Mixed Race Studies

Barack Obama’s Irish Roots

The Daily Beast
2011-04-11

Tom Sykes

President Obama set down in Dublin Monday [2011-05-23] as part of a six-day European trip that will include a stop in Moneygall, the tiny town where his great-great-great grandfather was born. In anticipation, the 350 people who live there have painted their homes and opened a coffee shop called “Obama’s café.” Tom Sykes on the president’s Irish roots.

The great, but generally unvocalized, astonishment of the people of Moneygall is not so much that one of their descendants is president of the United States, but that one of their descendants is black. You see, a lad going off to America and doing well for himself … well, all the folks in the pub drinking their pints of Guinness can get their heads around that story; sure, wasn’t JFK the most famous Irishman of all?

But a black man? From Moneygall? What?…

…But the fact remains: Moneygall is very, very white. There are no black people living in the village, although there is a “very nice Indian family” living in the housing estate outside town. But Moneygall is not unusual in that respect; rural Ireland is very, very white. The 2006 census showed that just 1.06 percent of Irish citizens are black, and outside major city centers, black people are still a rarity. In the countryside, the presence of black people is usually commented on. Inadvertent racism pervades conversation and society, both polite and impolite. Mixed-race people, for example, are often referred to as “half-castes” or “half-and-halfs.”…

Read the entire article here.

The Afro-Mexican presence in Guadalajara at the dawn of independence

Purdue University
December 2010
85 pages
Publication Number: AAT 1490649
ISBN: 9781124557854

Beau D. J. Gaitors

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Purdue University by Beau D. J. Gaitors In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts

Scholars often characterize the Afro-Mexican experience through depictions of a large presence during the colonial period and a rapid decline after Mexican independence. Prior studies emphasized miscegenation and racism as causes of the disappearance of Afro-Mexicans from Mexican society. This thesis addresses the presence and subsequent disappearance of Afro-Mexicans from Guadalajara. Census records show that the Afro-Mexican population in Guadalajara was significant, one-fourth of the population, at the end of the colonial period. However, records also show that the Afro-Mexican population experienced a substantial decline to only two percent of Guadalajara’s population at the dawn of independence. This thesis asserts that the “disappearance” of Afro-Mexicans was a result of integration, especially in the residential and occupational spheres of Guadalajara. The two percent of Afro-Mexicans recorded in the census illustrates that Afro-Mexicans continued to integrate into society and did not simply disappear. Afro-Mexicans became Mexicans through social incorporation into the city through residential, occupational, and marital integration.

Table of Contents

• LIST OF TABLES
• ABSTRACT
• CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER 2. THE AFRICAN PRESENCE IN NEW SPAIN
• CHAPTER 3. THE GROWTH OF GUADALAJARA TO 1791
• CHAPTER 4. RESIDENTS OF GUADALAJARA 1791-1822
• CONCLUSION
• BIBLIOGRAPHY

List of Tables

• Table 1. Afro-Mexicans in Guadalajara, 1821-1822, by Cuartel
• Table 2. Marriage within Race (Major Groups)
• Table 3. Afro-Mexican Marriage Across Race
• Table 4. Race in the System of Education
• Table 5. Distribution of Afro-Mexican Occupational Positions

CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION

On December 6, 1810, standing on the balcony of the Palacio Real in the city of 

Guadalajara, Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla proclaimed the independence of the Mexican nation. In this proclamation he also declared that the independence of Mexico, known as New Spain in the colonial period, would be accompanied by the emancipation of all slaves in the nation.1 More specifically, Hidalgo stated that all slaveholders should emancipate their slaves within ten days of the decree. These enslaved individuals constituted several different racial and ethnic groups, including Native American and African. Native Americans were taken captive during wars and employed as slaves by the Spanish especially in Northern New Spain. In contrast, the vast majority of Africans arrived in New Spain alongside Europeans either as enslaved laborers or free conquistadors, creating a sizeable population of Africans within New Spain. African descendants remained in many regions of New Spain throughout the colonial period; however, centuries of assimilation and integration rendered the African presence in Mexico miniscule at the dawn of independence.

Today when people are asked, “What is a Mexican?” individuals rarely visualize a person of African descent. Despite a considerable presence in the history of Mexico, Mexicans of African descent, or Afro-Mexicans, have been essentially invisible in the history of Mexico. Afro-Mexicans, like many other marginalized groups in other nations, have been constantly neglected in contemporary national narratives or given brief references in national histories despite the prominent historic role they played. Afro-Mexicans have experienced varying degrees of invisibility in the contemporary portrayal of Mexican history and national identity. The neglect of the Afro- Mexican in the national history directly impacts the present-day position of people of African descent in Mexico. The inability of individuals to immediately and quickly point to the significant contributions and the presence of Africans in the history of Mexico makes it easy to assume that African descendants do not have a space in present-day Mexico. More specifically, the neglect of the African presence in the narrative of Mexico makes it easy for people to imagine Mexico as a nation without strong ties to African heritage and blood. Yet, in the last fifteen to twenty years, Afro-Mexicans have struggled to gain a representative space in the Mexican self-portrait, causing many scholars to reevaluate and reconsider the presence of people of African descent in Mexico. Although individuals have reconsidered the varying degrees of invisibility of the African heritage in Mexico, there is still a lack of momentum in recovering the African links to Mexico in the present day.

The process resulting in the invisibility of Afro-Mexicans is not simply a contemporary issue; it is steeped in the historic construction of the Mexican identity. Centuries of miscegenation and assimilation of different racial and ethnic groups led to the creation of a multi-racial society in Mexico. Theories emerged to account for the image of the Mexican nation and its interracial heritage. Individuals in power constructed the Mexican identity with great influence on the perceptions of citizens. In the 1920s Mexican intellectuals, most notably José Vasconcelos, began to promote the idea of a cosmic race, “la raza cósmica,” in Mexico. This theory sought to promote a collective group identity that went beyond race and ethnicity in Mexico. Individuals of Spanish descent, Native American descent, and African descent populated the vast region that made up Mexico. However, these three groups had many variations within themselves. There were numerous indigenous groups that populated the region that would later become Mexico. People of African descent had a significant role in populating Mexico in the colonial period. Some were born in different regions in Africa and brought to the New World, while others were born in the Americas. Furthermore, the African position in the colonial system varied, as some Africans were enslaved while others were free. Just as with the African case, there were Spaniards who were born in the New World, known as criollos, and Spaniards born in Spain, known as peninsulares. Throughout the colonial and post-independence periods the indigenous, African, and Spanish groups constituted a multiracial and multiethnic society. Contributing to this mixed landscape were the sexual relations between these individuals, resulting in the birth of mixed-race individuals who inhabited colonial Mexico.

