Mixed Race Studies

Interracial Intimacy: The Regulation of Race and Romance. By Rachel F. Moran [Bartholet Review]

The Journal of Interdisciplinary History
Volume 33, Number 2 (Autumn 2002)
pages 320–322
DOI: 10.1162/00221950260209039

Elizabeth Bartholet, Morris Wasserstein Professor of Law
Harvard Law School

Interracial Intimacy: The Regulation of Race and Romance. By Rachel F. Moran (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2oo) 271 pp. $3o.oo.

This thoughtful, provocative book treats an important topic that has received inadequate attention. Moran discusses the unfinished revolution that began with Brown v. Board of Education, in which the nation’s highest court ordered desegregation of the public schools, concluding “that racial boundaries could be broken down and racial hierarchy undone only through interracial contact”. She describes in powerful terms the central role played by the ban on interracial intimacy in the segregationist system of our past, and the myriad restrictions that operate to prevent such intimacy in our theoretically integrationist present. In the end, she makes a nuanced and persuasive case for the good that would come from liberating love and enabling interracial intimacy.

Moran uses history to shine a bright light on the present. She tells in horrifying detail the story of whites’ use of racial barriers to maintain their superior position, not only over blacks but also over Native Americans and successive immigrant groups seen as alien. She also shows how at each stage of historical development, from the days of slavery through abolition through Reconstruction, those in power have seen interracial intimacy as the ultimate threat to racial hierarchy. She describes those resisting change as obsessed with the importance of at least maintaining the color line in this arena, whether through laws preventing interracial marriage and adoption or through the lynching of black men suspected of consorting with white women. She describes those promoting change as feeling compelled to provide reassurance that their kind of racial progress would never mean breaching the all-important ban on interracial marriage. This history provides persuasive proof of the point that she makes explicit interracial intimacy is subversive of the racial order…

Read the entire review here.

From Legend to History to Film: “The Free State of Jones”

Renegade South: Histories of Unconventional Southerners
2015-11-17

Vikki Bynum, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History
Texas State University, San Marcos

The Free State of Jones, the movie

Between November 19–22, 2015, the Smithsonian Institute and National Endowment of the Humanities will host a history film forum at the National Museum of American History in Washington DC. The forum will include a panel discussion of the forthcoming movie, The Free State of Jones.

According to Executive Director and forum curator Christopher Wilson, “by looking at several brand new films that illuminate the Secrets of American History, we will consider the issues that arise when true stories of the past become the subject of our on-screen entertainment.” To this end, on November 21, distinguished historians David Blight and Steven Hahn will join Gary Ross, the movie’s director and screenplay author, to discuss the challenges of bringing The Free State of Jones to the Big Screen.

The forum will also address the ways in which “films reflect the social, political, and cultural concerns of the times in which they were made,” which speaks to the question posed on Twitter by Kevin Levin of Civil War Memory: “What has changed in our Civil War memory to make room for just such a movie?”

Good question. Given that tales about the Free State of Jones have been around since before the Civil War ended, why wasn’t a movie about these plain white farmers of Civil War Mississippi who armed themselves and fought against the Confederacy made before now?…

Read the entire article here.

Interracial relationships and the ‘brown baby’ problem: black GIs, white women and their mixed race offspring in World War II Britain

University of Cambridge
Department of History and Philosophy of Science
Seminar Room 1
Tuesday, 2015-11-17, 17:00-18:30Z

Lucy Bland, Reader in History
Anglia Ruskin University

For more information, click here.

Saskatchewan artist Leah Dorion features Métis women in stunning exhibit

CBC News
2015-11-08

Visual artist Leah Dorion said this painting is dedicated to Catherine Beaulieu Bouvier from Fort Providence, N.W.T. (Eric Anderson/CBC)

Country Wives and Daughters of the Country: Métis Women of This Land at the Affinity Gallery

Visual artist Leah Marie Dorion grew up in Prince Albert, proud of her Métis heritage, but she always wondered why Métis women were never represented in textbooks.

Now, Dorion’s doing something about it with her new exhibit of acrylic paintings and crafts.

“I have created paintings and dedicated them to specific Métis women of history,” Dorion told Saskatchewan Weekend host Eric Anderson. “These women I felt never really had a visual presence in the history books. There is a lot of oral history of these women and their contributions.”

It’s called Country Wives and Daughters of the Country: Métis Women of This Land…

Read the entire article here.

