Mixed Race Studies

Pearl’s Secret: A Black Man’s Search for His White Family

University of California Press
May 2001
Paperback ISBN: 9780520227309
321 pages
5-1/2 x 8-1/4 inches, 25 b/w photographs, 2 line illustrations

Neil Henry, Associate Professor of Journalism
University of California, Berkeley

Pearl’s Secret is a remarkable autobiography and family story that combines elements of history, investigative reporting, and personal narrative in a riveting, true-to-life mystery. In it, Neil Henry—a black professor of journalism and former award-winning correspondent for the Washington Post—sets out to piece together the murky details of his family’s past. His search for the white branch of his family becomes a deeply personal odyssey, one in which Henry deploys all of his journalistic skills to uncover the paper trail that leads to blood relations who have lived for more than a century on the opposite side of the color line. At the same time Henry gives a powerful and vivid account of his black family’s rise to success over the twentieth century. Throughout the course of this gripping story the author reflects on the part that racism and racial ignorance have played in his daily life—from his boyhood in largely white Seattle to his current role as a parent and educator in California.

The contemporary debate over the significance of Thomas Jefferson‘s longtime romantic relationship with his slave, Sally Hemings, and recent DNA evidence that points to his role as the father of black descendants, have revealed the importance and volatility of the issue of dual-race legacies in American society. As Henry uncovers the dramatic history of his great-great-grandfather—a white English immigrant who fought as a Confederate officer in the Civil War, found success during Reconstruction as a Louisiana plantation owner, and enjoyed a long love affair with Henry’s great-great-grandmother, a freed black slave—he grapples with an unsettling ambivalence about what he is trying to do. His straightforward, honest voice conveys both the pain and the exhilaration that his revelations bring him about himself, his family, and our society. In the book’s stunning climax, the author finally meets his white kin, hears their own remarkable story of survival in America, and discovers a great deal about both the sting of racial prejudice as it is woven into the fabric of the nation, and his own proud identity as a teacher, father, and black American.

The People Who Own Themselves: Aboriginal Ethnogenesis in a Canadian Family 1660-1900

University of Calgary Press
2003
300 pages
6″ x 9″
ISBN: 1-55238-115-3

Heather Devine, Professor of Communication and Culture
University of Calgary

The search for a Metis identity and what constitutes that identity is a key issue facing many Aboriginals of mixed ancestry today. The People Who Own Themselves reconstructs 250 years of the Desjarlais’ family history across a substantial area of North America, from colonial Louisiana, the St. Louis, Missouri region, and the American Southwest to Red River and Central Alberta. In the course of tracing the Desjarlais family, social, economic, and political factors influencing the development of various Aboriginal ethnic identities are discussed. With intriguing details about the Desjarlais family members, this book offers new, original insights into the 1885 Northwest Rebellion, focusing on kinship as a motivating factor in the outcome of events. With a unique how-to appendix for Metis genealogical reconstruction, this book will be of equal interest to Metis wanting to research their own genealogy and to scholars engaged in the reconstruction of Metis ethnic identity.

We Were Always Free: The Maddens of Culpeper County, Virginia, A 200-Year Family History

University of Virginia Press
1992
304 pages
6 1/8 x 9 1/4
52 b&w illustrations
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8139-2371-0

T. O. Madden, Jr. (1903-2000)

with

Ann L. Miller, Historian
Virginia Transportation Research Council

Foreword by Nell Irvin Painter

In August of 1758, in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, a poor Irish immigrant named Mary Madden bore a child, Sarah Madden, whose father was said to be a slave and the property of Colonel James Madison, father of the future president of the United States. This daughter, though born to a free mulatto, became indentured to the Madisons. There she worked as a seamstress to pay off the fine of her birth until she was thirty-one years old.

Sarah Madden bore ten children; when the term of her indenture was over, she and her youngest son, Willis, struck out for themselves—Sarah as a seamstress, laundress, and later, with Willis, a dairy farmer and tavern keeper.

Spanning two hundred years of American history, We Were Always Free tells its story with remarkable completeness. we can thank Sarah Madden and her descendants for keeping their family narrative alive—and for saving hundreds of important documents detailing their freedom, hardship, and daily work.