The concept of the “cosmic race” necessitated the erasure of specific group contributions in the construction of the Mexican state in order to create a homogenized Mexican national identity. This new identity was intended to go beyond the multiple distinct groups and mixed groups in Mexican society. The new Mexican identity would theoretically represent the diverse groups as equal participants in the construction of the Mexican nation. These diverse groups would be represented as part of a collective that provided the building blocks to construct the Mexican nation. Yet, the emergence of a homogenous identity resulted in a substantial disappearance and neglect of some groups that participated in the construction of Mexican society. Individual groups were subsumed into the collective identity of the Mexican nation as their contributions were bulked into a single framework of progress.

Although specific groups were brought into a collective identity, they found it difficult to ignore their distinct differences. With this in mind, specific groups presented themselves as both Mexican and their unique group identity. When the cultural contributions to Mexico were acknowledged, the focus was on Spanish and indigenous groups as the primary participants in the construction of Mexico, while the contributions of Afro-Mexicans were relegated to the margins.

Although Afro-Mexicans have been relegated to the margins, their presence in Mexico cannot be so easily overlooked. There are locations in Mexico that hold populations of African descendants in large numbers. Coastal regions and port cities such as Costa Chica, Guerrero, and Veracruz, reflect the significant presence of people of African descent in Mexico. Despite the presence in these regions, the potential for the representation of Afro-Mexicans is limited. The concentration of Afro-Mexicans in these regions encourages the social invisibility of African presence within the greater Mexican nation. More specifically, it is readily assumed that people of African descent have resided solely in these areas. However, Afro-Mexicans were also present on a large scale in other areas of Mexico, especially in urban centers such as Mexico City and Guadalajara. Many Afro-Mexican slaves found their way to various locales in colonial Mexico as a result of slavery and the migratory patterns of slaveholders…

Purchase the dissertation here.

Mediating Racial Mixture

The Journal of Media Literacy
Volume 55, Numbers 1 & 2 (Cultural Diversity) (2008)

Carlos E. Cortés, Professor Emeritus of History
University of California, Riverside

Which one of the following names does not fit in the set? Barack Obama. Mariah Carey. Halle Berry. Tiger Woods. Ann Curry. Soledad O’Brien. Benjamin Jealous. Carlos Cortés.

Oh, that’s too easy. All of the others—a presidential candidate, a pop diva, an Oscar-winning actress, a professional golfer, two national television newspeople, and the newly-elected president of the NAACP—are visible figures of contemporary American popular culture.
 
But let’s try another question. What characteristic do they have in common? The answer: they are all the offspring of mixed heritages, part of a major U.S. population shift—the relentless growth of ethnically-mixed Americans.
 
This phenomenon has myriad implications. Not the least, it has challenged traditional U.S. categorical thinking about race and ethnicity. This includes news media conventions for racially and ethnically identifying individuals and groups (Cortés, 2000).
 
THE ROOTS OF MIXEDNESS

Two historical trends have converged to hypertrophy this challenge. First, the rise of interracial marriage, particularly since the 1967 Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court decision that invalidated the sixteen remaining state-level intermarriage bans. (Mildred Jeter Loving, the African-American woman whose marriage to a white man helped precipitate that landmark decision, died in May of this year.)
 
Second, the continuous inflow of Latin Americans. Millions are of mixed heritage and come from nations with racial systems quite different than the one that has taken root in the United States. Furthermore, by the third generation, more than half of U.S. Latinos marry non-Latinos, so their children further undermine categorical purity.

The year 2000 census illustrated the impact of these two trends. Through a set of decisions that reflected changing realities, pragmatism, compromise, and external pressure, the Census Bureau addressed mixed heritage in two ways.
 
First, it repeated the 1990 practice of separating Hispanic heritage (question five on the short form) from race (question six). The result—48 percent of self-identified Hispanics checked white as their racial identity, while 42 percent checked “some other race” (meaning I don’t fit into any of your racial categories).

Second, and for the first time, the 2000 census permitted respondents to indicate more than one “race.” This ended, at least temporarily, the historical “check one” practice that had forced mixed-race respondents to reject either their father or their mother.
 
These demographic and census category changes have contributed to scholarly dissensus, including deep disagreements over the meaning and use of such terms as “race” and “ethnicity” (Gracia, 2007). They have also raised a challenge for the American news media (Squires, 2007). How should they categorize and label mixed-heritage people?…

Read the entire article here.

Op-Ed: President Obama and the Mixed Race Mix-up

Digital Journal
2009-03-22

Hargrove Jones

Today, a young woman in a California audience, stood up and told President Obama that she is mixed-race, and glad that the president is someone she can relate to. Does that mean she cannot relate to her father, or her mother?
 
As a matter of fact, if her parents shared her point of view, she would not exist.

Confused thinking, like a person with a black parent and a white parent, purporting to need a mixed race person, in order to relate; echos the chaotic ideas of Alice Walker’s bi-racial daughter, claiming her mother is jealous because she has a rich white father. As if she cannot conceive of the truth, which is, that it is her mother who is rich; and it is her mother who picked that white man, to be her father. This type of mis-perceiving can only occur, when you deny who you are…

…Mixed race, without white parent involvement, has been part and parcel of the Diasporan community for 400 years, which is why those who are a part of this new social experience, and who want to be identified as mixed race or bi-racial, have difficulty distinguishing themselves physically since, large numbers of Diasporans, who are pleased to own their African heritage, look more European than most bi-racial people.

People who are of African descent, but who want to excuse themselves from that designation, are plagued by social concepts like the one drop rule. According to the one drop rule, one drop of African blood makes one African. But it is more than a biological description, it speaks to the historic attitude toward Africans since, the concept is not reciprocal. One drop of European blood, does not a European make. Inferentially, the rule speaks to a racial measure that is qualitative, not quantitative…

…Most mixed race people, like all people of African descent, wear a symbol in their flesh, that has the same effect as the star of David appended to the Jews during the holocaust. It identifies us with slanderous misrepresentations, and as people who are available for abuse.

In my opinion, the mixed race claim is an effort at exception from a maligned group, and the aggressive inclusion of President Obama, is an attempt to dignify it. Only people of African descent are perpetually saying, that they are something, besides the obvious.

