Mixed Race Studies

African Slavery: The New Hollywood Renaissance

Our Weekly: Los Angeles
2013-11-14

William Covington, Contributor

With the recent release of “12 Years A Slave” and “Django Unchained” and numerous slave genre movies awaiting release, it appears the slavery motif is possibly generating a new African American Renaissance in Hollywood.

According to Pasadena screenwriter Herman James, “Hollywood doesn’t care about educating the nation on the institution that built this country. They are taking the pulse and following the money.

Movies about slavery have become a niche genre that has a strong possibility of making money, and James says this has nothing to do with a Black president in the White House or the fact that the Civil War took place 150 years ago. Instead, he thinks the proliferation may be attributed to the fact that recently Hollywood discovered that movies about slavery and plantations are profitable. “They are the new race movies. However, if they flop they will vanish as easy as they have become big-screen entertainment.”…

The race movies that James refers to are early movies produced between 1915 and 1950 for Black audiences…

…In “The North Star,” the character Big Ben escapes a southern plantation and makes his way north to freedom by following the North Star. He ends up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where he is helped by local Quakers who are part of the Underground Railroad, a system of hiding places and trails for those escaping the horrors of slavery. This movie is currently in post production.

“Belle” is inspired by the true story of Dido Elizabeth Belle (Gugu Mabatha-Raw), the illegitimate mixed-race daughter of a Royal Navy Admiral. Raised by her aristocratic great-uncle Lord Mansfield (Tom Wilkinson) and his wife (Emily Watson), Belle’s lineage affords her certain privileges, yet the color of her skin prevents her from fully participating in the traditions of her social standing. Expected to be released in 2014.

In “The Keeping Room,” three Southern women—two sisters and one African American slave—left without men in the dying days of the Civil War, are forced to defend their home from the onslaught of a band of soldiers who have broken off from the fast-approaching Union Army. It is scheduled for release in 2014…

Read the entire article here.

Why Do You Call Yourself Black And African?

New African
2009-04-30

Carina Ray, Associate Professor of African and Afro- American Studies
Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts

A little over a year ago I received an email with the subject line “Ok I wonder why you call yourself ‘black’ and ‘African’” from a self-described longtime New African reader.  Even if subsequent emails have been less direct in their articulation of the same underlying sentiment, they all point in a similar direction: some people are confused about my racial background and about the way I racially identify myself.  Their need to seek clarification suggests that being able to label me is important to the way in which they understand the content of my columns.

I was perplexed at first by this seemingly sudden preoccupation with my race.  After all I’d been writing for New African for several years and never had anyone raise the subject before. It then occurred to me that these racial enquiries started happening almost immediately after my picture began running with my column.  Obviously there was a disconnect in the minds of some readers between my appearance and my writing, especially when I refer to myself as both Black and African, and use the collective “we” to talk about the past, present, and future of Black people worldwide.

Indeed, the fact that I claim my place in the global African world annoyed one reader so much that he asked, “Why do you keep on writing ‘we’?” Just in case he hadn’t already made his point clear he added, “You are not black in my eyes. You look much more Italian or Spanish. I can assure you, if you go to Africa you will be called ‘white’.” I always find it amusing that people seem to forget the proximity of southern Spain and Italy to Africa.  There is a reason after all that Spaniards and Italians from the south look a lot like North Africans—centuries of exchange between the two regions certainly wasn’t limited to material goods.

Ironically, however, the reader was partially right.  I am ¼ Italian, but I don’t look anything like my blond hair and blue eyed Italian paternal grandmother who came from Turin in the far north of the country.  Nor do I look anything like my paternal Irish grandfather.  The reader wasn’t off the mark either when he guessed I might be Spanish.  My mom is part Spanish. She is also Taíno Indian and African, most likely of Yoruba ancestry, as were many of the enslaved Africans who worked the sugar plantations on the island of Puerto Rico where my mom was born.  So there you have it: Taíno, Spanish, Northern Italian, Irish, and yes, African too.  Why, you might ask, if I am so thoroughly mixed race do I identify as Black and African?