These documents came to light in 1949 when T. O. Madden Jr. discovered a hidebound trunk originally belonging to his great-grandfather Willis. Stored in the trunk were papers dating back to the mid-eighteenth century, freedom papers, papers of indenture, deeds of land, Sarah Madden’s laundry and seamstress record books, letters, traveling passes. The trunk even held a full set of business records from the nineteenth century when Madden’s Tavern flourished as a center of activity in Orange County and as a rest stop on the road to Fredericksburg.

From that day forward, T. O. Madden deeply researched his family, using census reports, other official sources, family, and friends. All have led to his ably reconstructed family history, and to his own remarkable story.

We Were Always Free is a unique and very American family saga.

Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture

University of Virginia Press
1999
325 pages
6 x 9
ISBN: 0-8139-1919-3

Edited by

Jan Ellen Lewis
Rutgers University

Peter S. Onuf
University of Virginia

The publication of DNA test results showing that Thomas Jefferson was probably the father of one of his slave Sally Hemings‘s children has sparked a broad but often superficial debate. The editors of this volume have assembled some of the most distinguished American historians, including three Pulitzer Prize winners, and other experts on Jefferson, his times, race, and slavery. Their essays reflect the deeper questions the relationship between Hemings and Jefferson has raised about American history and national culture.

The DNA tests would not have been conducted had there not already been strong historical evidence for the possibility of a relationship. As historians from Winthrop D. Jordan to Annette Gordon-Reed have argued, much more is at stake in this liaison than the mere question of paternity: historians must ask themselves if they are prepared to accept the full implications of our complicated racial history, a history powerfully shaped by the institution of slavery and by sex across the color line.

How, for example, does it change our understanding of American history to place Thomas Jefferson in his social context as a plantation owner who fathered white and black families both? What happens when we shift our focus from Jefferson and his white family to Sally Hemings and her children? How do we understand interracial sexual relationships in the early republic and in our own time? Can a renewed exploration of the contradiction between Jefferson’s life as a slaveholder and his libertarian views yield a clearer understanding of the great political principles he articulated so eloquently and that Americans cherish? Are there moral or political lessons to be learned from the lives of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings and the way that historians and the public have attempted to explain their liaison?

Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture promises an open-ended discussion on the living legacy of slavery and race relations in our national culture.

Contributors:

Annette Gordon-Reed, New York Law School
Rhys Isaac, College of William and Mary
Winthrop D. Jordan, University of Mississippi
Jan Ellen Lewis, Rutgers University, Newark
Philip D. Morgan, Institute of Early American History and Culture
Peter S. Onuf, University of Virginia
Jack N. Rakove, Stanford University
Joshua Rothman, University of Virginia
Werner Sollors, Harvard University
Lucia Stanton, Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation
Dianne Swann-Wright, Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation
Clarence Walker, University of California at Davis
Gordon S. Wood, Brown University

Mongrel Nation: The America Begotten by Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings

University of Virginia Press
January 2009
144 pages
5 1/2x 81/4
Cloth ISBN 0-8139-2777-0

Clarence E. Walker, Professor of History
University of California, Davis

The debate over the affair between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings rarely rises above the question of “Did they or didn’t they?” But lost in the argument over the existence of such a relationship are equally urgent questions about a history that is more complex, both sexually and culturally, than most of us realize. Mongrel Nation seeks to uncover this complexity, as well as the reasons it is so often obscured.

Clarence Walker contends that the relationship between Jefferson and Hemings must be seen not in isolation but in the broader context of interracial affairs within the plantation complex. Viewed from this perspective, the relationship was not unusual or aberrant but was fairly typical. For many, this is a disturbing realization, because it forces us to abandon the idea of American exceptionalism and reexamine slavery in America as part of a long, global history of slaveholders frequently crossing the color line.

More than many other societies—and despite our obvious mixed-race population—our nation has displayed particular reluctance to acknowledge this dynamic. In a country where, as early as 1662, interracial sex was already punishable by law, an understanding of the Hemings-Jefferson relationship has consistently met with resistance. From Jefferson’s time to our own, the general public denied—or remained oblivious to—the possibility of the affair. Historians, too, dismissed the idea, even when confronted with compelling arguments by fellow scholars. It took the DNA findings of 1998 to persuade many (although, to this day, doubters remain).

The refusal to admit the likelihood of this union between master and slave stems, of course, from Jefferson’s symbolic significance as a Founding Father. The president’s apologists, both before and after the DNA findings, have constructed an iconic Jefferson that tells us more about their own beliefs—and the often alarming demands of those beliefs—than it does about the interaction between slave owners and slaves. Much more than a search for the facts about two individuals, the debate over Jefferson and Hemings is emblematic of tensions in our society between competing conceptions both of race and of our nation.