Eslanda: The Large and Unconventional Life of Mrs. Paul Robeson

Yale University Press
2013-01-08
424 pages
64 b/w illus.
6 1/8 x 9 1/4
Cloth ISBN: 9780300124347

Barbara Ransby, Professor, Gender and Women’s Studies, African American Studies & History
University of Illinois, Chicago

• Won Honorable Mention for the 2013 Southern California Book Festival, in the Biography/Autobiography category, sponored by JM Northern Media LLC.
• Won an Honorable Mention for the 2013 New England Book Festival given by the JM Northern Media Family of Festivals, in the Biography/Autobiography Category.
• Selected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2013 in the North America Category.
• Won a Honorable Mention for the 2014 Los Angeles Book Festival in the Biography/Autobiography Category.

Eslanda “Essie” Cardozo Goode Robeson lived a colorful and amazing life. Her career and commitments took her many places: colonial Africa in 1936, the front lines of the Spanish Civil War, the founding meeting of the United Nations, Nazi-occupied Berlin, Stalin’s Russia, and China two months after Mao’s revolution. She was a woman of unusual accomplishment—an anthropologist, a prolific journalist, a tireless advocate of women’s rights, an outspoken anti-colonial and antiracist activist, and an internationally sought-after speaker. Yet historians for the most part have confined Essie to the role of Mrs. Paul Robeson, a wife hidden in the large shadow cast by her famous husband. In this masterful book, biographer Barbara Ransby refocuses attention on Essie, one of the most important and fascinating black women of the twentieth century.

Chronicling Essie’s eventful life, the book explores her influence on her husband’s early career and how she later achieved her own unique political voice. Essie’s friendships with a host of literary icons and world leaders, her renown as a fierce defender of justice, her defiant testimony before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s infamous anti-communist committee, and her unconventional open marriage that endured for over 40 years—all are brought to light in the pages of this inspiring biography. Essie’s indomitable personality shines through, as do her contributions to United States and twentieth-century world history.

W. E. B. Du Bois and The Souls of Black Folk

University of North Carolina Press
August 2015
288 pages
6.125 x 9.25, notes, index
Paper ISBN: 978-1-4696-2643-7

Stephanie J. Shaw, Professor of History
Ohio State University

In this book, Stephanie J. Shaw brings a new understanding to one of the great documents of American and black history. While most scholarly discussions of The Souls of Black Folk focus on the veils, the color line, double consciousness, or Booker T. Washington, Shaw reads Du Bois’ book as a profoundly nuanced interpretation of the souls of black Americans at the turn of the twentieth century.

Demonstrating the importance of the work as a sociohistorical study of black life in America through the turn of the twentieth century and offering new ways of thinking about many of the topics introduced in Souls, Shaw charts Du Bois’ successful appropriation of Hegelian idealism in order to add America, the nineteenth century, and black people to the historical narrative in Hegel’s philosophy of history. Shaw adopts Du Bois’ point of view to delve into the social, cultural, political, and intellectual milieus that helped to create The Souls of Black Folk.

Slavery’s Hidden History: An interview with historian Eric Foner

American Libraries
2015-10-27

George M. Eberhart, Editor

Eric Foner—Pulitzer Prize–winning historian, author of Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (W. W. Norton, 2015), Columbia University professor, and author of more than 20 history texts—spoke to American Libraries about his latest book and his plans for the future. Foner’s specialty is the American Civil War and Reconstruction, and he has been teaching a popular course on that topic to Columbia undergraduates for more than 30 years. His book Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (Harper and Row, 1988) is recognized as a definitive work on federal attempts to rebuild the South and establish equal constitutional rights for African-Americans. Foner is giving a talk about the Underground Railroad at the Chicago Humanities Festival on October 31.

Your most recent book is a fascinating look at the Underground Railroad and antislavery networks of pre–Civil War New York City. Explain how you came across the document that shed new light on these events.

