and secrets.”

“I was a brown baby looking for mama, someone who wanted to belong. Abandonment and rejection are two emotions we all have,” said Cardwell during a panel discussion after the airing of the documentary, Brown Babies, The Mischlingkinder Story.

Cardwell is one of an estimated 100,000 biracial children born to German women and African-American servicemen stationed in Europe during World War II. He was brought to the United States when he was three and grew up with a couple who raised him along with five other mixed race German children. Cardwell traveled to six times and spent 30 years and $250,000 in his quest for greater knowledge of his background and heritage…

Read the entire article here.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

The Origins and Authors of the Code Noir

Posted in Articles, Caribbean/Latin America, Europe, History, Law, Media Archive, Slavery, United States on 2013-02-28 01:39Z by Steven

The Origins and Authors of the Code Noir

Louisiana Law Review
Volume 56, Number 2 (Winter 1996)
pages 363-407

Vernon Valentine Palmer, Thomas Pickles Professor of Law
Tulane University, New Orleans

I. Introduction

The Code Noir marked France’s historic rendezvous with slavery in the Americas. It was one of the most important codes in the history of French codes. First promulgated by Louis XIV in 1685 for his possessions in the Antilles, then introduced in Louisiana in 1724, this code was, unlike the Custom of Paris, the only comprehensive legislation which applied to the whole population, both black and white. In these colonies where slaves vastly outnumbered Europeans and slave labor was the engine of the economy as well as its greatest capital investment, the Code was a law affecting social, religious and property relationships between all classes.

The Code was also an important sociological portrait, for no legislation better revealed the belief system of European society including its fears, values and moral blind spots. No legislation was more frequently amended and regularly adapted to adjust to France’s evolving experience with slavery. Furthermore, perhaps no aspect of the Code—whether one refers to its motives and aims, compares it to other slave systems, or questions its enforcement—is free of contemporary controversy.

However, no set of issues is more important than the Code’s antecedents and origins. Who were its authors and what sources did they use in drafting the Code? And what difference does it make? Some have claimed that the Code Noir derives from Roman law and that once again we have an example of legislation from the civil law which contrasts with slave legislation in the English colonies. But to what extent is this conclusion justified? Indeed, the claims about Roman sources usually include the argument that slave laws like those of France and Spain were susceptible of being codified because the Roman reservoir of rules was available, whereas English law developed ad hoc experientially, and could not be codified at the outset2 Some even argue that Rome’s legal influence improved the quality of life of slaves in the New World. France and Spain’s laws, they argue, were relatively more “humane” or less dehumanizing than slavery rules developed by English colonies, and Spanish slavery regulation was milder than that of France because of the greater degree to which Spain absorbed Roman law into its law of slavery…

…II. THE INSTRUCTIONS

The first document is the King’s Mémoire to his Intendant, dated April 30, 1681. This Mémoire is a statement of reasons or motifs why a slavery code is desired, and it contains a set of instructions for the preparation of an “ordonnance” in the Antilles. The King entrusted the task to Jean-Baptiste Patoulet and the Comte de Blénac, his two top officials in the Antilles…

…III. The Drafters’ Rough Notes

On December 3, 1681, de Blénac and Patoulet compiled what is essentially a set of notes comparing their views and seeking consensus on specific problems and topics relating to slavery. Two vertical columns divide each page. The right-hand column reads, “Advice of M. de Blénac on several issues in the Isles of America” and the left-hand column carries the heading “Response of Sieur Patoulet.” De Blénac took the initiative in the drafting, organizing his thoughts into nine articles. Article one deals with convening sessions of the Sovereign Councils, article two with matters of taxation, article three with the problem of the diminishing number of Europeans in the islands, article four with criminal and civil trials, procedures and punishments of slaves, article five with questions arising out of racial mixing (status of offspring, marriage, customs in Martinique and Guadeloupe, etc.), article six with the desirability of introducing feudal fiefs in the islands, article seven with establishing an inspectorate to monitor the treatment of slaves on each island, and article eight with police control (passes, runaways, etc.). Article nine contains a miscellany. De Blénac wrote these sections of the memorandum and then sent the papers on to Patoulet for his response or comments. Patoulet completed his “Response” three days later, and returned the entire document to de Blénac who then added a postscript stating that he would appear the following Monday at Patoulet’s office to work further on the drafting.