Acknowledgment of racial and ethnic heritage is fine and right, but it should be responsive to a question, or in a meaningful context, not an anxious announcement that begs to escape the many painful experiences that racism provides.

Mixed race claimants should be aware, that whatever you call yourself in America, if you look like you are of African descent, you will be treated like you are of African descent. But it’s everyone’s right to be called whatever suits them, and the woman in the audience, obviously wants to be called mixed race, but President Barack Obama is, a self-described African American. She should have given him, the same respect, that she wants for herself.

To read the opinion piece, click here.

Black or White?

The New York Times
2011-05-14

Daniel J. Sharfstein, Professor of Law
Vanderbilt University

Daniel J. Sharfstein is the author of “The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White.”

In February 1861, just weeks after Louisiana seceded from the Union, Randall Lee Gibson enlisted as a private in a state army regiment. The son of a wealthy sugar planter and valedictorian of Yale’s Class of 1853, Gibson had long supported secession. Conflict was inevitable, he believed, not because of states’ rights or the propriety or necessity of slavery. Rather, a war would be fought over the inexorable gulf between whites and blacks, or what he called “the most enlightened race” and “the most degraded of all the races of men.” Because Northern abolitionists were forcing the South to recognize “the political, civil, and social equality of all the races of men,” Gibson wrote, the South was compelled to enjoy “independence out of the Union.” (Read Randall Lee Gibson’s article, “Our Federal Union.”)

The notion that war turned on a question of black and white as opposed to slavery and freedom was hardly an intuitive position for Gibson or for the South. Although Southern society was premised on slavery, the line between black and white had always been permeable. Since the 17th century, people descended from African slaves had been assimilating into white communities. It was a great migration that was covered up even as it was happening, its reach extending into the most unlikely corners of the South: although Randall Gibson was committed to a hardline ideology of racial difference, this secret narrative of the American experience was his family’s story.

Gibson’s siblings proudly traced their ancestry to a prosperous farmer in the South Carolina backcountry named Gideon Gibson. What they didn’t know was that when he first arrived in the colony in the 1730s, he was a free man of color. At the time the legislature thought he had come there to plot a slave revolt. The governor demanded a personal audience with him and learned that he was a skilled tradesman, had a white wife and had owned land and slaves in Virginia and North Carolina. Declaring the Gibsons to be “not Negroes nor Slaves but Free people,” the governor granted them hundreds of acres of land. The Gibsons soon married into their Welsh and Scots-Irish community along the frontier separating South Carolina’s coastal plantations from Indian country. It did not matter if the Gibsons were black or white—they were planters…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

From the Curse of Ham to the Curse of Nature

The British Journal for the History of Science
Volume 40, Issue 3 (2007)
pages 367-388
DOI: 10.1017/S0007087407009788

Robert Kenny, ARC Research Fellow
The Australian Centre, School of Historical Studies
La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia

This paper examines the debate engendered in ethnological and anthropological circles by Darwin’s Origin of Species and its effects. The debate was more about the nature of human diversity than about transmutation. By 1859 many polygenists thought monogenism had been clearly shown to be an antiquated and essentially religious concept. Yet the doctrine of natural selection gave rise to a ‘new monogenism‘. Proponents of polygenism such as James Hunt claimed natural selection had finally excluded monogenism, but Thomas Huxley, the most prominent exponent of the new monogenism, claimed it amalgamated the ‘best’ of both polygenism and monogenism. What it did provide was an explanation for the irreversible inequality of races, while it maintained that all humans were of one species. This bolstered belief in the innate superiority of the Caucasians over other peoples. The effect was finally to sever British ethnology from its evangelical monogenist roots. More subtly and surprisingly, it provided support in Church circles for a move away from the ideal of the ‘Native Church’.

It is well known that Darwin’s Origin of Species avoided applying the mechanism of natural selection to the development of the human species. Darwin waited twelve years before publishing his Descent of Man in 1871. Others were not so reticent. Natural selection provoked debate in British ethnological and anthropological circles through the 1860s, debates enacted in the shadow of the American war over slavery and British colonial expansion. Just as much as they were prompted by the transmutation theory, the debates had their antecedents in competing views of human diversity: did the variety of human races represent a single species descended from a common ancestor, or did the variety indicate separate species of humans descended from uncommon ancestors? Before 1859 the monogenist camp was seen, particularly by its opponents, as having based its arguments on religious conviction as much as on science, while many polygenists also saw their position as at least as much in harmony with Christian Scripture. But, to the surprise of many polygenists, after 1859 many of the most famous Darwinians, who had little truck with religion as a source of scientific knowledge, proclaimed themselves monogenists.

In the standard historiography, particularly in the writings of George Stocking, these debates are characterized as involving a conflict between a ‘Darwinian’ camp, ensconced in the Ethnological Society of London, and the ‘Anti-Darwinians’ of the Anthropological Society of London.1 Such histories, aiming to elucidate the progress of the ‘Darwinian revolution’ within anthropology, have underplayed the fundamental shift that occurred in the predominant attitude of the Ethnological Society under the influence of the Darwinians. This shift turned a monogenism of practical equality of races into a monogenism that accepted an irrevocable inequality of races and was politically little different from the polygenism advocated by the leaders of the Anthropological Society. Such histories have also overplayed polygenists’ antagonism to Darwin’s theory—for many polygenists transmutation was a means to understand the plurality of races as a plurality of species. The aim here is to examine the mechanics of the shift in monogenism and to show that natural selection, at least as then perceived by many, challenged and fatally undermined both polygenism and orthodox monogenism at their foundations. In so doing it established a new ‘scientific’ argument for human inequality that was to have far-reaching and surprising effects…

…Polygenisms

Despite his monogenism, Hodgkin was a long-time friend of the most vocal polygenists of the time, Robert Knox and the American Samuel Morton. They were all Edinburgh students together. Notoriously implicated in the Edinburgh scandals of Burke and Hare, Knox enthusiastically argued that the mulatto offspring of a European-native coupling were non-productive in the same way as a mule. He held that even in Ireland there had been ‘no amalgamation of the Celtic and Saxon blood’. This was not a novel position, as the term implies—’mulatto’ is from the Spanish for young mule. It was commonly held by settlers in Australia that Aboriginal women who had once borne a child to a European were thenceforward unable to conceive with an Aboriginal man. This supposed fact was used by Samuel Morton to support his polygenist doctrines in America, where polygenism had a greater following because it could so easily be used to support slavery. It had enough currency that Darwin felt the need to mention its disproof as late as 1871 in his Descent of Man.

