Mixed Race Studies

The ‘white’ slave children of New Orleans: Images of pale mixed-race slaves used to drum up sympathy among wealthy donors in 1860s

Daily Mail
2012-02-28

When eight former slaves aimed to drum up support for struggling African-American schools in the 1860s, they believed they had just the thing.

In order to garner sympathy – and funds – from rich northerners as they toured the country, organisers from New Orleans portrayed the slaves as white for a propaganda campaign, using four children with mixed-race ancestry and pale complexions.

They believed the white faces of Charles Taylor, Rebecca Huger, Rosina Downs and Augusta Broujey would encourage donors to sympathise with the plight of recently-emancipated slaves and give more generously…

…They soon discovered it was near-impossible to find sympathy and support in a war-torn and racially-prejudiced county…

Read the entire article and view 11 other photographs here.

Pruning the Family Tree

Vassar: The Alumnae/i Quarterly
Volume 99, Issue 3 (Summer 2003)
Online Additions
Vassar College
Poughkeepsie, New York

Virginia Edwards Castro ’64
Blanco, Texas

When I was in grade school my family subscribed to the Saturday Evening Post. There was a cover I will never forget. It was an illustrated family tree, with pirates, dandies, Yankees, confederates, Indians, Puritans, cowboys, dance hall floozies and a Spanish lady with a comb and a mantilla. At the top, like a shining star, was a little redheaded, freckle-faced, blue-eyed all-American boy. The cover wasn’t big enough to include everyone. For example, I don’t recall any kilted men playing bagpipes or Germans in lederhosen. And had there been room, not even Norman Rockwell would have dared to include African slaves.

In the fifties, my family had not yet acquired a television, which they considered a health hazard and a waste of time and money, so I amused myself by playing board games, making scrapbooks, reading books, and my favorite activity-Sunday snooping. I spent weekends at my grandparents’ home, which had five bedrooms, four servants’ rooms, a study, a den, storage rooms, a billiards room, a ballroom, a pantry, the breakfast room, the dining room, the living room, the parlor, the coal room and the laundry room. The dining room had a huge buffet containing secret compartments. My grandmother’s dressing room contained an iron safe built into the wall, worthy of a country bank. My grandfather’s bedroom had a jewelry safe behind an oil painting of a landscape. And the huge buffet in the dining room had several secret compartments. I knew where every key hung and every combination.

The large entry hall with a grand piano ended in a staircase that divided on the landing before it continued upstairs on either side. The walls were covered with family portraits, as were the walls of the ballroom on the third floor. I memorized the identities of all our relatives, living and dead. The library contained volumes of family trees to go with them. The Poages were of Scotch-Irish origin. They were said to go back to the 1300’s to “a mighty Gael named Thorl who slew a would-be assassin of the king”. He was knighted Earl of the Poage, which was variously interpreted as “poke” referring to the blow he dealt, or also “poke”, referring to the kiss bestowed on him by a grateful king. The list of descendents went all the way to my mother, I recall. Their coat-of-arms on the wall featured two wild boars rampant, with the motto “Fortuna Favet Fortibus” (fortune favors the brave.)

A Poage married a Starke, a descendent of General Starke who fought in the Revolution. His portrait was said to hang in the White House. (If it did, it must be in the basement, a victim of remodeling.) My great grandfather was named Return Jefferson Starke, if that is any indication of what side the Starkes were in the Civil War. I remember coming across a portrait of one of the two families in a confederate uniform with a notation of membership in the Ku Klux Klan. Unfortunately, even at my young age my awareness of the meaning of this activated the censor in my mind, and I can’t recall the details. It was this same censorship in reverse which suppressed all memories of other races in our family.

I always suspected something was missing, although at first-to use a well-worn but appropriate metaphor-I barked up the wrong tree. First, there was the portrait of what appeared to be an Italian noblewoman in the place of honor over the mantel in the library. Since my mother and her father both looked Italian, we assumed this was our ancestor. However, my grandmother finally confessed that, lacking a suitable portrait, she had purchased this one at an art auction, when an art curator attending a party at their home correctly identified it as the portrait of a famous Italian courtesan. (After some lengthy family debate, it stayed there, as a work of art.)

