Mixed Race Studies

African Americans and the Presidency: The Road to the White House

Routledge
2009-11-25
256 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-415-80392-2
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-80391-5
eBook ISBN: 978-0-203-86433-3

Edited by:

Bruce A. Glasrud, Professor Emeritus of History
California State University, East Bay

Cary D. Wintz, Distinguished Professor of History and Geography
Texas Southern University

African Americans and the Presidency explores the long history of African American candidates for President and Vice President, examining the impact of each candidate on the American public, as well as the contribution they all made toward advancing racial equality in America. Each chapter takes the story one step further in time, through original essays written by top experts, giving depth to these inspiring candidates, some of whom are familiar to everyone, and some whose stories may be new.

Presented with illustrations and a detailed timeline, African Americans and the Presidency provides anyone interested in African American history and politics with a unique perspective on the path carved by the predecessors of Barack Obama, and the meaning their efforts had for the United States.

Contents

• Introduction: The African American Quest for the Presidency / Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz
• 1. Beginning the Trek—Douglass, Bruce, Black Conventions, Independent Political Parties / Bruce A. Glasrud
• 2. The Communist Party of the United States and African American Political Candidates / David Cullen and Kyle G. Wilkison
• 3. Charlotta A. Bass—Win Or Lose, We Win / Carolyn Wedin
• 4. Shirley Chisholm—A Catalyst for Change / Maxine D. Jones
• 5. The Socialist Workers Party and African Americans / Dwonna Naomi Goldstone
• 6. Civil Rights Activists and the Reach for Political Power / Jean Van Delinder
• 7. Jesse Jackson—Run, Jesse, Run! / James M. Smallwood
• 8. Lenora Branch Fulani—Challenging the Rules of the Game / Omar H. Ali
• 9. Race Activists and Fringe Parties with a Message / Charles Orson Cook
• 10. Black Politicians—Paving the Way / Hanes Walton, Jr., Josephine A. V. Allen, Sherman C. Puckett, and Donald R. Deskins, Jr.
• 11. Colin Powell—The Candidate Who wasn’t / Cary D. Wintz
• 12. Barack Hussein Obama—An Inspiration of Hope, an Agent for Change / Paul Finkelman
• Blacks and the Presidency: A Selected Bibliography

Introduction: The African American Quest for the Presidency

Forty years ago (1968), the African American political scene began to change dramatically, the culmination of Supreme Court decisions such as Smith vs. Allwright, Baker vs. Carr, and Terry vs. Adams; amendments to the United States Constitution including the fourteenth, fifteenth, nineteenth, and twenty-fourth; federal legislation, especially the Civil Rights Act (1964) and Voting Rights Act (1965); and determined black leaders and voters. African Americans as never before voted and contended for national office. Some white liberals abetted and encouraged the metamorphoses. All was not well, however. Civil rights leader and black activist Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated while leading a reform effort in Memphis, Tennessee. Two months later, while completing a primary election victory in California, Democratic senator Robert F. Kennedy, a white proponent of black rights, was assassinated. Perhaps propelled by these losses on the national scene, African American men and women participated in the national political process as delegates and voters, both vital steps, and also as nominees and candidates.

A few years before, while serving as Attorney General of the United States for his brother, John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy asserted that the United States could have a black president within forty years. As Kennedy phrased it, “in the next forty years a Negro can achieve the same position that my brother has.” From the perspective of 2008 Kennedy’s prescience is remarkable. Forty years after the assassinations of King and Kennedy, an African American, Senator Barack Obama, was the Democratic Party’s nominee for the presidency. By mid-September most polls suggested that he was the front-runner to be elected president of the United States, and in November Obama was elected the forty-fourth president of the United States. President Obama was not the first African American to seriously pursue the presidency. In fact, more than forty black men and women candidates paved the way for a black president; Obama stands on the shoulders of those other black leaders and politicians…

Read the entire Introduction here.

White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity, and Religion in Dallas, 1841-2001 [Wintz Review]

White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity, and Religion in Dallas, 1841-2001, Michael Phillips, (The University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX, 78713-7819) 2006. Contents. Illus. Notes. Biblio. Index. P. 267.

East Texas Historical Journal
Volume XLV (45), Number 2, Fall 2007

Cary D. Wintz, Distinguished Professor of History and Geography
Texas Southern University

As the writing of Texas history has grown increasingly sophisticated in recent years, relatively little of this new scholarship has been directed at the history of Texas cities. Michael Phillips addresses this shortcoming in White Metropolis, his study of Dallas from its founding to 2001. Phillips’ focus is race, but not as it is usually conceptualized. This is not a history of African Americans in Dallas, or for that matter a study of Dallas race relations. Instead Phillips organizes his study around the concept of race in all of complexity. Influenced in part by Neil Foley’s tri-racial study of black, Mexican American and poor white workers in Texas agriculture, Phillips broadens our usually narrow concept of race to include blacks, along with Mexican Americans, immigrants (especially those from southern and eastern Europe), the white working class, Jews, Catholics, and even women. These otherwise disparate groups share the fate of having been marginalized and oppressed—sometimes violently—by the white power elite that dominated Dallas’ political and economic development and controlled its history and its image of itself.