Morton was famous for collecting and measuring skulls to demonstrate the moral and intellectual differences between races. His work was well known on both sides of the Atlantic. As Stephen Jay Gould demonstrated in his Mismeasure of Man, Morton fudged the measurements to ‘prove’ the Caucasian brain was bigger. This proof became a commonplace—in the decades that followed many writers used the term ‘ larger-brained European’. Friendship notwithstanding, Hodgkin was unimpressed by this science of skulls. In 1849 he wrote, ‘Having myself paid some attention to the ethnological grouping of skulls, I must confess that I have found considerable difficulty in adopting points of characteristic difference; and in this difficulty I find an argument in favour of the unity of species. ‘ He found greater variety of cranial capacity, Morton’s measure of cognitive ability, between individuals within a local group than between distant groups…

Read the entire article here.

The campaign for racial purity and the erosion of paternalism in Virginia, 1922-1930: “nominally white, biologically mixed, and legally Negro”.

The Journal of Southern History
Volume 68, Number 1 (February 2002)
pages 65-106

J. Douglas Smith

In September 1922 John Powell, a Richmond native and world-renowned pianist and composer, and Earnest Sevier Cox, a self-proclaimed explorer and ethnographer, organized Post No. 1 of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America. By the following June the organization claimed four hundred members in Richmond alone and had added new groups throughout the state, all dedicated to “the preservation and maintenance of Anglo-Saxon ideals and civilization.” For the next ten years Powell and his supporters dominated racial discourse in the Old Dominion; successfully challenged the legislature to redefine blacks, whites, and Indians; used the power of a state agency to enforce the law with impunity fundamentally altered the lives of hundreds of mixed-race Virginians; and threatened the essence of the state’s devotion to paternalistic race relations.

The racial extremism and histrionics of the leaders of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs have attracted the attention of both legal scholars and southern historians, particularly those interested in the 1924 Racial Integrity Act, the major legislative achievement of the organization, and Loving v. Virginia, the 1967 U.S. Supreme Court decision that outlawed three centuries of miscegenation statutes in the United States. Historian Richard B. Sherman, for instance, has focused on the organization’s leaders, “a small but determined group of racial zealots who rejected the contention of most southern whites in the 1920s that the “race question was settled.” Sherman, who has written the most detailed account of the legislative efforts of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs, has argued in the pages of the Journal of Southern History that the leaders of the organization constituted a “dedicated coterie of extremists who played effectively on the fears and prejudices of many whites.” Convinced that increasing numbers of persons with traces of black blood were passing as white, they made a “Last Stand” against racial amalgamation.

While Sherman is certainly correct that the Anglo-Saxon Clubs owed their success to the commitment of their leaders, their views and policies resonated with a much broader swath of the white population. The Anglo-Saxon Clubs did not merely manipulate the racial fears and prejudices of whites but also tapped into the same assumptions that undergirded the entire foundation of white supremacy and championed segregation as a system of racial hierarchy and control. The call for racial integrity appealed especially to elite whites in Virginia who were obsessed with genealogy and their pristine bloodlines. Lady Astor, for instance, reportedly informed her English friends that they lacked the purity of the white inhabitants of the Virginia Piedmont. “We are undiluted,” she proclaimed. Author Emily Clark satirized this prevailing view in Richmond when one of her characters remarked, “for here alone, in all America, flourished the Anglo-Saxon race, untainted, pure, and perfect.” White elites across Virginia gave their support to the Anglo-Saxon Clubs and allowed Powell’s message a hearing: state senators and delegates approved legislation; governors publicly advocated the aims of the organization; some of the most socially prominent women in Richmond joined the ladies auxiliary; and influential newspapers offered editorial support and provided a public platform for the dissemination of the organization’s extreme views…

…In addition to exposing a fundamental weakness in the system of managed race relations, the Anglo-Saxon Clubs unintentionally revealed the absurdity of the basic assumption that underlay their mission: it proved impossible to divide the state, or the nation for that matter, into readily identifiable races. The longer they waged their campaign, the more apparent it became that they could not divine the precise amount of nonwhite blood in a given individual. Furthermore, the Anglo-Saxon Clubs met a great deal of resistance from individuals and communities who rejected the clubs’ particular construction of racial identity. Communities across the state revealed a variability in race relations that confounded those most committed to a discrete, binary definition of race…

…Although Powell and Cox initially placed their efforts within the broader nativist context of the national debate over federal immigration policy, they soon ceased to mention immigration at all. (11) Instead, they focused their energies toward “achieving a final solution” to the “negro problem.” Their ultimate concern, as they suggested in lengthy articles in the Times-Dispatch, was to prevent “White America” from devolving into a “Negroid Nation.” Writing in July 1923, Powell argued that the passage of Jim Crow laws and the disfranchisement of blacks had “diverted the minds of our people from the most serious and fundamental peril, that is, the danger of racial amalgamation.” “It is not enough to segregate the Negro on railway trains and street cars, in schools and theaters,” the pianist declared; “it is not enough to restrict his exercise of the franchise, so long as the possibility remains of the absorption of Negro blood into our white population.” Powell acknowledged that Virginia’s laws already prevented the intermarriage of blacks and whites but warned that such laws did not necessarily “prevent intermixture.” He and his colleagues in the Anglo-Saxon Clubs also believed that a 1910 Virginia statute that defined a black person as having at least one-sixteenth black blood no longer protected the integrity of the white race. Pointing to census figures that showed a decrease in the number of mulattoes in Virginia from 222,910 in 1910 to 164,171 in 1920, they argued that an increasing number of people with some black blood must be passing as white. Consequently, a new, “absolute” color line offered the only “possibility, if not the probability, of achieving a final solution.”

Powell’s analysis of census data, however, points to the absurdity of his campaign to define race in absolute terms. While Powell interpreted the steep drop in mulattoes as proof of increased passing, historian Joel Williamson argues that by the early twentieth century the only significant “mixing” occurred between lighter-skinned blacks and darker-skinned blacks. Even census officials warned in 1920 that “considerable uncertainty necessarily attaches to the classification of Negroes as black and mulatto, since the accuracy of the distinction depends largely upon the judgment and care employed by the enumerators.” Mulattoes in Virginia did not become white between 1910 and 1920 but rather became black. In fact, the census bureau did away with mulatto as a category for the 1930 enumeration…

…Although Powell was the Anglo-Saxon Clubs’ leading spokesman, Walter Plecker, as director of the Bureau of Vital Statistics, was without a doubt the group’s primary enforcer. From 1924 until his retirement twenty-two years later, Plecker waged a campaign of threats and intimidation aimed at classifying all Virginians by race and identifying even the smallest traces of black blood in the state’s citizens. In short, the statistician operated on the belief that a person was guilty of being black until he or she could prove otherwise.

