Mixed Race Studies

Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves

Farrar, Straus and Giroux an imprint of Macmillan
2012-10-16
352 pages
Hardback ISBN-10: 0374299560; ISBN-13: 978-0374299569

Henry Wiencek

Is there anything new to say about Thomas Jefferson and slavery? The answer is a resounding yes. Master of the Mountain, Henry Wiencek’s eloquent, persuasive book—based on new information coming from archaeological work at Monticello and on hitherto overlooked or disregarded evidence in Jefferson’s papers—opens up a huge, poorly understood dimension of Jefferson’s world. We must, Wiencek suggests, follow the money.

So far, historians have offered only easy irony or paradox to explain this extraordinary Founding Father who was an emancipationist in his youth and then recoiled from his own inspiring rhetoric and equivocated about slavery; who enjoyed his renown as a revolutionary leader yet kept some of his own children as slaves. But Wiencek’s Jefferson is a man of business and public affairs who makes a success of his debt-ridden plantation thanks to what he calls the “silent profits” gained from his slaves—and thanks to a skewed moral universe that he and thousands of others readily inhabited. We see Jefferson taking out a slave-equity line of credit with a Dutch bank to finance the building of Monticello and deftly creating smoke screens when visitors are dismayed by his apparent endorsement of a system they thought he’d vowed to overturn. It is not a pretty story. Slave boys are whipped to make them work in the nail factory at Monticello that pays Jefferson’s grocery bills. Parents are divided from children—in his ledgers they are recast as money—while he composes theories that obscure the dynamics of what some of his friends call “a vile commerce.”

Many people of Jefferson’s time saw a catastrophe coming and tried to stop it, but not Jefferson. The pursuit of happiness had been badly distorted, and an oligarchy was getting very rich. Is this the quintessential American story?

The thunderstorm that shook the mountain during the telling of Peter Fossett’s story passed. We tourists were deposited back into the present, with shafts of sunlight illuminating a peaceful scene–a broad pathway stretching into the distance, disappearing over the curve of the hillside. Jefferson named it Mulberry Row for the fast-growing shade trees he planted here in the 1790s. One thousand yards long, it was the main street of the African-American hamlet atop Monticello Mountain. The plantation was a small town in everything but name, not just because of its size, but in its complexity. Skilled artisans and house slaves occupied cabins on Mulberry Row alongside hired white workers; a few slaves lived in rooms in the mansion’s south dependency wing; some slept where they worked. Most of Monticello’s slaves lived in clusters of cabins scattered down the mountain and on outlying farms. In his lifetime Jefferson owned more than 600 slaves. At any one time about 100 slaves lived on the mountain; the highest slave population, in 1817, was 140…

…Jefferson made his emancipation proposal around the same time he took on an intriguing legal case, Howell v. Netherland, that illuminates the shifting, increasingly ambiguous racial borderland in colonial Virginia, where strict enforcement of racial laws could have the effect of making white people black.

In the winter of 1769, Samuel Howell, a mixed-race indentured servant who had escaped from his master, sought a lawyer in Williamsburg to represent him in suing for freedom. His grandmother was a free white woman, but his grandfather was black, so Howell had become entrapped in a law that prescribed indentured servitude to age thirty-one for certain mixed-race people “to prevent that abominable mixture of white men or women with negroes or mulattoes.” Howell, aged twenty-seven, was not indentured forever, since he would be freed in about four years, but nonetheless Jefferson felt angry enough over this denial of rights that he took Howell’s case pro bono.

Jefferson later became famous for his diatribes against racial mixing, but his arguments on behalf of Howell, made more than a decade before he wrote down his infamous racial theories, suggest that the younger Jefferson harbored doubts about the supposed “evil” of miscegenation. The word “seems” in the following sentence suggests that he did not quite accept the prevailing racial ideology: “The purpose of the act was to punish and deter women from that confusion of species, which the legislature seems to have considered as an evil.”

Having just one black grandparent, Howell probably appeared very nearly white. But with the full knowledge that Howell had African blood, Jefferson argued to the justices that he should be immediately freed. He made his case partly on a strict reading of the original law, which imposed servitude only on the first generation of mixed-race children and could not have been intended, Jefferson argued, “to oppress their innocent offspring.” He continued: “it remains for some future legislature, if any shall be found wicked enough, to extend [the punishment of servitude] to the grandchildren and other issue more remote.” Jefferson went further, declaring to the court: “Under the law of nature, all men are born free,” a concept he derived from his reading of John Locke and other Enlightenment thinkers, the concept that would later form the foundation of the Declaration of Independence. In the Howell case, Jefferson deployed it in defense of a man of African descent…

Read the entire excerpt here.