Rummaging through the forbidden recesses of my grandfather’s roll top desk, I found references to his mother’s family, the Tongs. I then assumed we had Chinese ancestry until I learned that Tong, variously spelled Tonge and Tongue, was an old English name. There was a letter from my great aunt Flora claiming that she descended from French Huguenots who changed their name from d’Estaing to De Tongue when they moved to England. Whether this is true or not, there are documents and books that show we descended from a William Tongue who fought in the Revolution. In his late seventies he was forced to ride all the way from Missouri to Washington D.C. to see why he was not receiving his pension. I learned that the Tongues, who later shortened their surname to Tong, were on the union side. Another letter from my great aunt Flora stated that grandfather William, in his blue velvet suit with white ruffled collar, cried at the fact that brothers would fight brothers and cousins, against cousins.

My father’s name was Joseph Castro Edwards. Most of my life I was considered to have Hispanic roots-particularly by those aware of the Spanish tradition of the second name being the father’s surname and the last in sequence being the mother’s. Instead, I found out my father was named after Dr. Jose Gabino Castro (by my grandfather, unaware of the aforementioned tradition) in honor of a Filipino doctor who saved my grandfather’s life when he was a prisoner in the jungle for eight months during the Spanish-American war in the Philippines. As my grandfather later told me, the opposing general sent a messenger with the order to “let the enemy soldier die, by the order of the highest authority.” The doctor humbly explained he had to obey even higher orders to save a human life. When asked who might be the higher authority, he replied, “Almighty God.” (Fortunately, the general was a religious man, or I wouldn’t be writing this.)…

…We found a tiny town with antiques so old they were worthy of New England. I asked a man in the antique store if he had ever heard of the Bedell family. “Of course,” he replied. “If you want to know about them, go next door to the president of the local historical society.” From there, things progressed rapidly. We found her unloading bags of groceries. “You will be pleased to know that we just had a ceremony honoring your family at the old cemetery held by Sons of the Revolution.” She put down a bag. “You may not be so pleased to know something else about your family.” She looked at me carefully. I hoped we were not part of the James gang. Maybe it was Wild Bill Hickock, lived there for a while and shot some poor, unsuspecting soul. I waited. “Your family was mixed race.” I released a small sigh of relief. “I know, my father already told me he was part Cherokee. “ Surprised, she replied, “I don’t know about the Cherokee, but your great great grandmother was a slave.” That, indeed, hit home…

Read the entire article here.

Black History Month: Making truth live

The Windsor Star
2012-02-27

Elise Harding-Davis

To me, as a Canadian woman of African origins, Black History Month is meant to share factual stories and events about North America’s African-based cultures. It is also a prime time to debunk myths and validate folklore and our cherished oral histories.
 
Recent articles linking Ron Jones and me to two famous historical figures are surfacing because they bare truth. Parallel histories were crafted, theirs glorious, ours inconsequential.
 
Comparably, our family histories are just as undeniable and magnificent as those of the notable figures we are connected to. That our past was covered up and debased does not make our rightful lineage any less based in truth.
 
We are a mixture of displaced African peoples, aboriginal inhabitants and usurping European founders and pioneers of Canada and the United States, a unique hybrid creation of the North American experience. The famous, infamous and homogeneous masses are indeed our forebears.
 
We exhibit the many shades and features inherent in these cultures because they chose to mix their genetics with ours.
 
The supremacy of owning another being is intoxicating. As a result, strange mental processes led to very peculiar practices. We were not recognized as human beings. As slaves, concubines and servants, we were at the mercy and whim of those who had possession of us. Our births were generally listed with the other stock, documented in curious ways or not recorded at all, blurring the truth of our parentage.
 