Plecker considered it his mission to encourage as many Virginians as possible to register with the state. Between ten and twenty thousand near-white Virginians, he noted, “possess an intermixture of colored blood, in some cases to a slight extent, it is true, but still enough to prevent them from being white.” Such people previously had been considered white, which had allowed them to demand “admittance of their children to white schools” and “in not a few cases” to marry whites. Although such people were “scarcely distinguished as colored,” they “are not white in reality.” Registration, he argued, would enable the Bureau of Vital Statistics to head off such trouble…

…Linking racial integrity and segregated schools assumed a level of critical importance as the General Assembly prepared to meet in January 1930. Revelations that a number of mixed-race children attended white schools in Essex County provided advocates of a stricter racial-definition law the means of persuasion that they had lacked in 1926 and 1928 when they were seen as unnecessarily harassing the state’s Indians. The situation in Essex County first developed in 1928 as local school officials took steps to remove from the white schools children considered mixed. One family resisted, hired a lawyer, and filed suit. In the Circuit Court of Essex County, school officials acknowledged that the children in question had less than one-sixteenth black blood. Consequently, Judge Joseph W. Chinn ruled that the children could not be kept out of white schools.

Chinn based his ruling on what racial integrity advocates had long understood as a loophole in the original legislation. The 1924 Racial Integrity Act defined a white person as an individual with “no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian,” making an exception only for certain Indians, and failed to define a black person. Furthermore, the act specifically prohibited the intermarriage of a white person with a nonwhite person, but it made no mention of the schools. Powell later testified that he had assumed that all persons not deemed white would be automatically classified black. But since the 1924 statute did not amend the 1910 act which termed blacks as persons with one-sixteenth or more black blood, an individual with less than one-sixteenth black blood could not be considered black, and therefore he or she could not be prevented from attending white schools.

A reporter for the Richmond Times-Dispatch concluded that under Chinn’s ruling “any child having less than one-sixteenth Negro blood, not only can attend a white school, but must attend it, and is by law prevented from attending a colored school.” The judge’s opinion, moreover, opened the door for persons with less than one-sixteenth black blood to attend any of Virginia’s colleges or universities. In the wake of Chinn’s decision, local officials understood that their only avenue of relief lay with the state legislature passing a stricter law; consequently, sponsors introduced a measure that defined as black “any person in whom there is ascertainable any Negro Blood”—the so-called one-drop rule…

Loving Indian Style: Maintaining Racial Caste and Tribal Sovereignty Through Sexual Assimilation

Wisconsin Law Review
Volume 2007, Number 2 (2007-01-12)
pages 410-461

Carla D. Pratt, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Educational Equity; Nancy J. LaMont Faculty Scholar and Professor of Law
Pennsylvania State University

I. Introduction

When the United States Supreme Court struck down Virginia’s miscegenation statute forty years ago, everyone understood that the Court was eroding the formal barrier between blacks and whites. Although there has been healthy disagreement about Loving v. Virginia, including whether it provides the precedent for legal endorsement of same-sex marriage, scholars generally agree that the Virginia statute which Loving struck down was not a law proscribing miscegenation generally, but merely prohibiting miscegenation with a white person. Commentators have generally recognized the Virginia legislators’ choice to structure the law in this way as being aimed at preserving white racial purity and ensuring that white women were reserved exclusively for white men. Ostensibly the law was insouciant regarding the intimate relations of people of color, but a closer look betrays its impact on interracial relations between people of color.

Further, state miscegenation laws that ultimately permitted whites to marry Indians aided the assimilation of Indians into mainstream white America by operating as a form of racial rehabilitation. Indian assimilation, however, required more than Indians intermarrying with whites; it required the total indoctrination of Indians into the system of white supremacy. This meant that Indians needed to adopt white sexual mores, including the aversion to race-mixing with blacks.

This Article calls this process—which operated as the pathway to Indian acceptance in American society and privileged Indians over blacks—“sexual assimilation.” While sexual assimilation was aimed at cultural genocide from the federal perspective, it paradoxically played a role in preventing Indian cultural extinction by helping to maintain tribal sovereignty.

Scholars have generally characterized Loving as a case about the line separating whites from blacks. Within the subtext of Loving, however, lies a narrative about the line separating Indians from blacks. Virginia’s miscegenation law employed a eugenics-based racial classification to legally construct Mildred Loving as “Negro,” but her true racial identity contained a Cherokee Indian component. Mildred was herself a product of race mixing. Furthermore, while Mildred’s mixed racial identity may lead one to believe that—as some scholars have suggested—Indians intermarried with blacks freely and frequently, the miscegenation laws of several tribes impart a counternarrative that portrays some Indian communities as viewing marriage to blacks as taboo.

Despite all of the discussion about miscegenation laws that Loving has generated, there has been little discussion about the American Indian Nations’s enactment of miscegenation laws. Perhaps this paucity of literature is due to the fact that Loving had no precedential effect in tribal miscegenation law since tribes are sovereigns that are, in many respects, independent of federal regulation. Nonetheless, an examination of Loving is incomplete without an examination of the role that state miscegenation laws played in Indian communities in the scheme to maintain the boundaries of racial categories and the struggle to maintain tribal sovereignty. An examination of tribal miscegenation law yields a better understanding of how state miscegenation laws affected nonblack people of color such as Native Americans, who were often political casualties of state and federal laws designed with a black-white paradigm in mind. In fact, Native Americans found themselves wedged in the middle of the black-white models of racial subordination and ultimately adjusted to the existing racial hierarchy through social and legal assimilation.

The fact that several Indian tribes adopted miscegenation laws similar to the law struck down in Loving raises important questions. Why did these particular tribes adopt miscegenation laws? What role did the adoption of miscegenation laws play in the tribe and its interaction with state and federal governments? What role did tribal miscegenation laws play in the acculturation of Indians, and what legacy have these laws left for the tribes’ contemporary understanding of self?