Let me begin by providing the context necessary to understand the particularly unique way in which Black is defined in the United States, where I was born and raised. Black, as a legal-cum-racial category, was historically constructed in the broadest possible way in order to expand the number of people who could be enslaved and to limit the legal right of racially mixed people to claim their freedom.  Known as the “one-drop rule“, the idea that a person with even the slightest trace of African ancestry is Black has long outlived slavery in America.  What was once a legal construction became a socially constructed category that has and continues to encompass a broad range of very phenotypically diverse Black people.  While the racial landscape of the U.S. is home to Black people of all hues, hair textures, body shapes and sizes, and facial features, we do not all experience our blackness in the same way—far from it. Phenotype, class, gender, and geography all play major roles in shaping our individual experiences as Black people in America. Hierarchies based on skin tone, alone, have been at the root of painful divisions within the black community, and are often the basis for preferential treatment within the dominant white society. It has not been lost on African-Americans that if Barack Obama was the complexion of his father he would likely not be our president today…

Read the entire article here.

Goree: of Slavery, Signares and Foreigners with Cash

dofo kow/ߘߝߏ ߞߏ ߎ/history matters
2013-01-16

Jody Benjamin

Two of the hottest Hollywood films out right now deal with American slavery, “Lincoln” and “Django Unchained.” The history of slavery in the United State is once again in mainstream cultural vogue, this time with A-list directors Stephen Spielberg and Quentin Tarantino putting this difficult subject before popular audiences in new ways.

So it was an interesting time to visit Goree Island, off the coast of Dakar, Senegal. The small volcanic formation off the western tip of Senegal (Dakar’s skyline is clearly visible from the island) was unoccupied when Portuguese traders first came there in the 15th century, using it as a base from which to trade in gold with Africans, but then becoming the first among many Europeans after them to focus on trading slaves.

The settled part of Goree Island is so small you can walk leisurely around it in two hours or so. The biggest chunk of the tourist crowd that travels over daily by ferry from Dakar do just that before returning the same day. Every day. Like clock work. Beginning with the first ferry crosses over about 10:30, ferries arrive every two hours dumping groups of FWC (“Foreigners With Cash”) onto the island famously associated with the Atlantic slave trade—although historians say the island played only a small role, contrary to popular belief…

…There is still much about this house in particular, and the island in general, that I am still learning. But the “Maison des Esclaves” appears to have been owned by Anne Pepin, a Senegalese signare, one of a wealthy class of mulatto women who were critical to business transactions between Africans and Europeans throughout this part of the African coast. (In other words, according to some American black nationalist interpretations, and the old fashioned American racial logic of the “one-drop” rule, I was basically standing in the foyer of a black woman’s house!) It is still unclear who built the house (help me out if you know) whether it was Anne and her husband, or her brother Nicholas. Anne was reportedly the lover to the island’s French governor in the late 18th century, Chevalier de Boufflers, to the apparent humiliation of his wife, Ann Sabran. It was Anne Pepin’s niece, Anna Cola, who is depicted (in the lower left, wearing the white shawl) in an image of the home in 1839 about a generation after Anne Pepin lived.

Usually, the offspring of European men and African women, signares typically became the “local wives” of European traders who were valued for their family connections to local Africans as well as their facility with European language, culture and entree into the transient European society. Signares were frequently slave traders, slave owners and active in any number of other lucrative trades such as the trades in gum Arabic, in cloth and other commodities. Because of their wealth and location within a web of gendered, racialized social and economic relations, signares (from the Portuguese ‘senhora’ or ‘lady’) were often the figurative and literal “belles of the Ball,” on Goree. In coastal settlements from the Senegal river to Freetown, Sierra Leone, they were key figures in trade between Africans and Europeans. Tastemakers, they are often represented in drawings and paintings from the period draped in varied and expensive fabrics and jewelry…

Read the entire article here.

How Diversity Will Alter Black History

The Root
2013-11-06

Lynette Holloway

A changing population will help shed more light on America’s multiracial past.

(The Root)—This is part 3 of a three-part series. To see the previous stories, here and here.

Time was, the social construct of the one-drop rule made United States history either black or white. The rule emerged from the South as a way to facilitate slavery and implement Jim Crow segregation. But while the courts and the civil rights movement have dismantled legal segregation, vestiges of the one-drop rule still linger.