De Blénac’s procedure in this memorandum was to pose a general problem at the beginning of each paragraph within an article and then to list possible solutions by shorthand annotation. Patoulet’s responses either approved, disapproved, or supplemented these solutions. These agreements and disagreements formed the basis of their subsequent working session.

These notes allow glimpses into the formative stage of the redaction. They also illuminate aspects of the personalities of the authors and the sources at their disposition. The notes first reveal that the authors took quite seriously the obligation to collaborate with the three Sovereign Councils. De Blénac outlined a procedure in article one, whereby the Councils of all the islands were to meet every two months and to remain in continuous session where matters required it. The authors apparently interpreted their instructions as permitting some parts of the slave code to arise out of the deliberations of these assemblies. This was a sensible interpretation. Since the Intendant served as first president of these Councils with responsibility to take the votes, draw up and sign and promulgate the regulations, and since the Governor-General had full rights of audience and was expected to attend, these sessions would have been the most convenient means by which the authors might comply with their duty to seek consensus and collaboration. Yet this shows that they built the Code not merely out of previously established laws and customs, but from on-going legislative activity during the redaction period itself. Thus, to Patoulet and de Blénac “collaboration” did not exclude the passage of new legislation by the local representative institutions which they led. This was the antithesis of an “artificial” process of discovering rules by the light of Roman sources in faraway Paris.

Second, the notes give hints as to the personalities and motives of the codifiers. De Blénac appears the more humanitarian and racially tolerant of the two. He called for inspectors to be placed on each island to monitor the treatment of slaves, and he wanted to outlaw the use of cruel punishments like “la brimballe” and “le hamac.” Patoulet, however, did not find these practices “too rude” to be employed. Patoulet believed in strict separation of the races. He was scandalized by concubinage between Europeans and Africans, whereas de Blénac considered miscegenation a normal, even inevitable, phenomenon in the colonial context.

Though the drafters may have had somewhat differing outlooks, we should guard against the tendency to contuse their motives with our own views. Judging by these notes, some allegedly “protective” rules may have had a completely different motive than to protect slaves. For example, de Blénac and Patoulet reached the conclusion that the law should require owners to provide their slaves with minimum food and clothing allotments, and this rule passed into the Code Noir. They did not originally discuss this measure as a matter of decency or humanity toward slaves (as might be supposed), but as a means of halting the diminishing white population in the islands. The drafters’ notes argued that when slaves were not properly fed, they had a tendency to run away in search of food and steal from the petit blancs, causing these whites to sell their lands and leave the islands. Readers of the Code may search for higher motives behind the rations provision, but the Mémoire provides evidence that cold-eyed efficiency primed every other consideration.

Finally, the drafters’ notes contain important references to the existence of customs and usages about slavery which had already taken root in the Caribbean islands. These practices were a vital part of the dynamic by which indigenous slave law developed. De Blénac tells us, for example, that there was a usage on the isle of Martinique regarding the manumission of mulattoes: the men are freed automatically when they become twenty years old, the women when they reach fifteen years. The father of a mulatto child was obliged to pay a fine to the Church as a penalty, and if he claimed the child for himself from the owner of the mother he had to pay the owner a similar sum. On Guadeloupe and St. Christophe, however, de Blénac outlines the development of other laws and customs. De Blénac takes all of these rules and practices into account in stating his position to Patoulet. As mentioned earlier, the presence of these diverse legal elements and sources shows that the picture of French slave law drawn by Professor Watson is quite misleading. Professor Watson assumed that France would have turned inevitably to Roman sources because there was a legal vacuum existing with respect to local law and custom. This took no account, however, of the speed and diversity with which law and custom incubated on small isolated islands separated by great distances. None of this development could have been visible from Paris, nor would it have depended upon Rome…

Read the entire article here.

Tags: , , , , , ,

Rather, the Hays were members of a regular migration of mixed-race West Indians who arrived in the home country during the period.

