Mixed Race Studies

Escape into Whiteness

The New York Review of Books
2011-11-24

Brent Staples

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

Tickets to the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial were a hot item in the spring of 1922. Tens of thousands of people converged on the Mall for a day of celebration that included parades, music, and speeches by President Warren Harding and Supreme Court Chief Justice William Howard Taft, under whose presidency the memorial had been initiated.

One of the better-known black Washingtonians on hand that sunny Memorial Day was Whitefield McKinlay, former collector of customs at Georgetown and real estate manager to many of the city’s light-skinned mulatto elite. Nearing his seventieth birthday, McKinlay had lived through the best and the worst of what the post–Civil War world had to offer people of color. He had enrolled in the University of South Carolina during the heady days of Reconstruction and then been expelled when the Democrats rose to power there and created a particularly virulent form of the Jim Crow state. He had seen black politicians swept into office by newly enfranchised black voters and swept out again when the franchise was revoked.

Through this same process, Washington, D.C., had been transformed from what one of McKinlay’s more prominent real estate clients had termed “The Colored Man’s Paradise”—a place of considerable freedom and opportunity—into what the historian David Levering Lewis aptly describes as a “purgatory,” where Negroes were barred from hotels and restaurants, driven from federal jobs, and generally persecuted by Southerners in Congress who seemed intent on erasing the colored presence from the city. Though he does not deal at length with McKinlay, Daniel Sharfstein, an associate professor of law at Vanderbilt, brings this part of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Negro society vividly to life in his authoritative and elegantly written The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White…

Read or purchase the book review here.

The Lost German Slave Girl: The Extraordinary True Story of Sally Miller and Her Fight for Freedom in Old New Orleans

Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
November 2005
288 pages
Paperback ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-4229-0

John Bailey

It is a bright, spring morning in New Orleans, 1843. In the Spanish Quarter, on a street lined with flophouses and gambling dens, Madame Carl Rouff recognizes a face from her past. It is the face of Salomé Müller, her best friend’s daughter who disappeared twenty-five years earlier. But the young olive-skinned woman claims her name is Mary Miller—she is the property of a Frenchman who owns a nearby cabaret. She is a slave, with no memory of a “white” past, or of the Müller family’s perilous journey from its German village to New Orleans. And yet her resemblance to her mother is striking, and she bears two telltale birthmarks. Had a defenseless European orphan been callously and illegally enslaved, or was she an imposter? So began one of the most celebrated and sensational trials of nineteenth-century America.

In brilliant novelistic detail, award-winning historian John Bailey reconstructs the exotic sights, sounds, and smells of mid-nineteenth-century New Orleans, an “infernal motley crew” of cotton kings, decadent river workers, immigrants, and slaves. Miller’s dramatic trial offers an eye into the fascinating laws and customs surrounding slavery, immigration, and racial mixing. Did Miller, as her relatives sought to prove, arrive from Germany under perilous circumstances as an indentured servant or was she, as her master claimed, part African and a slave for life? The trial pits a humble community of German immigrants against Mary’s previous owner, John Fitz Miller, a hardened capitalist who is as respected by the community for his wealth and power as he is feared and distrusted, and his attorney, John Randolph Grymes, one of the brashest and most flamboyant lawyers of his time. Was Sally Miller’s licentious lifestyle proof that she was part African, as the defense argued? Or was she the victim of a terrible injustice? Bailey follows the case’s incredible twists and turns all the way to the Supreme Court, and comes to a shocking conclusion.

A tour de force of investigative history that reads like a suspense novel, The Lost German Slave Girl is a fascinating exploration of slavery and its laws, a brilliant reconstruction of mid-nineteenth-century New Orleans, and a riveting courtroom drama. It is also an unforgettable portrait of a young woman in pursuit of freedom.

Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation

Harvard University Press
February 2012
288 pages
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
17 halftones, 1 line illustration, 1 map
Hardcover ISBN 9780674047747

Rebecca J. Scott, Charles Gibson Distinguished University Professor of History and Professor of Law
University of Michigan

Jean M. Hébrard, Historian and Visiting Professor
École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris)
University of Michigan

Around 1785, a woman was taken from her home in Senegambia and sent to Saint-Domingue in the Caribbean. Those who enslaved her there named her Rosalie. Her later efforts to escape slavery were the beginning of a family’s quest, across five generations and three continents, for lives of dignity and equality. Freedom Papers sets the saga of Rosalie and her descendants against the background of three great antiracist struggles of the nineteenth century: the Haitian Revolution, the French Revolution of 1848, and the Civil War and Reconstruction in the United States.

Freed during the Haitian Revolution, Rosalie and her daughter Elisabeth fled to Cuba in 1803. A few years later, Elisabeth departed for New Orleans, where she married a carpenter, Jacques Tinchant. In the 1830s, with tension rising against free persons of color, they left for France. Subsequent generations of Tinchants fought in the Union Army, argued for equal rights at Louisiana’s state constitutional convention, and created a transatlantic tobacco network that turned their Creole past into a commercial asset. Yet the fragility of freedom and security became clear when, a century later, Rosalie’s great-great-granddaughter Marie-José was arrested by Nazi forces occupying Belgium.

Freedom Papers follows the Tinchants as each generation tries to use the power and legitimacy of documents to help secure freedom and respect. The strategies they used to overcome the constraints of slavery, war, and colonialism suggest the contours of the lives of people of color across the Atlantic world during this turbulent epoch.

School for Tricksters: A Novel in Stories

Texas A&M University Press Consortium (Southern Methodist University Press)
2011-01-11
248 pages
6×9
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-87074-563-8

Chris Gavaler, Visiting Assistant Professor of English
Washington & Lee University, Lexington, Virginia

This is a novel in stories depicting radical incidents of racial crossing in the early twentieth century. The alternating chapters are closely based on two real-life students, Ivy Miller, a semi-orphaned white girl seeking a free education, and Sylvester Long, a black youth escaping the Jim Crow South. Both passed illegally as Indians while attending the U.S. government’s most prestigious Indian boarding school.

Crimes of Performance

Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society
Volume 13, Issue 1 (2011)
Special Issue: Black Critiques of Capital: Radicalism, Resistance, and Visions of Social Justice
pages 29-45
DOI: 10.1080/10999949.2011.551476

Uri McMillan, Assistant Professor of English
University of California, Los Angeles

In this article, I focus on the intersections between discourses of crime and illegality with modes of performance in the multiple impersonations staged by William and Ellen Craft, two married fugitive slaves who escaped from chattel slavery in the United States in 1848 through a complex set of layered performances. I begin illustrating the linkages between crime and performance by tracing the workings of a dynamic I term “fugitive transvestism” in an aesthetic representation of Ellen Craft, specifically an engraving she posed for in 1851 that was later published in The London Illustrated News. In doing so, I not only reveal the engraving as a site where we can witness Craft’s embodied performances, rather than a seemingly static document, but also focus on the crimes of “being” acted by Craft that surface in the engraving itself. In addition, I further reveal the performative and criminal acts committed by Ellen Craft, by later moving to a discussion of prosthetics, focusing attention on the mechanisms of Craft’s escape costume. Prosthetic performances, as I discuss them, were dramatic and tactical strategies employed by the Crafts that continue to reveal the suturing of crime and performance in Ellen Craft’s counterfeit embodiment of her alter-ego, while taking it further into yet another set of unlawful impersonations. Thus, this essay will evince how the Craft’s multiple crimes of performance enabled their mobility across 19th-century spatial sites and representational spheres.

Read or purchase the article here.