But now, 7 million Americans self-identify as multiracial, quickly changing the meaning of who is black, white, Asian, Hispanic or other. For some, it raises questions about how history is perceived by future generations, black history specifically. Will there still be a need for Black History Month?

“We’ve been biracial or a multiracial country since the 17th century,” Bernard W. Kinsey told The Root. He and his wife, Shirley, are touring their Kinsey Collection, a national museum exhibit of African-American art and history dating back to the 1600s.

“America is the only country in the world where having one drop of black blood still makes you black,” Kinsey continued. “We operate on this notion of color as a basis of identity in America. I’ve been to 94 countries, and no other country operates quite like America does with this notion of color.”

Douglas A. Blackmon, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II, told The Root that a multiracial America will only bring to the surface what has been hidden for centuries.

“All American history has always been multiracial, at least certainly since the early 1600s,” Blackmon told The Root. “It’s not a question of whether there has been a multiracial history, but whether it’s been acknowledged or specifically understood…

Read the entire article here.

the road weeps, the well runs dry

Los Angeles Theater Center
514 South Spring Street
Los Angeles, California 90013
Telephone: 213.489.0994

2013-10-24 through 2013-11-17
Thursday-Saturday: 20:00 PT (Local Time)
Sunday: 15:00 PT (Local Time)

Written by Marcus Gardley
Directed by Shirley Jo Finney

Rolling World Premiere

Surviving centuries of slavery, revolts, and The Trail of Tears, a community of self-proclaimed Freedmen creates the first all-black U.S. town in Wewoka, Oklahoma. The Freedmen (Black Seminoles and people of mixed origins) are rocked when the new religion and the old way come head to head and their former enslavers arrive to return them to the chains of bondage.  Written in gorgeously cadenced language, utilizing elements of African American folklore and daring humor, the road weeps, the well runs dry merges the myth, legends and history of the Seminole people.

Previews: October 24 & 25

For more information, click here.

An Essentially American Narrative

The New York Times
2013-10-11

Nelson George

A Discussion of Steve McQueen’s Film ‘12 Years a Slave’

Amid comic book epics, bromantic comedies and sequels of sequels, films about America’s tortured racial history have recently emerged as a surprisingly lucrative Hollywood staple. In the last two years, “The Help,” “Lincoln,””Django Unchained,””42” and “Lee Daniels’ The Butler” have performed well at the box office, gathering awards in some cases and drawing varying degrees of critical acclaim.

The latest entry in this unlikely genre is “12 Years a Slave,” the director Steve McQueen’s adaptation of Solomon Northup’s 1853 memoir. A free black man living in Saratoga, N.Y., Northup (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor) was kidnapped in 1841 and sold into brutal servitude in the Deep South. During his ordeal, he labors at different plantations, including the one owned by the sadistic Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender), who has a tortured sexual relationship with the slave Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o).

Following a buzzed-about preview screening at the Telluride Film Festival and the audience award at the Toronto International Film Festival, “12 Years a Slave” arrives in theaters Friday amid much online chatter that it may be headed for Oscar nominations. But Mr. Ejiofor, who portrays Northup, and Mr. McQueen, known for the bracingly austere “Hunger” and “Shame,” both say that getting audiences to see an uncompromisingly violent and quietly meditative film about America’s “peculiar institution” is still a challenge even with the presence of a producer, Brad Pitt, in a small role.

While the material was developed by Americans (including the screenwriter John Ridley) the director and most of the major cast members are British, a topic of concern among some early black commentators.

On a sweltering afternoon in SoHo last month, the author and filmmaker Nelson George led a round-table discussion at the Crosby Street Hotel with Mr. Ejiofor and Mr. McQueen. Joining them to provide a wider historical and artistic context were the Columbia University professor Eric Foner, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery,” among other books; and the artist Kara Walker, whose room-size tableaus of the Old South employing silhouettes have redefined how history and slavery are depicted in contemporary art and influenced many, including the “12 Years a Slave” production team. Current civil rights issues including the New York police practice of stop and frisk, recently declared unconstitutional; sexuality and slavery; Hollywood’s version of American history; and the themes of Obama-era cinema were among the topics of the sharp but polite dialogue. These are excerpts from the conversation…

Q. I wanted to start with contemporary analogues. One thing that came to mind was stop and frisk, a way the New York City police could stop a black or Latino male. I thought of Solomon as a character who, for a lot of contemporary audiences, would be that young black person. [To Mr. McQueen and Mr. Ejiofor] When you were seeking a way into the slave story, was what happens now part of that?