Labeling People: French Scholars on Society, Race, and Empire, 1815-1848

McGill-Queen’s University Press
2003-08-20
264 pages
6 x 9
15 drawings
Cloth ISBN: (0773525807) 9780773525801

Martin S. Staum, Professor of History
University of Calgary

An examination of techniques used by scholarly societies to classify people that constructed the image of an inferior “Other” to promote social stability at home and a relationship of domination or paternalism with non-Europeans abroad.

Nineteenth-century French scholars, during a turbulent era of revolution and industrialization, ranked intelligence and character according to facial profile, skin colour, and head shape. They believed that such indicators could determine whether individuals were educable and peoples perfectible. In Labeling People Martin Staum examines the Paris societies of phrenology (reading intelligence and character by head shapes), geography, and ethnology and their techniques for classifying people. He shows how the work of these social scientists gave credence to the arrangement of “races” in a hierarchy, the domination of non-European peoples, and the limitation of opportunities for ill-favored individuals within France.

While previous studies have contrasted the relative optimism of middle-class social scientists before 1848 with a later period of concern for national decline and racial degeneration, Staum demonstrates that the earlier learned societies were also fearful of turmoil at home and interested in adventure abroad. Both geographers and ethnologists created concepts of fundamental “racial” inequality that prefigured the imperialist “associationist” discourse of the Third Republic, believing that European tutelage would guide “civilizable” peoples, and providing an open invitation to dominate and exploit the “uncivilizable.”

White Enough to Be American? Race Mixing, Indigenous People, and the Boundaries of State and Nation

University of North Carolina Press
February 2008
256 pages
6.125 x 9.25, 7 illus., notes, bibl., index
Cloth ISBN:  978-0-8078-3143-4
Paper ISBN:  978-0-8078-5837-0

Lauren L. Basson, Assistant Professor of Politics and Government
Ben-Gurion University, Israel

Racial mixture posed a distinct threat to European American perceptions of the nation and state in the late nineteenth century, says Lauren Basson, as it exposed and disrupted the racial categories that organized political and social life in the United States. Offering a provocative conceptual approach to the study of citizenship, nationhood, and race, Basson explores how racial mixture challenged and sometimes changed the boundaries that defined what it meant to be American.

Drawing on government documents, press coverage, and firsthand accounts, Basson presents four fascinating case studies concerning indigenous people of “mixed” descent. She reveals how the ambiguous status of racially mixed people underscored the problematic nature of policies and practices based on clearly defined racial boundaries. Contributing to timely discussions about race, ethnicity, citizenship, and nationhood, Basson demonstrates how the challenges to the American political and legal systems posed by racial mixture helped lead to a new definition of what it meant to be American—one that relied on institutions of private property and white supremacy.

Read a review of the book by Daniel Lipson here.

Property Rites: The Rhinelander Trial, Passing, and the Protection of Whiteness

University of North Carolina Press
April 2009
408 pages
6.125 x 9.25, 10 illus., notes, bibl., index
Cloth ISBN  978-0-8078-3268-4
Paper ISBN  978-0-8078-5939-1

Elizabeth M. Smith-Pryor, Assistant Professor of History
Kent State University

In 1925 Leonard [Kip] Rhinelander, the youngest son of a wealthy New York society family, sued to end his marriage to Alice [Beatrice] Jones, a former domestic servant and the daughter of a “colored” cabman. After being married only one month, Rhinelander pressed for the dissolution of his marriage on the grounds that his wife had lied to him about her racial background. The subsequent marital annulment trial became a massive public spectacle, not only in New York but across the nation—despite the fact that the state had never outlawed interracial marriage.

Elizabeth Smith-Pryor makes extensive use of trial transcripts, in addition to contemporary newspaper coverage and archival sources, to explore why Leonard Rhinelander was allowed his day in court. She moves fluidly between legal history, a day-by-day narrative of the trial itself, and analyses of the trials place in the culture of the 1920s North to show how notions of race, property, and the law were—and are—inextricably intertwined.