This Article examines tribal miscegenation laws in an effort to locate some potential answers to these questions. This Article is not proffered as a definitive answer to the questions posed, but as a contribution to the emerging dialogue aimed at developing a collective understanding of the social, historical, and political context in which such laws arose and operated. This Article deviates from the traditional binary paradigm of exploring how miscegenation laws affected blacks and whites and explores how miscegenation laws affected nonblack people of color and their relations with blacks. Thus, it reveals that the statute at issue in Loving and similar race-preserving laws indirectly regulated interracial relations between certain nonwhite groups.

Part II of this Article explores the substance of tribal miscegenation laws—and their legal and political context—in an effort to better understand why tribes adopted such racially isolating laws. Part III examines how state miscegenation laws affected Native Americans as well as the role of tribal miscegenation laws in maintaining individual and communal Indian identity and tribal sovereignty. Part IV questions whether tribal miscegenation laws, despite their repeal, help explain contemporary tribal conflicts between blacks and Indians. Part V concludes that extant legal disputes between the tribes and African Americans who claim membership in those tribes are derivatives of the project of sexual assimilation of Indian people. This suggests that both the tribes and African Americans who claim a Native American identity could benefit from a better understanding of the historical sociolegal context in which contemporary notions of Indian identity are rooted…

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‘The offspring of infidelity’: Polygenesis and the defense of slavery

Emory University
2008
506 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3332327
ISBN: 9780549849544

Christopher Luse, Instructional Assistant Professor of History
University of Mississippi

This dissertation examines an internal debate within the antebellum South over the nature of slavery and race. Focusing on the printed materials of the public sphere, this work explores the impact of a newly popular doctrine within ethnology, polygenesis, on the southern defense of slavery. Supporters of polygenesis claimed that non-white races were not merely inferior, but separately created species with fundamentally different physiological, intellectual and moral natures. For centuries polygenesis had been over shadowed by the orthodox doctrine in ethnology, monogenesis, which claimed that all races descended from a common ancestor (Adam and Eve). Under attack from antislavery forces, white southerners turned to polygenesis. They asserted that only the permanent inferiority of blacks justified bondage. Southern physicians were at the forefront of popularizing this defense, using their knowledge of medicine and physiology to claim that blacks resembled apes more than Caucasians. Southern newspaper editors took up the cause to refute abolitionist attacks. Supporters developed the theory of “hybridity,” claiming that people of mixed racial ancestry were “hybrids” doomed to disease, infertility and an early death. Southern supporters used this theory to assert only slavery prevented “amalgamation.” In response, southern Christians heatedly attacked this new “infidelity” as undermining the Bible, the chief defense of slavery. Southern ministers defended their vision of “Christian Slavery.” They claimed that southern slavery was based on a beneficial paternalistic master-slave relationship. Polygenesis undermined the common bonds of humanity necessary for paternalism. Southern Christians used the latest scientific research to argue for a common physical and moral nature among all the races. With the coming of the Civil War, southern Christians attempted to reform slavery up to “Bible Standards” by legalizing slave marriages and access to the Bible. They failed. In the aftermath of defeat, many white Christians adopted polygenesis to attack Reconstruction and racial equality.

A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Emory University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Department of History

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Proslavery Ethnology
• Chapter 2: Hybridity and Other Threats
• Chapter 3: Christian Slavery
• Chapter 4: The Moral and Theological Critique
• Chapter 5: The Scientific Critique of Polygenesis
• Chapter 6: I he Crisis of Christian Slavery
• Bibliography

INTRODUCTION

On the eve of the secession of South Carolina, Reverend James Henley Thornwell held southern slaveholders to Scriptural standards and found them wanting. Thornwell, a reluctant secessionist, delivered a jeremiad to call on southerners to repent as they faced the fiery trial of preserving their embattled slaveholding community. The Presbyterian Thornwell, a prestigious clergyman often called “the Calhoun of the Church,” denounced a grave threat to slavery. The target of his wrath was not only the ravings of abolitionists, but the “science, falsely so-called” which defended slavery by making “the slave a different being from his master.” Thornwell maintained “those who defend slavery upon the plea that the African is not of the same stock with ourselves, are aiming a fatal blow at the institution by bringing it into conflict with the dearest doctrines of the Gospel.” Thornwell viewed with consternation the increasing popularity of polygenesis, a previously marginal theory within ethnology. This emerging school not only asserted the inferiority of “lower races,” but claimed their separate creation as species with fundamentally different natures. Within the antebellum South a paradoxical debate raged. Southern white Christians, staunch defenders of slavery, attacked this new form of scientific racism by defending the humanity of black slaves. The southern critics of polygenesis even employed many of the same arguments and sources as abolitionists. Thornwell aimed his harshest anathemas at southerners who adopted this “infidel” theory to defend slavery. Thornwell admitted that “our offense has been, that in some instances we have accepted and converted into a plea, the conclusions of this vain conceit.”

In his brilliant sermon Thornwell managed to address the most important themes of the controversy. He argued “such speculations have not sprung from slavery. They were not invented to justify it. They are the offspring of infidelity, a part of the process by which science has been endeavoring to convict Christianity of falsehood.” Thornwell was only partially correct. Polygenesis, and scientific racism as a whole, had multiple roots. The debate involved not only slavery, but the long process of accommodation and conflict between science and religion within Western culture. It did not pit enlightened scientists against obscurantist religious bigots, although the polygenists loved to claim as much. Foes of polygenesis like Thornwell defended an established vision of the relation of science to religion that proclaimed the unity between the Word and Works of the Creator. The troubled but vital partnership between Christianity and science underwent profound strain due to the use of ethnology to defend slavery and racial subordination. Because, with apologies to Thornwell, it is clear that the necessity to defend slavery and racial subordination drove the development of polygenesis, which also became very popular in the North and Europe. The Northern Democratic Party, especially, used polygenesis to denounced calls for racial equality.

I propose to resurrect and analyze a half-forgotten debate which illustrates major issues in antebellum intellectual and cultural life. I contend that the controversy was much more prominent in the sectional turmoil than has been generally appreciated. The issue was fiercely contested in the pulpit, the lecture platform, in newspaper editorials and on the political stage. The debate was not the mere hobby-horse of a small group of researchers confined to erudite scientific journals. Its prominence is reflected in both secular and denominational newspapers. I have sought the most popular sources available. In part, this explosion of material was due to significant innovations in print technology and transportation during the era. The late antebellum era witnessed a massive increase in the circulation of newspapers and reading material. I have assembled this weight of material to demonstrate that the controversy was pervasive in the public realm. Newspaper editorials often assumed the basic points of the issue to be public knowledge. The conflict affected a host of pressing issues, from slavery to the rise of new scientific disciplines to the nature of republican government. The debate pervaded the public sphere.