Steve McQueen Absolutely. History has a funny thing of repeating itself. Also, it’s the whole idea of once you’ve left the cinema, the story continues. Over a century and a half to the present day. I mean, you see the evidence of slavery as you walk down the street.

What do you mean? 

McQueen The prison population, mental illness, poverty, education. We could go on forever…

…Servitude and Sexuality 

There’s a lot of things to say about sex in the film, but one of the things that is going to leap out is Alfre Woodard’s character [Mistress Shaw, described in the book as the black wife of a white plantation owner]. 

McQueen In the book, she doesn’t say anything. I had a conversation with John Ridley, and I said: “Look, we need a scene with this woman. I want her to have tea.” It was very simple. Give her a voice.

Walker It’s not that it was that uncommon. That planter would be sort of the crazy one, the eccentric one, and she’s getting by.

Ejiofor It was against the law to marry, but it did happen.

Foner There were four million slaves in the U.S. in 1860 and several hundred thousand slave owners. It wasn’t just a homogeneous system. It had every kind of human variation you can imagine. There were black plantation owners in Louisiana, black slave owners…

…Solomon has a wife beforehand. In the film it seems as if he lived with Eliza [a fellow slave]. Then obviously [he has] some kind of relationship with Patsey, a friendship. But I wondered about Solomon’s own sexual expression. 

Ejiofor  His sexuality felt slightly more of a tangent. I think the real story is where sex is in terms of power.

Foner Remember, this book is one of the most remarkable first-person accounts of slavery. But it’s also a piece of propaganda. It’s written to persuade people that slavery needs to be abolished. He doesn’t say anything about sexual relations he may have had as a slave. There’s no place for such a discussion because of the purpose of the book.

Walker But in “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” [by Harriet Ann Jacobs] and other slave narratives written by women, that’s always kind of the subtext, because there are children that are produced, relationships that are formed or allegiances that are formed with white men in order to have freedom.

Foner  Harriet Jacobs was condemned by many people for revealing this, even antislavery people.

Walker Yes, but it’s always the subtext. Even “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” It’s like, there’s little mulatto children, and that’s the evidence…

Read the entire interview here.

Black Seminoles and The Underground Railroad

AC Bilbrew Library
150 E. El Segundo Blvd.
Los Angeles, California 90061
310-538-3350
Saturday, 2013-11-23, 14:30 PST (Local Time)

Phil Wilkes Fixico

Celebrate Native American Heritage Month by exploring the history of free Blacks and fugitive slaves who escaped to Florida between the 1600s and 1800s, forging alliances with the Seminole Nation and establishing their own autonomous communities and unique culture.

Phil Wilkes “Pompey” Fixico is a Seminole Maroon descendant , member of the L.A. chapter of the Buffalo Soldiers and Dept. of Interior/National Park Service/ National Underground Railroad/ Network to Freedom Private-Sector Partner (Semiroon Historical Society). He is also the honorary spokesman for John Horse Band of the Texas Seminoles.

For more information, click here.

The Drock Story (Second Edition)

Our Family Tree – Ancestors of Donald W.L. Roddy and Related Family Lines
August 2005
29 pages

Donald W. L. Roddy (From Research by: Daryl Y. [Hooper] Holmes and Donald W. L. Roddy)

1730 – Norwich, Connecticut:

My great-great-great-great-great grandfather, Guy Drock, was probably born sometime between 1726 and 1742, most likely around 1730, give or take a few years. He may have been born in Norwich, or born elsewhere and brought to Norwich as a child. Guy officially became a Christian on 31 July, 1742, when he was baptized in the First Congregational Church in Norwich, New London County, in the Colony of Connecticut in New England. Nothing is said about his age in the baptismal Record, other than that he was a boy, so we don’t know if his was an infant baptism or a voluntary baptism sometime in his later childhood.