Central to Phillip’s analysis of Dallas history is the theory of “whiteness,” which the author defines as much as an attitude as a complexion. “Whiteness rested on a steadfast belief in racial differences, support of capitalism, faith in rule by the wealthy, certitude that competition and inequity arose from nature, and rejection of an activist government that redistributed political or economic power.” (12)…

Read the entire article here.

Matters of the Heart: A History of Interracial Marriage in New Zealand

Auckland University Press
July 2013
312 pages approx
240 x 170 mm, illustrations
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-86940-731-5

Angela Wanhalla, Senior Lecturer in History
University of Otago, New Zealand

A history of the intimate relations between Māori and Pākehā, and the intersections of public policy and private life.

Philip Soutar died at Ypres in 1917. Before becoming a soldier, Soutar’s life revolved around his farm at Whakatāne, where he lived with his Māori wife Kathleen Pine in an ‘as-you-please marriage, uncelebrated by a clergyman’. Matters of the Heart introduces us to couples like Philip and Kathleen to unravel the long history of interracial relationships in New Zealand.

That history runs from whalers and traders marrying into Māori families in the early nineteenth century through to the growth of interracial marriages in the later twentieth. It stretches from common law marriages and Māori customary marriages to formal arrangements recognised by church and state. And that history runs the gamut of official reactions—from condemnation of interracial immorality or racial treason to celebration of New Zealand’s unique intermarriage patterns as a sign of us being ‘one people’ with the ‘best race relations in the world’.

In the history of intimate relations between Māori and Pākehā, public policy and private life were woven together. Matters of the Heart reveals much about how Māori and Pākehā have lived together in this country and our changing attitudes to race, marriage and intimacy.

A Code To Live By In Appalachia

Transom
2013-01-30

Mary Helen Miller, Producer/Reporter
WUTC, 88.1 FM
University of Tennessee, Chattanooga

with help from:
Viki Merrick, Editor

There may come a day when races are so blended as to be irrelevant, but not yet. For our first 2012 Transom Donor Fund piece, producer Mary Helen Miller explores the racial identity of Melungeons in Appalachia. It’s not an easy task to come up with a definition, as it turns out, even in the age of DNA. The truth of heritage can be tough to admit for some. Mary Helen’s piece will clear things up for you, as clear as possible anyway, and includes a trip to the 16th annual Melungeon Reunion in Big Stone Gap, Virginia. –Jay Allison, Producer/Editor/Founder

About A Code To Live By In Appalachia
 
“Mysterious” is probably the first word most people associate with the Melungeons. They were a mixed race group that settled in southern Appalachia in the late 1700s. They lived in their own communities, separate from their white neighbors. Some stayed in those communities as late as the mid-20th century.

The oldest generations of Melungeons had a striking look: dark skin, straight black hair, blue eyes. Nobody knew where they had come from or how, exactly, they ended up in the mountains along the Tennessee-Virginia border. Melungeons themselves often explained their distinct looks by claiming Native American or Portuguese ancestry. But their white neighbors would sometimes claim they had African heritage.

The mystery of the Melungeon people drew me in, just like it’s drawn in so many others. Growing up in Tennessee, I remember my mom occasionally mentioning the Melungeons. Whatever remarks she made always seemed to end with: “… and nobody knows where they’re from. Isn’t that something?”
 
Recently, a little googling led me to Jack Goins, the force behind the Melungeon DNA Project. Jack is a retired TV salesman in Hawkins County, Tennessee, who is descended from Melungeons. He’s been gathering DNA samples from other descendants to try to get some answers about Melungeon ancestry…

Read the entire article here. Download/Listen to the episode (00:16:56)  here.