Professor Daniel J. Sharfstein to be Featured Guest on Mixed Chicks Chat

Mixed Chicks Chat (The only live weekly show about being racially and culturally mixed. Also, founders of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival) Hosted by Fanshen Cox, Heidi W. Durrow and Jennifer Frappier
Website: TalkShoe™ (Keywords: Mixed Chicks)
Episode: #230 – Professor Daniel Sharfstein
When: Wednesday, 2011-10-26, 21:00Z (17:00 EDT, 14:00 PDT)

Daniel J. Sharfstein, Professor of Law
Vanderbilt University

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

Selected Bibliography:

• The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White. New York: Penguin Press, 2011. 415 pp. Hardcover ISBN: 9781594202827.
•  “Crossing the Color Line: Racial Migration and the One-Drop Rule, 1600–1860,” Minnesota Law Review, Volume 91, Number 3 (February 2007): 592-656.
• “The Secret History of Race in the United States,” The Yale Law Journal, Volume 112, Issue 6 (March 2003): 1473-1509.
• “Passing Fancy,” Legal Affairs – The Magazine at the Intersection of Law and Life (September/October 2003).

Listen to the interview here. Download the episode here.

First woman among 17 elected to baseball Hall

Associated Press
2006-02-27

TAMPA, Fla.—Effa Manley became the first woman elected to the baseball Hall of Fame when the former Newark Eagles executive was among 17 people from the Negro Leagues and pre-Negro Leagues chosen Monday by a special committee.

“This is a historic day at the Hall of Fame,” shrine president Dale Petroskey said. “I hoped that someday there would be a woman in the Hall. It’s a pretty proud moment.”…

…Manley co-owned the New Jersey-based Eagles with her husband, Abe, and ran the business end of the team for more than a decade. The Eagles won the Negro Leagues World Series in 1946—one year before Jackie Robinson broke the major-league color barrier.

“She was very knowledgeable, a very handsome woman,” said Hall of Famer Monte Irvin, who played for the Eagles while the Manleys owned the team, as did Don Newcombe and Larry Doby.

“She did a lot for the Newark community. She was just a well-rounded, influential person,” Irvin said. “She tried to organize the owners to build their own parks and have a balanced schedule and to really improve the lot of the Negro League players.”

Manley was white but married a black man and passed as a black woman, said Larry Lester, a baseball author and member of the voting committee.

“She campaigned to get as much money as possible for these ballplayers, and rightfully so,” Lester said.

Manley used baseball to advance civil rights causes with events such as an Anti-Lynching Day at the ballpark. She died in 1981 at age 84.

“She was a pioneer in so many ways, in terms of integrating the team with the community,” said Leslie Heaphy, a Kent State professor on the committee. “She’s also one of the owners who pushed very hard to get recognition for Major League Baseball when they started to sign some of their players.”…

Read the entire article here.

Author Talk and Book Signing: Bob Luke

National Portrait Gallery
Bookstore
Eighth and F Streets NW
Washington, D.C.
2011-10-19, 18:00-19:00 EDT (Local Time)

Bob Luke discusses and signs copies of The Most Famous Woman in Baseball: Effa Manley and the Negro Leagues. Manley’s life played out against the backdrop of the Jim Crow years, when discrimination forced most of Newark’s blacks to live in the Third Ward, where prostitution flourished, housing was among the nation’s worst, and only menial jobs were available. Manley and the Eagles gave African Americans a haven, Ruppert Stadium. She was a force of nature—and, as Bob Luke shows, one to be reckoned with. From 1936 to 1948, she ran the Negro league Newark Eagles, which her husband, Abe, owned for roughly a decade. Because of her business acumen, commitment to her players, and larger-than-life personality, she would leave an indelible mark not only on baseball but also on American history.

For more information, click here.

The Most Famous Woman in Baseball: Effa Manley and the Negro Leagues

Potomac Books, Inc.
March 2011
256 pages
6″ x 9″; 26 B&W Images; Notes; Suggested Reading; Appendix; Index
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-59797-546-9

Bob Luke

Never one to mince words, Effa Manley once wrote a letter to sportswriter Art Carter, saying that she hoped they could meet soon because “I would like to tell you a lot of things you should know about baseball.”

From 1936 to 1948, Manley ran the Negro league Newark Eagles that her husband, Abe, owned for roughly a decade. Because of her business acumen, commitment to her players, and larger-than-life personality, she would leave an indelible mark not only on baseball but also on American history.