American Dilemma: The Negro problem and Modern Democracy

Harper and Brothers Publishing
1944
822 pages

Gunnar Myrdal (1898-1987)

With the Assistance of

Richard Sterner and Arnold Rose

This landmark effort to understand African-American people in the New World provides deep insight into the contradictions of American democracy as well as a study of a people within a people. The touchstone of this classic is the jarring discrepancy between the American creed of respect for the inalienable rights to freedom, justice, and opportunity for all and the pervasive violations of the dignity of blacks.

CONTENTS

• Foreword, by Frederick P. Keppel
• Author’s Preface
• Introduction
  1. The Negro Problem as a Moral Issue
  2. Valuations and Beliefs
  3. A White Man’s Problem
  4. Not an Isolated Problem
  5. Some Further Notes on the Scope and Direction of This Study
  6. A Warning to the Reader
• PART I. THE APPROACH
  • Chapter 1. American Ideals and the American Conscience
    1. Unity of Ideals and Diversity of Culture
    2. American Nationalism
    3. Some Historical Reflections
    4. The Roots of the American Creed in the Philosophy of Enlightenment
    5. The Roots in Christianity
    6. The Roots in English Law
    7. American Conservatism
    8. The American Conception of Law and Order
    9. Natural Law and American Puritanism
    10. The Faltering Judicial Order
    11. Intellectual Defeatism
    12. “Lip-Service”
    13. Value Premises in This Study
  • Chapter 2. Encountering the Negro Problem
    1. On the Minds of the Whites
    2. To the Negroes Themselves
    3. Explaining the Problem Away
    4. Explorations in Escape
    5. The Etiquette of Discussion
    6. The Convenience of Ignorance
    7. Negro and White Voices
    8. The North and the South
  • Chapter 3. Facets of the Negro Problem
    1. American Minority Problems
    2. The Anti-Amalgamation Doctrine
    3. The White Man’s Theory of Color Caste
    4. The “Rank Order of Discriminations”
    5. Relationships between Lower Class Groups
    6. The Manifoldness and the Unity of the Negro Problem
    7. The Theory of the Vicious Circle
    8. A Theory of Democracy
• PART II. RACE
  • Chapter 4. Racial Beliefs
    1. Biology and Moral Equalitarianism
    2. The Ideological Clash in America
    3. The Ideological Compromise
    4. Reflections in Science
    5. The Position of the Negro Writers
    6. The Racial Beliefs of the Unsophisticated
    7. Beliefs with a Purpose
    8. Specific Rationalization Needs
    9. Rectifying Beliefs
    10. The Study of Beliefs
  • Chapter 5. Race and Ancestry
    1. The American Definition of “Negro”
    2. African Ancestry
    3. Changes in Physical Appearance
    4. Early Miscegenation
    5. Ante-Bellum Miscegenation
    6. Miscegenation in Recent Times
    7. “Passing”
    8. Social and Biological Selection
    9. Present and Future Genetic Composition Trends
  • Chapter 6. Racial Characteristics
    1. Physical Traits
    2. Biological Susceptibility to Disease
    3. Psychic Traits
    4. Frontiers of Constructive Research
• PART III. POPULATION AND MIGRATION
  • Chapter 7. Population
    1. The Growth of the Negro Population
    2. Births and Deaths
    3. Summary
    4. Ends and Means of Population Policy
    5. Controlling the Death Rate
    6. The Case for Controlling the Negro Birth Rate
    7. Birth Control Facilities Tor Negroes
  • Chapter 8. Migration
    1. Overview
    2. A Closer View
    3. The Great Migration to the Urban North
    4. Continued Northward Migration
    5. The Future of Negro Migration
• PART IV. ECONOMICS
  • Chapter 9. Economic Inequality
    1. Negro Poverty
    2. Our Main Hypothesis: The Vicious Circle
    3. The Value Premises
    4. The Conflict of Valuations
  • Chapter 10. The Tradition of Slavery
    1. Economic Exploitation
    2. Slavery and Caste
    3. The Land Problem
    4. The Tenancy Problem
  • Chapter 11. The Southern Plantation Economy and the Negro Farmer
    1. Southern Agriculture as a Problem
    2. Overpopulation and Soil Erosion
    3. Tenancy, Credit and Cotton
    4. The Boll Weevil
    5. Main Agricultural Classes
    6. The Negro Landowner
    7. Historical Reasons for the Relative Lack of Negro Farm Owners
    8. Tenants and Wage Laborers
    9. The Plantation Tenant
  • Chapter 12. New Blows to Southern Agriculture During the Thirties: Trends and Policies
    1. Agricultural Trends during the ‘Thirties