The debate illuminates southern slavery and southern culture as a whole. Historians continue to debate heatedly the nature of slavery. The controversy over polygenesis uncovers a uniquely conservative, patriarchal and religious worldview as well as a serious indigenous challenge to this Christian, paternalistic ideology. The antebellum South increasingly denounced the powerful currents of egalitarianism, religious liberalism, and “infidelity” sweeping the western world, but they could not separate themselves from them. Southerners saw themselves as modern men participating in the larger developments of Western civilization. They used the latest innovations in sociology, political science and natural history to defend an institution denounced as immoral and archaic by the rest of the Western world…

…Along with abolitionism and socialism, proslavery Christians wrestled with another “ism,” racism. At the heart of the ethnological debates was the nature of race. In order to understand the antebellum controversy it is necessary to deal with some of the theoretical issues of race. Nineteenth century ethnologists celebrated their increased understanding of human differences as a major advance in understanding the natural world. They believed that they discovered the nature of human variations in the same fashion that Isaac Newton discovered the laws of physics. They believed they had gained insight into the plans of the Creator. “Race” was an expression of natural law, not an artificial human category. In contrast, for the past eighty years, biologists, anthropologists and geneticists have been dismantling the idea of race as a valid scientific concept. In a fascinating instance of foreshadowing, antebellum critics of polygenesis anticipated a number of the modern assaults on race. Opponents repeatedly pointed out the impossibility of clearly defining racial boundaries. They presented the imperceptible gradations of complexion, hair and physiognomy among the races. Proslavery Christians even denied that there existed a uniform, degraded “Negro Type.” Modern geneticists have mapped the extraordinary amount of genetic overlap between the various “races,” concluding that on the most basic level of chromosomes and genes, the races are the same. As Audrey Smedley puts it, the “Biogenetic variations in the human species are not the same phenomenon as the social clusters we call ‘races.'” Modern scientists have largely abandoned race in favor of geographically based “breeding populations” with varying gene frequencies.

Modern anthropologists have traveled a similar path. Beginning in the early twentieth century with the pioneering work of Franz Boas, anthropologists have stressed the plastic nature of human behavior and capacities. Anthropologists view human behavior as mostly culturally determined and transmitted. For the purposes of this study, the most crucial insight is that race is socially and culturally constructed. Race is an ideology, not a science. Barbara J. Fields writes “Race is not an element of biology (like breathing oxygen or reproducing sexually), nor even an idea (like the speed of light or the value of pie) that can be imagined to live an eternal life of its own. Race is not an idea but an ideology.” Racial thought is inseparable from the purposes it serves within a specific society, the conflicts it attempts to resolve (or disguise), the hierarchies it justifies and the meanings it explains. The ideology of race is the descriptive vocabulary of the everyday reality of power relations, more specifically, of the historic ability of European peoples to dominate other peoples. Ideologies of race are always historic despite their focus on the natural world. Most scholars insist that “race” did not exist in anything like its modern form until the era of European discovery and expansion. Race was the product of unique historical developments despite the efforts of ethnologists to give permanency to racial categories. Like all ideologies, although not “real” in a scientific sense, race is the cultural expression of very real social relations. Race is a human invention in much the same sense as political systems, art or literature. And like all human creations, it changes according to the needs of its society.

The seductive power of race as an ideology rests in its explanatory power and its simplicity. Racial ideologies empower all members of the superior social caste to make immediate judgments on the worthiness and intelligence of the “lower races” which determine the allotting of power and privileges. Almost as important is its ability to comprehensively explain the world. This power underscores a contention of this project: that polygenesis represented the first comprehensive racial ideology. This new doctrine explained all of human history and culture in terms of permanent, inherent racial traits. Earlier theories on the origin and nature of races focused narrowly on how physiological distinctions originated. They attempted to explain how peoples seemed to differ. Early ethnologists sought explanations for human variations that preserved the idea of a common human origin. In contrast, polygenists placed race at the center of human history. They focused on why humans differed.

The late emergence of polygenesis as a prominent theory underscores one aspect of racism. Race as a concept did not emerge through scientific research or historical investigation, but through the experience of domination and exploitation. For centuries prior to the emergence of sophisticated racial theories, “folk racist” beliefs of the inferiority of other races were prevalent in America. Most of the scientific findings of polygenists justified long standing beliefs concerning Indians and Africans. In Colonial America, whites contended that only Africans could labor in the semi-tropical South and that mulattoes were weaker and more diseased than the pure races. Nineteenth-century ethnologists gave a veneer of  authority to these beliefs by expounding theories of “hybridity” and “acclimation.” Racial ideologies are nothing if not purposeful. They almost always address a pressing need, whether it is the need to justify the necessity of enslaved labor to grow staple crops, or the necessity to control a dangerous “middle caste” between black slaves and white freemen.

By the late antebellum era, “folk racist” beliefs solidified into a set of core contentions concerning “lower races.” This increasing sophistication underscores the dynamic and fluid nature of racist beliefs. As slavery came under increasing attack, basic assumptions concerning blacks could no longer be taken for granted. They required increasing support and evidence. Among the most important “principles” of scientific racism were that races represented permanent distinctions which could be measured and evaluated. These distinctions organized themselves in a hierarchy of racial “types.” “Types” were idealized representations which disguised all the innumerable complexities among actual peoples. In antebellum racial types, all Caucasians possessed the profile of a Grecian god, while all blacks were ape-like and prognathous. These types expressed the true nature of the distinct races. These types represented not merely physiological differences, but basic moral, spiritual and intellectual distinctions. Racists emphasized that surface somatic variations were merely signs indicating the more fundamental racial “essences.” White seeming quardoons were in a deep physiological and psychological sense still black or an unnatural mixture. Ethnologists contended that these fundamental distinctions reflected God’s will embodied in natural law…

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Negro History, Part X: Miscegenation in America

Ebony Magazine
October 1962
pages 94-104
(Digitized by Google)

Lerone Bennett, Jr., Executive Editor

The material in this chapter on miscegenation during the slavery period is based largely on James Hugo Johnston’s doctorial dissertation at the University of Chicago, Race Relations in Virginia and Miscegenation in the South, 1776-1860; Carter Woodson’s article. “The Beginnings of The Miscegenation of the Whites and Blacks” in The Journal of Negro History; and A. W. Calhoun’s study, A Social History of the American Family.