ERIC FONER: It was totally accidental. Madeline Lewis, an undergraduate history major at Columbia who also worked for my family as a dog walker, was writing a senior thesis a few years ago about Sydney Howard Gay, an abolitionist editor here in New York City. Gay’s papers, about 80 boxes of them, are in the Columbia Rare Book and Manuscript Library. One day she said to me, “You know, Professor Foner, in one box there is a document having to do with fugitive slaves. I’m not quite sure what it is. It’s not relevant for my work, but you might find it interesting.” So I filed that in the back of my mind, and one day I was in the library and decided to look at that document. It was actually two little notebooks, dating from 1855 and 1856 when Gay was editing the National Anti-Slavery Standard and actively assisting escaped slaves. He kept a record of more than 200 men, women, and children who passed through New York City, and he called it the “Record of Fugitives.”…

Read the entire interview here.

The Souls of Black Folk

Yale University Press
2015-06-30 (Originally published in 1903)
240 pages
18 b/w illus.
5 1/2 x 8 1/4
Paper ISBN: 9780300195828

W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963)

Introduction and Chronology by:

Jonathan Scott Holloway, Edmund S. Morgan Professor of African American Studies, History, and American Studies; Dean of Yale College
Yale University

This collection of essays by scholar-activist W. E. B. Du Bois is a masterpiece in the African American canon. Du Bois, arguably the most influential African American leader of the early twentieth century, offers insightful commentary on black history, racism, and the struggles of black Americans following emancipation. In his groundbreaking work, the author presciently writes that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line,” and offers powerful arguments for the absolute necessity of moral, social, political, and economic equality. These essays on the black experience in America range from sociological studies of the African American community to illuminating discourses on religion and “Negro music,” and remain essential reading in our so-called “post-racial age.” A new introduction by Jonathan Scott Holloway explores Du Bois’s signature accomplishments while helping readers to better understand his writings in the context of his time as well as ours.

Cachita’s Streets: The Virgin of Charity, Race, and Revolution in Cuba

Duke University Press
2015
376 pages
27 illustrations
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-5918-0
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-5937-1

Jalane D. Schmidt, Associate Professor of Religious Studies
University of Virginia

Cuba’s patron saint, the Virgin of Charity of El Cobre, also called Cachita, is a potent symbol of Cuban national identity. Jalane D. Schmidt shows how groups as diverse as Indians and African slaves, Spanish colonial officials, Cuban independence soldiers, Catholic authorities and laypeople, intellectuals, journalists and artists, practitioners of spiritism and Santería, activists, politicians, and revolutionaries each have constructed and disputed the meanings of the Virgin. Schmidt examines the occasions from 1936 to 2012 when the Virgin’s beloved, original brown-skinned effigy was removed from her national shrine in the majority black- and mixed-race mountaintop village of El Cobre and brought into Cuba’s cities. There, devotees venerated and followed Cachita’s image through urban streets, amassing at large-scale public ceremonies in her honor that promoted competing claims about Cuban religion, race, and political ideology. Schmidt compares these religious rituals to other contemporaneous Cuban street events, including carnival, protests, and revolutionary rallies, where organizers stage performances of contested definitions of Cubanness. Schmidt provides a comprehensive treatment of Cuban religions, history, and culture, interpreted through the prism of Cachita.

Interesting description of a group of people called Cajans around Mobile Alabama written before 1940

Alabama Pioneers
2015-11-06

Donna R. Causey

THE CAJANS OF SOUTH ALABAMA

Occupying the pine and oak woods of Mobile County in southern Alabama are a group of people of mixed racial blood known in that section as Indian Cajans.

Living in a little world of their own, set apart from the rest of the world by the color line and ideas of social inequality, this group of people lives near Mobile County, known for its thriving seaport, and is the home of a big percent of this Cajan population. These people have been so overlooked that no one really knows where they came from, nor how long they have been here.

It is evident that the Alabama Cajans are a mixture of a number of races and nationalities: English, American Indian, German, French, Italian, Mexican, Negro, and Russian. The name “Cajan” is probably a misnomer as the group is connected only remotely with the Acadians of historical fame; however, it has been brought over probably from Louisiana and Mississippi and is now in general use in south Alabama.

In the absence of a more accurate term “Cajan” is used in this account to designate the people of mixed blood in Mobile County who are classed as neither white, red, nor black, but constitute a unique race.

Numerous stories regarding the origin of the group are told; however, none is known to be authentic. A typical tale is told by some of the old settlers in the southern part of the County. During the War of 1812 numbers of English pirates were forced to flee for their lives, and they came to Mobile. From the town they moved out into this section to escape punishment. Here they married and intermarried with Spanish, French, Germans, American Indians, and Mexicans, and started the new mixed race of Cajans…

Read the entire article here.