Attending her first owners’ meeting in 1937, Manley delivered an unflattering assessment of the league, prompting Pittsburgh Crawfords owner Gus Greenlee to tell Abe, “Keep your wife at home.” Abe, however, was not convinced, nor was Manley deterred. Like Greenlee, some players thought her too aggressive and inflexible. Others adored her. Regardless of their opinions, she dedicated herself to empowering them on and off the field. She meted out discipline, advice, and support in the form of raises, loans, job recommendations, and Christmas packages, and she even knocked heads with Branch Rickey, Bill Veeck, and Jackie Robinson.

Not only a story of Manley’s influence on the baseball world, The Most Famous Woman in Baseball vividly documents her social activism. Her life played out against the backdrop of the Jim Crow years, when discrimination forced most of Newark’s blacks to live in the Third Ward, where prostitution flourished, housing was among the nation’s worst, and only menial jobs were available. Manley and the Eagles gave African Americans a haven, Ruppert Stadium. She also proposed reforms at the Negro leagues’ team owners’ meetings, marched on picket lines, sponsored charity balls and benefit games, and collected money for the NAACP.

With vision, beauty, intelligence, discipline, and an acerbic wit, Manley was a force of nature—and, as Bob Luke shows, one to be reckoned with.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• 1. The Lady Makes a Splash
• 2. The Manleys Come to Baseball
• 3. Abe Trades Brooklyn for Newark
• 4. Effa Steps Up
• 5. Effa Comes Into Her Own
• 6. Fireworks
• 7. Cobbling Together a Lineup
• 8. War Comes to Newark
• 9. The Eagles Adapt to the War
• 10. Branch Rickey Drops the Color Bar
• 11. A Reunited Team
• 12. Striving for Respectability
• 13. Effa’s Life After the Eagles
• Epilogue
• Appendix
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• Suggested Readings
• About the Author

An Analysis of the Fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt

Drake University
February 1988
121 pages

Harold James Bruxvoort

A Dissertation Presented to The College of Arts and Sciences Drake University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Arts

Summary of Author: Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932) is a black short story author and novelist whose two volumes of short stories and three novels of purpose depict racial tensions present in the South during the post-Reconstruction era. He addressed a culture dominated by the myth of white superiority and black inferiority. Chesnutt’s purpose in his fiction is to present a perspective of racial tensions and social issues confronting Southern whites and blacks that differed from the perspective presented by writers of the plantation tradition fiction.

Rationale: Since black authors from 1853 to the 1890s basically reflected the themes of plantation tradition fiction and thus ignored social and political issues facing blacks in the 1890s, this analysis of Chesnutt’s fiction is made to determine whether he did present a differing perspective of slavery and of white-black issues in the South.

Procedure: This study is based on the reading and analysis of primary sources—The Conjure Woman, The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, The House Behind the Cedars, The Marrow of Tradition, and The Colonel’s Dream—as well as his letters collected by Helen, his daughter. Material from the Charles Chesnutt Collection was also incorporated into this study. Secondary sources include articles by Chesnutt’s contemporaries as well as articles and books by later scholars.

Findings: Charles Chesnutt is the first black American author to ask his publishers for the freedom to treat social and racial issues from a black’s perspective: issues such as racial intermarriage, the franchise, and convict labor practices. He also explored the ramifications of “passing” into white society and other problems confronting people of mixed-race in the South and in the North. He pleaded for a quickening of conscience and for moral renewal in the hearts of Southern whites.

Conclusions: Chesnutt projects a sense of optimism for racial acceptance in The House Behind the Cedars and to a lesser degree in The Marrow of Tradition. However, his third novel, The Colonel’s Dream reflects his frustration concerning the absence of meaningful change in the South in 1905. Negative responses by white supremacy groups and apathy on the part of Northern whites are two factors which led to his decline as an early twentieth-century novelist.

Table of Contents

• I. Chapter 1 Introduction
• II. Chapter 2 An Analysis of Plantation Tradition Fiction
• III. Chapter 3 An Analysis of the Fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt: His Hope for the South
• IV. Chapter 4 An Analysis of the Fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt: His Growing Pessimism
• V. Chapter 5 Conclusions

Read the entire dissertation here.