Our Blackness was quantified, mulatto (half-black), quadroon (one-quarter black), octoroon (one-eighth black) and even sextaroon (one sixteenth black); a thirty-second part black blood, which could span eight generations, branded us as slaves. Over the course of 500 years of enslavement and servitude, legal lineage was changed from patriarchal, father to son, to matriarchal, mother to child…

Read the entire article here.

Racial Hybridity, Physical Anthropology, and Human Biology in the Colonial Laboratories of the United States

Current Anthropology
Volume 53, Number S5 (April 2012)
DOI: 10.1086/662330
pages S95-S107

Warwick Anderson, Research Professor of History
University of Sydney

In the 1920s and 1930s, U.S. physical anthropologists imagined Hawai‘i as a racial laboratory, a controllable site for the study of race mixing and the effects of migration on bodily form. Gradually a more dynamic and historical understanding of human populations came to substitute for older classificatory and typological approaches in the colonial laboratory, leading to the creation of the field of human biology and challenges to scientific racism. Elite U.S. institutions and philanthropic foundations competed for the authority to define Pacific bodies and mentalities during this period. The emergent scientific validation of liberal Hawaiian attitudes toward human difference and race amalgamation or formation exerted considerable influence on biological anthropology after World War II, but ultimately it would fail in Hawai‘i to resist the incoming tide of continental U.S. racial thought and practice.

In 1920, Henry Fairfield Osborn, the forceful president of the American Museum of Natural History, wrote to a young physical anthropologist on his staff telling him how to conduct research into pure Polynesians and mixed-race people in Hawai‘i. Osborn had recently returned to New York from the islands—the territory of the United States—having found their exotic beauty enthralling and their inhabitants amenable to racial study. Like many other visitors, Osborn took surfing lessons on Waikiki with Duke Kahanamoku, the Olympic swimmer, whom he regarded as a “model chieftain type.” “Do not fail to make the acquaintance of Duke,” the keen eugenicist Osborn urged Louis R. Sullivan, “and secure his measurements, ascertaining if you can, without giving offence, whether he is full blooded.” In particular, Osborn wanted the diffident, frail anthropologist, a student of Franz Boas at Columbia University, to “obtain any data regarding swimming adaptations in the limbs and feet.” He hoped, too, that bathing and surfing in the refreshing climate would improve Sullivan’s consumptive tendencies. Additionally, Osborn demanded measurements of other types, including “fishermen,” “poi makers,” “tapa makers,” and “hula dancers.” He heard that the “Hawaiian and Chinese blend is an excellent one; in the schools, intelligent, upright, persistent.” Collecting “primitive” types was compelling because Osborn planned a Polynesian hall at the American Museum; the United States boasted a “historic connection” with Hawai‘i, and the evaluation of racially mixed peoples might offer insight into contemporary social problems on the mainland, including New York.

During the 1920s, physical anthropologists from the American Museum of Natural History and Harvard University treated Hawai‘i as a racial “laboratory,” a controlled site where they might assess an experiment in human biology (MacLeod and Rehbock 1994). They came to the Bernice P. Bishop Museum in Honolulu to study the origins of Polynesians and the process of contemporary race formation in the islands, presumably the result of environmental adaptation of newcomers and hybridization between different groups. In this sense, anthropologists such as Sullivan and his successor Harry L. Shapiro pursued a Boasian program in physical anthropology, elaborating on their mentor’s earlier work on race mixing and the modification of the bodies of immigrants, and producing dynamic and historical accounts of human difference (Boas 1910; Herskovits 1953; Kroeber 1942). Even though conservative eugenicists such as Osborn and his friend Charles B. Davenport initially had promoted research in the islands, the Pacific soon became a Boasian laboratory—to their consternation—a workshop for investigators skeptical of racial typologies and fixities. Most of these rising anthropologists arrived in Hawai‘i already discontented with the complicated and contradictory typological enterprise, and experiences there propelled their drift toward racial recusancy. The vast sea of islands, with Hawai‘i in the middle, proved an exemplary site where physical anthropology could be refashioned and a new human biology might emerge…