    2. The Disappearing Sharecropper
    3. The Role of the A.A.A. in Regard to Cotton
    4. A.A.A. and the Negro
    5. The Local Administration of the A.A.A.
    6. Mechanization
    7. Labor Organizations
    8. The Dilemma of Agricultural Policy
    9. Economic Evaluation of the A.A.A.
    10. Social Evaluation of the A.A.A.
    11. Constructive Measures
    12. Farm Security Programs
  • Chapter 13. Seeking Jobs Outside Agriculture
    1. Perspective on the Urbanization of the Negro People
    2. In the South
    3. A Closer View
    4. Southern Trends during the Thirties
    5. In the North
    6. A Closer View on Northern Trends
    7. The Employment Hazards of Unskilled Work
    8. The Size of the Negro Labor Force and Negro Employment
    9. Negro and White Unemployment
  • Chapter 14. The Negro in Business, the Professions, Public Service and Other White Collar Occupations
    1. Overview
    2. The Negro in Business
    3. Negro Finance
    4. The Negro Teacher
    5. The Negro Minister
    6. The Negro in Medical Professions
    7. Other Negro Professionals
    8. Negro Officials and White Collar Workers in Public Service
    9. Negro Professionals on the Stage, Screen and Orchestra
    10. Note on Shady Occupations
  • Chapter 15. The Negro in the Public Economy
    1. The Public Budget
    2. Discrimination in Public Service
    3. Education
    4. Public Health
    5. Recreational Facilities
    6. Public Housing Policies
    7. Social Security and Public Assistance
    8. Specialized Social Welfare Programs during the Period After
    9. The Social Security Program
    10. Assistance to Special Groups
    11. Work Relief
    12. Assistance to Youth
    13. General Relief and Assistance in Kind
  • Chapter 16. Income, Consumption and Housing
    1. Family Income
    2. Income and Family Size
    3. The Family Budget
    4. Budget Items
    5. Food Consumption
    6. Housing Conditions
  • Chapter 17. The Mechanics of Economic Discrimination as a Practical Problem
    1. The Practical Problem
    2. The Ignorance and Lack of Concern of Northern Whites
    3. Migration Policy
    4. The Regular Industrial Labor Market in the North
    5. The Problem of Vocational Training
    6. The Self-Perpetuating Color Bar
    7. A Position or “Indifferent Equilibrium”
    8. In the South
  • Chapter 18. Pre-War Labor Market Controls and Their Consequences for the Negro
    1. The Wages and Hours Law and the Dilemma of the Marginal Worker
    2. Other Economic Policies
    3. Labor Unions and the Negro
    4. A Weak Movement Getting Strong Powers
  • Chapter 19. The War Boom—and Thereafter
    1. The Negro Wage Earner and the War Boom
    2. A Closer View
    3. Government Policy in Regard to the Negro in War Production
    4. The Negro in the Armed Forces
    5. …And Afterwards?
• PART V. POLITICS
  • Chapter 20. Underlying Factors
    1. The Negro in American Politics and as a Political Issue
    2. The Wave of Democracy and the Need for Bureaucracy
    3. The North and the South
    4. The Southern Defense Ideology
    5. The Reconstruction Amendments
    6. Memories of Reconstruction
    7. The Tradition of Illegality
  • Chapter 21. Southern Conservatism and Liberalism
    1. The “Solid South”
    2. Southern Conservatism
    3. Is the South Fascist?
    4. The Changing South
    5. Southern Liberalism
  • Chapter 22. Political Practices Today
    1. The Southern Political Scene
    2. Southern Techniques for Disfranchising the Negroes
    3. The Negro Vote m the South
    4. The Negro in Northern Politics
    5. What the Negro Gets Out of Politics
  • Chapter 23. Trends and Possibilities
    1. The Negro’s Political Bargaining Power
    2. The Negro’s Party Allegiance
    3. Negro Suffrage in the South as an Issue
    4. An Unstable Situation
    5. The Stake of the North
    6. Practical Conclusions
• PART VI. JUSTICE
  • Chapter 24. Inequality of Justice
    1. Democracy and Justice
    2. Relative Equality in the North
    3. The Southern Heritage
  • Chapter 25. The Police and Other Public Contacts
    1. Local Petty Officials
    2. The Southern Policeman
    3. The Policeman in the Negro Neighborhood
    4. Trends and Outlook
    5. Another Type of Public Contact
  • Chapter 26. Courts, Sentences and Prisons
    1. The Southern Courts
    2. Discrimination in Court
    3. Sentences and Prisons
    4. Trends and Outlook
  • Chapter 27. Violence and Intimidation