Legalizing Identities: Becoming Black or Indian in Brazil’s Northeast

University of North Carolina Press
June 2009
272 pages
6.125 x 9.25, 18 illus., 2 maps, notes, bibl., index
Cloth ISBN  978-0-8078-3292-9
Paper ISBN  978-0-8078-5951-3

Jan Hoffman French, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
University of Richmond

Anthropologists widely agree that identities—even ethnic and racial ones—are socially constructed. Less understood are the processes by which social identities are conceived and developed. Legalizing Identities shows how law can successfully serve as the impetus for the transformation of cultural practices and collective identity. Through ethnographic, historical, and legal analysis of successful claims to land by two neighboring black communities in the backlands of northeastern Brazil, Jan Hoffman French demonstrates how these two communities have come to distinguish themselves from each other while revising and retelling their histories and present-day stories.

French argues that the invocation of laws by these related communities led to the emergence of two different identities: one indigenous (Xocó Indian) and the other quilombo (descendants of a fugitive African slave community). With the help of the Catholic Church, government officials, lawyers, anthropologists, and activists, each community won government recognition and land rights, and displaced elite landowners. This was accomplished even though anthropologists called upon to assess the validity of their claims recognized that their identities were “constructed.” The positive outcome of their claims demonstrates that authenticity is not a prerequisite for identity. French draws from this insight a more sweeping conclusion that, far from being evidence of inauthenticity, processes of construction form the basis of all identities and may have important consequences for social justice.

An Inter-Racial Love Story in Fact and Fiction: William and Mary King Allen’s Marriage and Louisa May Alcott’s Tale, ‘M.L.’

History Workshop Journal
2002
Volume 53, Number 1
pages 17-42
DOI: 10.1093/hwj/53.1.17

Sarah Elbert, Professor Emerita of History
The State University of New York, Binghamton

William G. Allen, the child of a free mulatto mother and a white father, was born about 1820, raised by a free black family,and taught probably by ‘educated foreigners’; among the Federal Troops stationed in Fortress Monroe. In 1838 a New York clergyman accepted Allen in his newly-opened school and then recommended his pupil to Gerrit Smith, a prominent New York abolitionist who supported black students at Oneida Institute in upstate New York.  There Allen developed close ties to leaders of the black abolitionist movement. Allen taught fugitive slaves in Canada and co-edited the National Watchman, an abolitionist newspaper in Troy, New York. By 1847 Allen was in Boston clerking for Ellis Gray Loring, an abolitionist lawyer, and also lecturing, writing, and agitating for immediate abolition, racial equality, ‘amalgamation’, and Africa’s importance in the history of world civilization.  Appointed a professor of Greek Language and Literature at New York Central College in McGrawville, upstate New York, he was among pioneers in coeducation and inter-racial education. Allen courted Mary E. King, a white student there. The couple first met little opposition from her family but their toleration quickly vanished when the couple’s engagement prompted an anti-abolitionist and certainly an anti-‘amalgamation’ mob of 500 ‘gentlemen of property and standing’ who prepared to tar and feather Allen and roll him in a nail-studied barrel.  Allen fled to Syracuse, New York, where Jeremiah Loguen and the Reverend Samuel J. May (uncle of Louisa May Alcott) we reactive radical abolitionists and conductors for slaves escaping on the ‘Underground Railway’.  King and Allen then married in New York City and fled to England. Allen lectured in Leeds, Bradford, and Newcastle in 1853 and he wrote their story in ‘The American Prejudice against Color’ and ‘A Personal Narrative’. The pamphlets published in Dublin and London were sent to Samuel J. May and Louisa May Alcott was visiting the May family during the months of the Allen-King incident and its sensationalist treatment in the local papers. Alcott fictionalized the King-Allen romance in her story ‘M.L.’, (now reprinted in Louisa May Alcott on Race, Sex and Slavery, Northeastern University Press, 1998).  Professor R. J. M. Blackett traced the Allens’ years in England and Ireland but found no record of the couple or their children after 1878, when they were living in Notting Hill, London, impoverished and dependent upon friends for support.  Both were dedicated teachers, devoted to the education of poor boys and girls. Allen was the principal of the Caledonian Training School in Islington1863, but Englishmen too were not lacking in racism and his school was resented by competitors who drove him out. (See Blackett,’William G. Allen: the Forgotten Professor’, Civil War History26:2, pp. 39–51). This article brings together Alcott’s tale and the events upon which it was based, in the context of abolitionist culture and activity in upstate New York and New England, and of Alcott’s life, politics, and writing.

Read or purchase the entire article here.