Race Relations in Virginia & Miscegenation in the South, 1776-1860

University of Massachusetts Press
1970
362 pages
ISBN-10: 0870230506; ISBN-13: 978-0870230509

James Hugo Johnston (1891-1974), Professor of History
University of Virginia

Contents

• FOREWORD
• PREFACE
• PART I. THE RELATION OF THE NEGRO TO THE WHITE MAN IN VIRGINIA
  • 1. Friendly Relations
  • 2. Violent Relations
  • 3. Free Negro Relations
• PART II. THE RELATION OF THE WHITE MAN TO THE NEGRO IN VIRGINIA
  • 4. The Humanitarians
  • 5. The Growth of Antislavery
  • 6. The Convention of 1829 and Nat Turner’s Insurrection
• PART III. MISCEGENATION
  • 7. The Intermixture of Races in the Colonial Period
  • 8. The Problem of Racial Identity
  • 9. The White Man and His Negro Relations
  • 10. The Status of the White Woman in the Slave States
  • 11. Indian Relations
  • 12. Mulatto Life in the Slave Period
• APPENDIX
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX

Race and Indigeneity in the Life of Elisha Apes

Ethnohistory
Volume 60, Number 1 (Winter 2013)
pages 27-50
DOI: 10.1215/00141801-1816166

Nancy Shoemaker, Professor of History
University of Connecticut

This essay examines cultures of racial categorization in New England and New Zealand through the life of one migrant, Elisha Apes, the younger half-brother of the radical Pequot Indian writer William Apess, who preferred to spell the family name with a second s. Elisha Apes settled in New Zealand in 1839 and married a Māori woman of the South Island. Their six children came to be labeled “half-castes” in the language of the nineteenth-century New Zealand state. If half-caste had been a term in New England, it would have been applied to Elisha Apes, for he was indeed of mixed descent. However, in New Zealand, where native referred to the Māori only, Apes’s native origins elsewhere had no bearing. His status as a foreigner who came to settle in New Zealand cast him into the same category as New Zealand’s European/white population.

Read or purchase the article here.

Family Secrets by Deborah Cohen: review

The Telegraph
2013-01-29

Judith Flanders

Judith Flanders delves into Deborah Cohen’s ‘Family Secrets‘

As former News of the World journalist Paul McMullan put it so memorably at the Leveson Inquiry, “Privacy is for paedos”. In part, this was no more than a tabloid journalist using words carelessly. If he had said secrecy, not privacy, was for “paedos”, the response would surely have been more muted, for post-Freud, secrecy is viewed as something entirely negative, whereas privacy is a right, enshrined in law.

Historian Deborah Cohen, whose previous book investigated how the British lived with their possessions, now explores how they lived with their ideas.

What did families try to hide, from 18th-century Britons in India, to suburbanites in the 20th century? In the 19th century, it was a truism that families should have no secrets from each other, even as they presented an impenetrable façade to the world. Family Secrets explores, via dozens of illuminating stories culled from the divorce-courts, adoption agencies and institutes for the mentally impaired, among others, how the world changed into a place where everybody tells everyone everything, from therapists to reality television.

By the early 19th century, there were 20,000-odd British men in India, mostly unmarried; over half the children baptised in one Calcutta church were both illegitimate and mixed race. Everyone knew about mixed-race relationships in India, but what happened when the men went home? Sometimes the children were brought back by their fathers, their mothers, referred to in legal documents as “old servants”, left behind. Sometimes the children themselves created elaborate back-stories: Anna Leonowens, the author of the autobiography that became The King and I, fabricated her entire childhood in order to hide her mother’s mixed-race background…

Read the entire review here.

Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey Will Read Civil War Poems Jan. 30

The Library of Congress
News Releases
Washington, D.C.
2013-01-04

Press contact: Donna Urschel (202) 707-1639
Public contact: Robert Casper (202) 707-5394

U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey will read selections from her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection “Native Guard,” in commemoration of the sesquicentennial of the Civil War and in conjunction with the Library of Congress exhibition “The Civil War in America.”
 
The reading will be at noon on Wednesday, Jan. 30, in Room 119 on the first floor of the Thomas Jefferson Building, 101 Independence Ave. S.E., Washington, D.C. A book-signing will follow. Sponsored by the Library’s Poetry and Literature Center, the event is free and open to the public. Tickets are not needed.
 
In “Native Guard,” Trethewey uses poetry to give voice to the Louisiana Native Guards, one of the first regiments of black soldiers recruited by the Union Army during the Civil War. Trethewey, in 2001, had researched “Native Guard” using primary-source documents from the Library’s Manuscript Division and later spent time writing the book in the Library’s Main Reading Room.
 
Trethewey, named Poet Laureate in June 2012 by Librarian of Congress James H. Billington, is the author of four poetry collections and a book of nonfiction. In January 2012, she was named Poet Laureate of Mississippi for a four-year term and will continue in the position during her tenure as U.S. Poet Laureate.
 
“The Civil War in America” exhibition, which commemorates the sesquicentennial of the war, features more than 200 unique items that reveal the complexity of the Civil War through those who experienced it firsthand. Through diaries, letters, maps, song sheets, newspapers and broadsides, photographs, drawings and unusual artifacts, the exhibition chronicles the sacrifices and accomplishments of those—from both the North and South—whose lives were lost or affected by the events of 1861-1865…

Read the entire press release here.