Posted in Caribbean/Latin America, Excerpts/Quotes, History, United Kingdom on 2013-02-25 00:58Z by Steven

It may seem out of place for three West Indian children, the offspring of an interracial couple, to be living in a small village at Scotland’s northern tip in 1801. Historians tend to think of an Afro-Caribbean presence in Britain as a phenomenon of the last sixty-plus years, and one localized around major urban centers. At the same time, only recently has the topic of inter-racial unions been addressed in the “new” multicultural Britain. The story of the Hay children in Dornoch, however, was not at all unique at the turn of the nineteenth century. Rather, the Hays were members of a regular migration of mixed-race West Indians who arrived in the home country during the period. Facing intense discrimination, few jobs opportunities, and virtually no educational options in the colonies, West Indians of color fled to Britain with their white fathers’ assistance. Once arrived, they encountered myriad responses. While some white relatives accepted them into their homes, others sued to cut them off from the family fortune. Equally, even though a number of fictional and political tracts welcomed their arrival, others condemned their presence and lobbied to ban them from landing on British soil. Regardless of these variable experiences, mixed-race migrants traveled to Britain consistently during the period. The Hay children may have turned heads on the roads of Dornoch, but they would not have been a wholly unfamiliar sight.

Daniel Alan Livesay, “Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Migration from the West Indies to Britain, 1750-1820” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2010).

Tags: , ,

Spectacular Wickedness: Sex, Race, and Memory in Storyville, New Orleans

Posted in Books, History, Louisiana, Media Archive, Monographs, United States on 2013-02-24 16:25Z by Steven

Spectacular Wickedness: Sex, Race, and Memory in Storyville, New Orleans

LSU Press
January 2013
336 pages
6.00 x 9.00 inches
13 halftones, 2 maps
Hardcover ISBN: 9780807150146

Emily Epstein Landau
Department of History
University of Maryland, College Park

From 1897 to 1917 the red-light district of Storyville commercialized and even thrived on New Orleans’s longstanding reputation for sin and sexual excess. This notorious neighborhood, located just outside of the French Quarter, hosted a diverse cast of characters who reflected the cultural milieu and complex social structure of turn-of-the-century New Orleans, a city infamous for both prostitution and interracial intimacy. In particular, Lulu White—a mixed-race prostitute and madam—created an image of herself and marketed it profitably to sell sex with light-skinned women to white men of means. In Spectacular Wickedness, Emily Epstein Landau examines the social history of this famed district within the cultural context of developing racial, sexual, and gender ideologies and practices.

Storyville’s founding was envisioned as a reform measure, an effort by the city’s business elite to curb and contain prostitution—namely, to segregate it. In 1890, the Louisiana legislature passed the Separate Car Act, which, when challenged by New Orleans’s Creoles of color, led to the landmark Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896, constitutionally sanctioning the enactment of “separate but equal” laws. The concurrent partitioning of both prostitutes and blacks worked only to reinforce Storyville’s libidinous license and turned sex across the color line into a more lucrative commodity.

By looking at prostitution through the lens of patriarchy and demonstrating how gendered racial ideologies proved crucial to the remaking of southern society in the aftermath of the Civil War, Landau reveals how Storyville’s salacious and eccentric subculture played a significant role in the way New Orleans constructed itself during the New South era.

Tags: , , , , , ,

Native American Roots in Black America Run Deep

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, History, Native Americans/First Nation, United States on 2013-02-24 02:15Z by Steven

Native American Roots in Black America Run Deep

Indian Voices
2013-02-04

David A. Love

Do you have Indian in your family? That’s a common question asked in the black community. Many African- Americans lay claim to Native American ancestry, and yet very few blacks have taken the steps to research this part of the history, to learn about their Native American roots and embrace the culture.

Thanksgiving is known as a time for American families to reunite, partake in feast and be grateful. And yet for Native Americans it is a time for mourning, a reflection on the arrival of European settlers that ultimately led to their displacement and elimination by the millions.

Blacks in America are intertwined with that history, and yet the evidence they possess is mostly anecdotal, such as the grandmother who had long, straight black hair, high cheekbones or a red tint to her skin…

Read the entire article here.

Tags: ,