…Race Crossing in America

Louis Sullivan, Osborn’s young emissary, was not the first mainland expert to evaluate racial diversity and mixture in Hawai‘i. After studying the decline of the northern “Negro,” the punctilious statistician Frederick L. Hoffman traveled to the islands to investigate the effects of Pacific “miscegenation.” Not surprisingly, his analysis of vital statistics revealed the supposedly baleful results of “Hawaiian mongrelization,” thereby confirming his prejudices (Hoffman 1916, 1917, 1923). Alfred M. Tozzer, the Harvard anthropologist, was rather more sympathetic. From 1916, he visited his wife’s (haole) family on Oahu each summer and measured the bodies of Chinese-Hawaiian and white-Hawaiian neighbors. After struggling with the statistics of race crossing, Tozzer, a close friend of Boas, handed over his data on 508 subjects to Leslie C. Dunn, a progressive young geneticist. While lamenting the unreliable “pedigrees,” Dunn could find no signs of “degeneracy” among the mixed offspring—by which he meant no obvious physical disharmony or mental deficiency. He noted that the first generation of European-Polynesian crosses showed native pigmentation and lacked hybrid vigor, but supposedly Hawaiian corpulence disappeared and finer European features emerged. Dunn complained of the difficulties calculating white hybrids: whites seemed too heterogeneous to fit one type or even to sort neatly into conventional Nordic, Alpine, and Mediterranean divisions (Dunn 1923). After further analysis, Dunn (1928:2) decided that Hawaiian-Chinese crosses generally reverted toward their Asian ancestry in what he called “this great experiment in race mixture.”

Race mixture or miscegenation excited considerable scholarly interest and public indignation in the continental United States during the early twentieth century. According to the 1910 census, the number of self-identifying “mulattoes” in the U.S. population had risen to two million, more than 20% of African Americans. This development prompted concern among some white social theorists. In 1918, Madison Grant (1918) predicted the passing of the great white race: “mongrelization” across the globe was leading to dilution and degeneration. A few years later, Lothrop Stoddard (1921) echoed Grant’s predictions. Through the 1920s and 1930s, marriage between African Americans and European Americans remained illegal in more than 40 states but not in the insular territories (Hollinger 2003; Kennedy 2003; Moran 2001; Pascoe 1996; Sollors 2000; Spickard 1989; Williamson 1980). In 1924, Virginia promulgated the “one-drop” rule to define more rigidly the boundaries of white identity. The following year, Leonard “Kip” Rhinelander scandalized New York when he sued Alice Jones for passing as white and deceptively luring him into marriage. Black men accused of lustful behavior toward white women were still being lynched in the South. In 1935, the African American intellectual W. E. B. DuBois observed that fear of race mixing was “the crux of the so-called Negro problem in the United States” (DuBois 1980 [1935]:99). Nonetheless, in places such as Harlem, New York, a self-conscious and assertive “mulatto” culture emerged during this period (Huggins 1973; Watson 1995).

American physical anthropologists and scientists tried to elucidate the biological principles of this controversial social issue. Even in the 1890s, Franz Boas, a liberal Jewish-German émigré inspired by the environmentalism of his mentor Rudolf Virchow, was scouring American Indian reservations and boarding schools looking for “half bloods” to measure. He noticed that rather than blending their ancestry, mixed children manifested features favoring one or the other parent, but he thought this segregation of heredity scarcely constituted “degeneration,” however defined. Indeed, mixing seemed to have a “favorable effect upon the race” (Boas 1902, 1940 [1894]; Stocking 1982). Miscegenation also intrigued less sympathetic physical anthropologists. “I am seeking information concerning the offspring of mulattoes,” Charles B. Davenport wrote in 1906 to Aleš Hrdlička at the Smithsonian Institution. “That is, I wish to learn if white skin color and black are produced as well as mulattoes. Are such pairs of mulattoes perfectly fertile and are their children vigorous?” The anatomist Hrdlička was stumped. He suspected three-quarters of the people of color in Washington, DC, were part white, but the “question of the mixed bloods of white and Negroes and of their progeny still awaits scientific investigation.” Over the following years, Hrdlička frequently urged the aging eugenicist to use the resources of the research station at Cold Spring Harbor, New York, to look into this question. But not until the late 1920s did Davenport enlist Morris Steggerda to measure and assess sociologically mixed-race people—and then in Jamaica. By this time their condemnation of disharmonious race crossing would appear exceptionally vehement and absurd. The scientists worried that Jamaican “hybrids,” inheriting the short arms of whites and the long legs of blacks, had trouble stooping and picking things off the ground; browns became “muddled and wuzzle-headed” (Davenport and Steggerda 1929:469)…