The Original Slave Colony: Barbados and Andrea Stuart’s ‘Sugar in the Blood’

The Daily Beast
2013-01-24

Eric Herschthal
Columbia University

Barbados provided the blueprint for all future British slave settlements in the American South. Andrea Stuart talks to Eric Herschthal about how her family was entwined in the island’s tormented history.

On the face of it, what happened in the tiny island of Barbados 400 years ago seems irrelevant to Americans today. Even now, the island matters to Americans for perhaps one reason: the weather—it’s a popular tourist getaway. But in her exceptional new book, Sugar in the Blood: A Family’s Story of Slavery and Empire, Andrea Stuart insists Barbados, with its long history of slavery, matters more than we know.

“I wanted to take slavery out of its niche,” she said. “It’s not a black story, it’s not a white story. I want to remind people that this story belongs to us all.” Slavery and its legacy—race—still shape our world. But more specifically, the creation of Barbados, the British empire’s earliest, most profitable settlement in the New World, provided the blueprint for all its future slave colonies: South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, you name it.

The island’s first settlers, like Stuart’s white ancestor George Ashby, arrived in the early-1600s. Spain was raking in huge profits with their New World colonies, mainly by extracting gold and silver. The British wanted to catch up, but when they arrived in the Caribbean, no precious metals were found. Within a few decades, however, they discovered they could make money by cultivating another precious commodity: sugar, or as it was called by many at the time, “white gold.”

That demanded workers, and the British quickly found a cheap labor source: African slaves. By century’s end, 80 percent of Barbados’s 85,000 inhabitants were Africans, giving rise to a rigid racial hierarchy: a small elite of whites on top; the masses of black workers on bottom; and, somewhere in between, a small caste of illegitimate mixed-race children, born to masters and their preyed-upon female slaves.

Given how small the island was, many of the whites who couldn’t establish a large plantation moved on to other British colonies. Many went to places that would become part of the United States. They replicated the Barbadian plantation model, growing mainly rice and tobacco, and had an outsized impact on early America. In colonies like South Carolina, six of the governors were Barbadians between 1670 and 1730. Other Barbadian émigrés, like George Ashby’s Quaker brother, helped settle Pennsylvania. Barbados was so important to the British colonial system that even George Washington, who only left North America once in his life, made that stop on the island, to help his sick brother recover from an illness…

…The “small people” she chose to focus on are her own descendants: George Ashby; his descendants like the wealthy plantation owner Robert Cooper; and several of Cooper’s slave concubines and their black children. Stuart’s mixed racial heritage helped her paint such a ruthlessly honest portrait of slavery, where she can both admire and revile slave-owners like Cooper—even wonder whether some of the slaves he slept with may have loved him.

“The reality is that most blacks have mixed blood,” she said. “When I was doing research on George Ashby, I felt some empathy. There’s something brave about leaving the world you know. If you can make that empathetic journey, you can show a more complicated picture.”…

Read the entire article here.

Sugar in the Blood: A Family’s Story of Slavery and Empire

Knopf
2013-01-22
384 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-307-27283-6
eBook ISBN: 978-0-307-96115-0

Andrea Stuart

In the late 1630s, lured by the promise of the New World, Andrea Stuart’s earliest known maternal ancestor, George Ashby, set sail from England to settle in Barbados. He fell into the life of a sugar plantation owner by mere chance, but by the time he harvested his first crop, a revolution was fully under way: the farming of sugar cane, and the swiftly increasing demands for sugar worldwide, would not only lift George Ashby from abject poverty and shape the lives of his descendants, but it would also bind together ambitious white entrepreneurs and enslaved black workers in a strangling embrace. Stuart uses her own family story—from the seventeenth century through the present—as the pivot for this epic tale of migration, settlement, survival, slavery and the making of the Americas.

 As it grew, the sugar trade enriched Europe as never before, financing the Industrial Revolution and fuelling the Enlightenment. And, as well, it became the basis of many economies in South America, played an important part in the evolution of the United States as a world power and transformed the Caribbean into an archipelago of riches. But this sweet and hugely profitable trade—“white gold,” as it was known—had profoundly less palatable consequences in its precipitation of the enslavement of Africans to work the fields on the islands and, ultimately, throughout the American continents. Interspersing the tectonic shifts of colonial history with her family’s experience, Stuart explores the interconnected themes of settlement, sugar and slavery with extraordinary subtlety and sensitivity. In examining how these forces shaped her own family—its genealogy, intimate relationships, circumstances of birth, varying hues of skin—she illuminates how her family, among millions of others like it, in turn transformed the society in which they lived, and how that interchange continues to this day. Shifting between personal and global history, Stuart gives us a deepened understanding of the connections between continents, between black and white, between men and women, between the free and the enslaved. It is a story brought to life with riveting and unparalleled immediacy, a story of fundamental importance to the making of our world.