    1. The Pattern of Violence
    2. Lynching
    3. The Psychopathology of Lynching
    4. Trends and Outlook
    5. Riots
• PART VII. SOCIAL INEQUALITY
  • Chapter 28. The Basis of Social Inequality
    1. The Value Premise
    2. a. The One-Sidedness of the System of Segregation
    3. The Beginning in Slavery
    4. The Jim Crow Laws
    5. Beliefs Supporting Social Inequality
    6. The Popular Theory of “No Social Equality”
    7. Critical Evaluation of the “No Social Equality” Theory
    8. Attitudes among Different Classes of Whites in the South
    9. Social Segregation and Discrimination in the North
  • Chapter 29. Patterns of Social Segregation and Discrimination
    1. Facts and Beliefs Regarding Segregation and Discrimination
    2. Segregation and Discrimination in interpersonal Relations
    3. Housing Segregation
    4. Sanctions for Residential Segregation
    5. The General Character of Institutional Segregation
    6. Segregation in Specific Types of Institutions
  • Chapter 30. Effects of Social Inequality
    1. The Incidence of Social Inequality
    2. Increasing Isolation
    3. Interracial Contacts
    4. The Factor of Ignorance
    5. Present Dynamics
• PART VIII. SOCIAL STRATIFICATION
  • Chapter 31. Caste and Class
    1. The Concepts “Caste” and “Class”
    2. The “Meaning” of the Concepts “Caste” and “Class”
    3. The Caste Struggle
    4. Crossing the Caste Line
  • Chapter 32. The Negro Class Structure
    1. The Negro Class Order in the American Caste System
    2. Caste Determines Class
    3. Color and Class
    4. The Classes in the Negro Community
• PART IX. LEADERSHIP AND CONCERTED ACTION
  • Chapter 33. The American Pattern of Individual Leadership and Mass Passivity
    1. “Intelligent Leadership”
    2. “Community Leaders”
    3. Mass Passivity
    4. The Patterns Exemplified in Politics and throughout the American Social Structure
  • Chapter 34. Accommodating Leadership
    1. Leadership and Caste
    2. The Interests of Whites and Negroes with Respect to Negro leadership
    3. In the North and on the National Scene
    4. The “Glass Plate”
    5. Accommodating Leadership and Class
    6. Several Qualifications
    7. Accommodating Leaders in the North
    8. The Glamour Personalities
  • Chapter 35. The Negro Protest
    1. The Slave Revolts
    2. The Negro Abolitionists and Reconstruction Politicians
    3. The Tuskegee Compromise
    4. The Spirit of Niagara and Harper’s Ferry
    5. The Protest Is Still Rising
    6. The Shock of the First World War and the Post-War Crisis
    7. The Garvey Movement
    8. Post-War Radicalism among Negro Intellectuals
    9. Negro History and Culture
    10. The Great Depression and the Second World War
  • Chapter 36. The Protest Motive and Negro Personality
    1. A Mental Reservation
    2. The Struggle Against Defeatism
    3. The Struggle for Balance
    4. Negro Sensitiveness
    5. Negro Aggression
    6. Upper Class Reactions
    7. The “Function” of Racial Solidarity
  • Chapter 37. Compromise Leadership
    1. The Daily Compromise
    2. The Vulnerability of the Negro Leader
    3. Impersonal Motives
    4. The Protest Motive
    5. The Double Role
    6. Negro Leadership Techniques
    7. Moral Consequences
    8. Leadership Rivalry
    9. Qualifications
    10. In Southern Cities
    11. In the North
    12. On the National Scene
  • Chapter 38. Negro Popular Theories
    1. Instability
    2. Negro Provincialism
    3. The Thinking on the Negro Problem
    4. Courting the “Best People Among the Whites”
    5. The Doctrine of Labor Solidarity
    6. Some Critical Observations
    7. The Pragmatic “Truth” of the Labor Solidarity Doctrine
    8. “The Advantages of the Disadvantages”
    9. Condoning Segregation
    10. Boosting Negro Business
    11. Criticism of Negro Business Chauvinism
    12. “Back to Africa”
    13. Miscellaneous Ideologies
  • Chapter 39. Negro Improvement and Protest Organizations
    1. A General American Pattern
    2. Nationalist Movements
    3. Business and Professional Organizations
    4. The National Negro Congress Movement
    5. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
    6. The N.A.A.C.P. Branches
    7. The N.A.A.C.P. National Office
    8. The Strategy of the N.A.A.C.P.
    9. Critique of the N.A.A.C.P.
    10. The Urban League
    11. The Commission on Interracial Cooperation
    12. The Negro Organizations during the War
    13. Negro Strategy