Read the entire article here.

Election of the first black mayor

Daily Mail
1913-11-10

Source: mytimemachine.co.uk

Coloured Mayor—Majority of One at Battersea—Dramatic Speech

For the first time in the history of this country a man of colour has been elected mayor of a borough. The honour has fallen to Mr. John Richard Archer, a photographer, of Battersea Park-Road, who by thirty votes to twenty-nine was last night elected Mayor of Battersea by the Progressive Party. His opponent was Mr W G Moore, a West End tailor.

Mr Archer has hitherto kept secret the place of his birth. Last night, on donning his chain of office, he revealed the secret in a dramatic speech. He said:

“I am a man of colour. Many things have been said about me which are absolutely untrue. I think you ought to show the same respect for me as you would a white man. I am the son of a man who was born in the West Indies. I was born in a little, obscure village in England that you may never have heard of–Liverpool. I am a Lancastrian born and bred.”

“MY MOTHER WAS IRISH”

“My mother [here Mr Archer spoke with great emotion] was just my mother. She was not born in Burma , as some newspapers stated. She was not born at Rangoon . My mother was Irish.”…

Read the entire article here.

Pain of ‘Trail of Tears’ shared by Blacks as well as Native Americans

Cable News Network (CNN)
In America: You define America. What defines you?
2012-02-25

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

Editor’s Note: Tiya Miles is chairwoman of the Department of Afro-American and African Studies, and professor of history and Native American studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author of “Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom” and “The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story.”  She is also the winner of  a 2011 “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation.

(CNN) – African American history, as it is often told, includes two monumental migration stories: the forced exodus of Africans to the Americas during the brutal Middle Passage of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, and the voluntary migration of Black residents who moved from southern farms and towns to northern cities in the early 1900s in search of “the warmth of other suns.” A third African-American migration story–just as epic, just as grave–hovers outside the familiar frame of our historical consciousness. The iconic tragedy of Indian Removal: the Cherokee Trail of Tears that relocated thousands of Cherokees to Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), was also a Black migration. Slaves of Cherokees walked this trail along with their Indian owners.
 
In 1838, the U.S. military and Georgia militia expelled Cherokees from their homeland with little regard for Cherokee dignity or life. Families were rousted out of their cabins and directed at gunpoint by soldiers. Forced to leave most of their possessions behind, they witnessed white Georgians taking ownership of their cabins, looting and burning once cherished objects. Cherokees were loaded into “stockades” until the appointed time of their departure, when they were divided into thirteen groups of nearly 1,000 people, each with two appointed leaders. The travelers set out on multiple routes to cross Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois, Missouri and Arkansas at 10 miles a day with meager supplies.
 
At points along the way, the straggling bands were charged fees by white farmers to cross privately owned land. The few wagons available were used to carry the sick, infant, and elderly. Most walked through the fall and into the harsh winter months, suffering the continual deaths of loved ones to cold, disease, and accident. Among these sojourners were African Americans and Cherokees of African descent. They, like thousands of other Cherokees, arrived in Indian Country in 1839 broken, depleted, and destitute…

Read the entire article here.