Sin. Sex. Race.

The three words took deep roots, intertwined and became one in the Puritan psyche. In the famous sermon preached at Whitechapel in 1609 for Virginia-bound planters and adventurers, the minister fused the words in a stern admonition against miscegenation. From Genesis he summoned the figure of Abram who left his country and his father’s house and migrated to a land God had prepared for his seed.

“Abram’s posteritie,” the preacher said, “(must) keepe to themselves. They may not marry nor give in marriage to the heathen, that are uncircumcised…  …The breaking of this rule, may breake the necke of all good successe of this voyage, whereas by keeping the feare of God, the planters in shorte time, by the blessing of God, may grow into a nation formidable to all the enemies of Christ.”

It was easier said than done.

From the beginning, English colonists, following Abram’s example, married and mated with Hagars—red and black. Even more distressing to the Puritan mind was the broad tolerance of the English women who married and mated with Hagars brothers. Proscription began early. In 1630, a bare 21 years after the Whitechapel sermon, one Hugh Davis was “soundly whipped before an assemblage of Negroes and others for abusing himself to the dishonor of God and the shame of Christians by defiling his body in lying with a Negro…” Forty years later, white women were being whipped and sold into slavery and extended servitude for showing open preferences for Negro men. Alarmed by widespread miscegenation, colonists from South Carolina to Massachusetts began a systematic campaign which ultimately made the Whitechapel sermon the racial policy of the land. Every instrument of persuasion was used to teach white people that they should “not marry nor give in marriage” to Negroes. No amount of persuasion, however, could “keepe” whites to themselves.

Miscegenation in America started not in the thirteen original colonies but in Africa. English, French, Dutch and American slavetraders took black concubines on the Guinea coast and mated with females on the slave ships. It should be noted that many Africans and Europeans were themselves the products of thousands of years of mixing between various African, Asian and Caucasian peoples.

In and around Jamestown and the Massachusetts of Cotton Mather, there was an extensive trade in genes. Socio-economic conditions in the early colonies encouraged racial mingling. White men and women from England, Ireland and Scotland were bought and sold in the same markets with Negroes and bequeathed in the same wills. As indentured servants bound out for five or seven years, these whites worked in the fields with Negro servants and lived in the same rude tenant huts. A deep bond of sympathy developed between the Negro and white indentured servants who formed the bulk of the early population. They fraternized during off-duty hours and consoled themselves with the same strong rum. And in and out of wedlock, they sired a numerous mulatto brood.

When Negro servants were reduced to slavery, the colonial governing classes redoubled their efforts to stamp out racial mixing. Miscegenation in this era was not only a breach of Puritan morality, but it was also a threat to slavery and the stability of the servile labor force. As early as 1664, Maryland enacted the first anti-amalgamation statute. It was an astonishing document. The statute was aimed at white women who had resisted every effort to inoculate them with the virus of racial pride; and the preamble stated very clearly the reasons which drove white men to the extremity of enslaving white women.

And forasmuch as divers freeborn English women, forgetful of their free condition, and to the disgrace of our nation, do intermarry with negro slaves, by which also divers suits may arise, touching the issue of such women, and a great damage doth befall the master of such negroes, for preservation whereof for deterring such freehom women from such shameful matches, be it enacted: That whatsoever free-born woman shall intermarry with any slave, from and after the last day of the present assembly, shall serve the master of such slave during the life of her husband; and that all the issues of such free-born women, so married, shall be slaves as their fathers were.

This law failed to stay intermarriage. Some women chose love and slavery; others were reduced to slavery by scheming planters who forced them to marry Negro men in order to reap the additional economic benefits accruing from the extended service of the mothers and the perpetual slavery of their children. A celebrated case revolved around Irish Nell, an indentured servant who came over with Lord Baltimore. When Baltimore returned to England, he sold Irish Nell to a planter who forced or encouraged her to marry a Negro. Shocked by the practice of prostituting white women for economic purposes. Lord Baltimore used his influence to get the law changed. The new law was about as effective as the old one—which is to say, it was not effective at all. E. I. McConnac, the authority on white servitude in Maryland, said: “Mingling of the races in Maryland continued during the eighteenth century, in spite of all laws against it.”

Negro-white marriages, especially Negro male-white female marriages, were a problem in Virginia and other colonies. In 1691, Virginia restricted intermarriage. Similar laws were put on the books in Massachusetts in 1705, North Carolina in 1715. South Carolina in 1717. Shortly after the enactment of Virginia’s ban on intermarriage, Ann Wall was convicted of “keeping company with a Negro under pretense of marriage.” The Elizabeth County court sold Ann Wall for five years and bound out her two mulatto children for 31 years, and “it is further ordered,” the court said, “that ye said Ann Wall after she is free from her said master doe at any time presume to come into this county she shall be banished to ye Island of Barbadoes.”

In an unsuccessful attempt to halt intermingling, Pennsylvania banned intermarriage in 1725. Forty-five years later, during the glow of the Revolution, Pennsylvania repealed the ban on intermarriage. Thereafter, mixed marriages became common in Pennsylvania. Thomas Branagan visited Philadelphia in 1805 and averred that he had never seen so much intermingling. “There are,” he wrote, “many, very many blacks who… begin to feel themselves consequential… …will not be satisfied unless they get white women for wives, and are likewise exceedingly impertinent to white people in low circumstances… I solemnly swear, I have seen more white women married to, and deluded through the arts of seduction by negroes in one year in Philadelphia, than for eight years I was visiting (West Indies and the southern states)… …There are perhaps hundreds of white women thus fascinated by black men in this city and there are thousands of black children by them at present.”

Aristocrats did not always obey the rules they made. Benjamin Franklin, it is said, was quite open in his relationships with black women. Carter Woodson, the careful historian, says Franklin “seems to have made no secret of his associations with Negro women,” Well-to-do people usually stopped short of legal marriage, but there is evidence that some threw caution to the wind. The following item appears in the will of John Fenwick, the Lord Proprietor of New Jersey. “Item, I do except against Elizabeth Adams of having any ye leaste part of my estate, unless the Lord open her eyes to see her abominable transgression against him, me her good father, by giving her true repentance, and forsaking ye Black ye hath been ye ruin of her; and becoming penitent of her sins; upon ye condition only I do will and require my executors to settle five hundred acres of land upon her.”…

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