As a boy, and young man, Guy worked for Captain Benajah Bushnell, who was a wealthy, influential land speculator, and one of the original settlers of what became Norwich in New London County in the Colony of Connecticut in New England. He got the title “Captain”, not from any association with seafaring, but because of his involvement with the local militia which conducted drills at least once a year, whether they needed it or not. Sometime around 1755, Sarah Powers, a young woman from Newport, on the Colony of Rhode Island, also started working for Benajah Bushnell. We do not know whether Sarah Powers was a voluntary employee of Bushnell or an indentured servant legally obligated to work for him for a specified period of time. In fact, we know very little about Sarah …. we do not even know for sure that she was born in Rhode Island, only that she had lived there prior to appearing in Norwich.

While working for Bushnell, Sarah apparently fell in love with Guy, and probably married him sometime around 1757 or before. It is likely that she also had a child by Guy between 1757 and 1759, perhaps Simon. In June, 1759, Guy and Sarah probably stopped working for Benajah Bushnell, and set about trying to make a new life for themselves. The so called French and Indian War was raging at the time. Guy opened a small blacksmith shop in downtown Norwich. He may have learned his blacksmith’s skills while working for Bushnell, or perhaps he became self taught after he left Bushnell’s service. During the war, inflation ran rampant. After the war, of course, came an economic depression. Guy and Sarah must have been hard pressed indeed to keep body and soul together. Then, to make matters worse, the British parliament started passing the series of acts that eventually led to the Revolutionary War.

Read the entire paper here.

Descendants of Norwich slave, owner meet

Norwich Bulletin
Norwich, Connecticut
2012-03-29

Adam Benson

Norwich, Conn.—When descendants of Norwich slave Guy Drock and the man who owned him met  for the first time Thursday, they weren’t sure what would happen.

Grant Hayter-Menzies’ fifth-generation great-grandfather, Capt. Benejah Bushnell, owned Drock for a decade in the mid-1700s in Norwich.

Hayter-Menzies, of British Columbia; Daryl D’Angelo, of Amherst, N.H.; and her cousin, Donald Roddy, of Spokane, Wash. — all of them white — came to Karen Cook’s U.S. history class at Norwich Free Academy with a story they said had to be told.

“I don’t have any of the cultural and social legacies of someone who grew up identified as an African-American, and I still had a moment of, ‘What does this guy want from me,’” D’Angelo said of meeting Hayter-Menzies.

Hayter-Menzies was apprehensive, too…

… Roddy, a retired airline pilot, said he stumbled across his Drock lineage several years ago, while doing genealogical research on his family.

“I had no idea I had African ancestors until a few years ago,” Roddy said. “No one in my living family had a clue about that.”

Hayter-Menzies said he’s forged a unique bond with D’Angelo and Roddy, and quickly felt a kinship with them once they finally met.

“My first reaction was to reach out and hug you,” Hayter-Menzies told D’Angelo. “We feel like friends already.”…

Read the entire article here.

“Slavery, Freedom and Reunion in a Colonial Connecticut Town” with Grant Hayter-Menzies, Daryl D’Angelo and Donald Roddy

Research at the National Archives and Beyond
BlogTalk Radio
Thursday, 2013-10-03, 21:00 EDT, (Friday, 2013-10-04, 01:00Z)

Bernice Bennett, Host

In June 1759, Norwich, Connecticut businessman Benajah Bushnell sold Guy Drock, a slave of African ancestry, to Sarah Powers, the Caucasian woman Drock had possibly married. Ironically, this deed freed Drock from Bushnell’s control but not from slavery. In March 2012, descendants of Guy and Sarah Drock and of Benajah Bushnell came together in Norwich for the first time in over two centuries. Drock descendants Daryl D’Angelo and Donald Roddy—who when they began their research years earlier did not know they had African ancestry, and Bushnell descendant Grant Hayter-Menzies—who thought only his Southern ancestors were slave owners—met to try to understand a legacy they did not know they shared. In the town where their past began, they sought to explore the personal impact of their ancestors’ intertwined histories, how the past has shaped them, their research and their interactions with one another today, and the relatively unknown institution of slavery in early New England.

• Grant Hayter-Menzies is an internationally published biographer and journalist .
• Daryl D’Angelo is a wife and mother, photographer and writer, and lives in a small town [Amherst] in southern New Hampshire.
• Donald Roddy is a 78 year old retired Airline Pilot.

For more information, click here.