We as Freemen: Plessy v. Ferguson

Pelican Publishing Company
2003
176 pages
5½ x 8½
20 photos – Notes – Index
ISBN: 1-58980-120-2
EAN: 978-1-58980-120-2 hc

Keith Weldon Medley

In June 1892, a thirty-year-old shoemaker named Homer Plessy bought a first-class railway ticket from his native New Orleans to Covington, north of Lake Pontchartrain. The two-hour trip had hardly begun when Plessy was arrested and removed from the train. Though Homer Plessy was born a free man of color and enjoyed relative equality while growing up in Reconstruction-era New Orleans, by 1890 he could no longer ride in the same carriage with white passengers. Plessy’s act of civil disobedience was designed to test the constitutionality of the Separate Car Act, one of the many Jim Crow laws that threatened the freedoms gained by blacks after the Civil War. This largely forgotten case mandated separate-but-equal treatment and established segregation as the law of the land. It would be fifty-eight years before this ruling was reversed by Brown v. Board of Education.

Keith Weldon Medley brings to life the players in this landmark trial, from the crusading black columnist Rodolphe Desdunes and the other members of the Comité des Citoyens to Albion W. Tourgee, the outspoken writer who represented Plessy, to John Ferguson, a reformist carpetbagger who nonetheless felt that he had to judge Plessy guilty.

Portrait of Crimean War Nurse Mary Seacole Acquired by National Portrait Gallery

artdaily.org
2012-02-12

Mary Seacole by Albert Charles Challen, 1869. ^©National Portrait Gallery, London.

LONDON.- The only known painting of Mary Seacole, the black Victorian nurse regarded as one of the most significant figures to emerge from the Crimean War, is to remain at the National Portrait Gallery where it has been on loan since 2004. The iconic portrait has been bought for £130, 000 through a public appeal by the Gallery and a Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) grant of £96,200.

Painted by Albert Challen in 1869, the portrait—which was discovered in 2004 by its owner, the biographer, writer and historian, Helen Rappaport—shows Seacole wearing the three medals which she was awarded for her service.

Born in Jamaica (c.1805 – 1881), Seacole was a nurse, adventurer and writer whose bravery, compassion and determination mark her as an exceptional figure in Victorian society. She travelled independently to Balaklava where she and her business partner, Thomas Day, opened the British Hotel between the harbour and British Headquarters. It served as an officers’ club, a canteen for troops and a base for her nursing activities. She remained in the Crimea until July 1856. She was a familiar figure to British newspaper readers through reports in The Times, Punch and elsewhere. Her autobiography, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands, was published in 1857 and sold well.

Since the 1970s, the development of a Black and Asian historiography has given her a central place in black British history. In 2004, Seacole was voted Greatest Black Briton in an online poll (http://www.100greatblackbritons.com/). As an inspirational figure in British history and with a growing reputation she has also begun to be regarded as an exemplary figure among all audiences regardless of ethnicity. With no formal training, nor from a wealthy middle-class background, Seacole overcame both racial and gender restrictions to establish herself as a notable humanitarian whose hands-on approach to nursing has become an inspiration to nurses today…

Read the entire article here.

Looking White, Acting Black: Cast(e)ing Fredi Washington

Theatre Survey
Volume 45, Issue 1 (2004)
pages 19-40
DOI: 10.1017/S0040557404000031

Cheryl Black, Associate Professor of Acting, Theatre History/Theory/Criticism
University of Missouri, Columbia

In October 1926 a leading African-American newspaper, the Pittsburgh Courier, featured adjacent photographs of two young women with a provocative caption: “White Actresses Who Open with Robeson and Bledsoe on Broadway during Week.” The actresses featured were Lottice Howell, starring with Jules Bledsoe in the musical play Deep River, and Edith Warren, starring with Paul Robeson in the drama Black Boy. In reporting this latest bit of integrated casting, however, the Courier was wrong on two counts. First, they misidentified the photographs, identifying Howell as Warren and Warren as Howell; and second, they misidentified Warren, whose real name was Fredi Washington, as “white.” Washington (who dropped the stage name during previews) was, by self-identification, Negro, or, in the language of the Savannah official who recorded her birth in 1903, “colored.”

Purchase the article here.

Book Review: Go White, Young Man

Vanderbilt Law Review
Volume 65, En Banc 1 (2012-01-30)
10 pages

Alfred L. Brophy, Judge John J. Parker Distinguished Professor of Law
University of North Carolina School of Law

Daniel J. Sharfstein. The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White. New York: Penguin Press, 2011. 415 pp. Hardcover ISBN: 9781594202827.

Sharfstein’s book follows three families whose members at some point crossed the color line separating black from white—or tried and failed to. These case studies tell us what it is to be American—how race is central to our identity, how we use race to take down opponents or to exclude—and how the line separating black and white is sometimes porous. However, is not the story of race and American legal history about the ways that race is defined by law and by norms? Race mattered because people policed the line separating blacks and whites. That many states classified people with a small percentage of African ancestry as white suggests that it was possible to move across the color line. Still, the cases where the color line was policed, rather than crossed, are significant.

Our nation’s struggle with race is now about one-third of a millennium long. So there is a lot for Daniel Sharfstein’s epic work of American history, The Invisible Line, to engage as it sweeps across centuries—from Virginia in the 1600s to Washington, DC, in the 1950s—and as it details generations of lives, from humble farmers in Appalachia to heirs of Gilded Age merchants. Where most other people who have looked at such issues focus on the chasm between white and black, Sharfstein looks at people on the line separating black and white. He is able in this way to get at key—and often overlooked—issues, such as how people have crossed the color line in America and what efforts to cross and police it tell us about our national struggle with race and with equality.

To detail the sine curve of attitudes towards race, Sharfstein offers three case studies of how racial categorization has functioned and how it kept (or attempted to keep) African-Americans in their place. The book follows three families whose members at some point crossed the line separating black from white—or tried and failed to. Sharfstein’s elegant prose illuminates how the color line functioned for people on both sides of it. For those who could do so, there were great incentives to claim to be white rather than black. In one era, race could define who might be a slave; in later eras, it was central to who could live in desirable locations, who could go to the most desirable schools, who could have access to the best government jobs. From statutes to social norms, African-Americans were told that they were inferior and had to maintain their place. Thus, those who might pass for white—those who had light enough skin color and perhaps the geographic mobility to mask their family history—often did so.

Some of the story of passing is well known. President Warren G. Harding is said to have remarked in response to an allegation that he had African ancestry, “How do I know? One of my ancestors may have jumped the fence.” Some of the best-known literature of the Jim Crow era was about crossing the color line, like Nella Larson’s Passing. And even antebellum literature often addressed the crossing of the line from black to white. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for instance, has a vignette about a light-skinned former slave who passed for white. Yet, even though we know that families crossed the color line (or attempted to), one wonders if the most important lessons from Sharfstein’s book are the ways the line was successfully policed rather than the ways it was crossed…

…We learn a great deal about the policing of the color line in Sharfstein’s book. Attempts to prevent passing sometimes failed, as in the Regulator Movement and in the Spencers’ Appalachia. In both of those cases, opponents of families who had once been identified as African-American unsuccessfully claimed that they were still African-American. But Sharfstein illustrates numerous occasions when the line was successfully policed: in Washington, DC, after Reconstruction, when O.S.B. Wall helped lead a western exodus movement; in the early twentieth century, when disfranchisement of blacks led to loss of representation in Congress and loss of civil service jobs, such as Stephen Wall’s at the Government Printing Office; and when an heir to the Field fortune—who, as a member of the Gibson family, had some African ancestry—put on a display at the Field Museum about the races of mankind.

We learn that statutes helped police the color line. For instance, statutes defined the blood quantum that permitted one to be considered white. Yet even when statutes defined one as black, social norms often classified a person as white. Sharfstein makes a bold statement about the porous nature of the color line in regard to slavery: “The difference between black and white was less about ‘blood’ or biology or even genealogy than about how people were treated and whether they were allowed to participate fully in community life. Blacks were the people who were slaves, in fact or in all but name; the rest were white.” This argument shifts the basis for being considered black from blood quantum to status—though the two were often highly correlated…

Read the entire review here.