  • Chapter 40. The Negro Church
    1. Non-Political Agencies for Negro Concerted Action
    2. Some Historical Notes
    3. The Negro Church and the General American Pattern of
    4. Religious Activity
    5. A Segregated Church
    6. Its Weakness
    7. Trends and Outlook
  • Chapter 41. The Negro School
    1. Negro Education as Concerted Action
    2. Education in American Thought and Life
    3. The Development of Negro Education in the South
    4. The Whites’ Attitudes toward Negro Education
    5. “Industrial” versus “Classical” Education of Negroes
    6. Negro Attitudes
    7. Trends and Problems
  • Chapter 42. The Negro Press
    1. An Organ for the Negro Protest
    2. The Growth of the Negro Press
    3. Characteristics of the Negro Press
    4. The Controls of the Negro Press
    5. Outlook
• PART X. THE NEGRO COMMUNITY
  • Chapter 43. Institutions
    1. The Negro Community as a Pathological Form of an American Community
    2. The Negro Family
    3. The Negro Church in the Negro Community
    4. The Negro School and Negro Education
    5. Voluntary Associations
  • Chapter 44. Non-Institutional Aspects of the Negro Community
    1. “Peculiarities” of Negro Culture and Personality
    2. Crime
    3. Mental Disorders and Suicide
    4. Recreation
    5. Negro Achievements
• PART XI. AN AMERICAN DILEMMA
  • Chapter 45. America Again at the Crossroads in the Negro Problem
    1. The Negro Problem and the War
    2. Social Trends
    3. The Decay of the Caste Theory
    4. Negroes in the War Crisis
    5. The War and the Whites
    6. The North Moves Toward Equality
    7. Tension in the South
    8. International Aspects
    9. Making the Peace
    10. America’s Opportunity
• Appendix 1. A Methodological Note on Valuations and Beliefs
  1. The Mechanism of Rationalization
  2. Theoretical Critique of the Concept “Mores”
  3. Valuation Dynamics
• Appendix 2. A Methodological Note on Facts and Valuations in Social Science
  1. Biases in the Research on the American Negro Problem
  2. Methods of Mitigating Biases in Social Science
  3. The History and Logic of the Hidden Valuations in Social Science
  4. The Points of View Adopted in This Book
• Appendix 3. A Methodological Note on the Principle of Accumulation
• Appendix 4. Note on the Meaning of Regional Terms as Used in This Book
• Appendix 5. A Parallel to the Negro Problem
• Appendix 6. Pre-War Conditions of the Negro Wage Earner in Selected Industries and Occupations
  1. General Characteristics of Negro Jobs
  2. Domestic Service
  3. Other Service Occupations
  4. Turpentine Farms
  5. Lumber
  6. The Fertilizer Industry
  7. Longshore Work.
  8. Building Workers
  9. Railroad Workers
  10. Tobacco Workers
  11. Textile Workers
  12. Coal Miners
  13. Iron and Steel Workers
  14. Automobile Workers
  15. The Slaughtering and Meat Packing Industry
• Appendix 7. Distribution of Negro Residences in Selected Cities
• Appendix 8. Research on Caste and Class in a Negro Community
• Appendix 9. Research on Negro Leadership
• Appendix 10. Quantitative Studies of Race Attitudes
  1. Existing Studies of Race Attitudes
  2. The Empirical Study of Valuations and Beliefs
  3. “Personal” and “Political” Opinions
  4. The Practical Study of Race Prejudice
• List of Books, Pamphlets, Periodicals, and Other Material Referred to in This Book
• Numbered Footnotes
• Index

From pages 102-106

If white Americans can believe that Negro Americans belong to a lower biological species than they themselves, this provides a motivation for their doctrine that the white race should be kept pure and that amalgamation should, by all means, be prevented. The theory of the inborn inferiority of the Negro people is, accordingly, used as an argument for the antiamalgamation doctrine. This doctrine, in its turn, has, as we have seen, a central position in the American system of color caste. The belief in biological inferiority is thus another basic support, in addition to the no-social-equality, anti-amalgamation doctrine, of the system of segregation and discrimination. Whereas the anti-amalgamation doctrine has its main importance in the “social” field, the belief in the Negro’s biological inferiority is basic to discrimination in all fields. White Americans have an interest in deprecating the Negro race in so far as they identify themselves with the prevailing system of color caste. They have such an interest, though in a lower degree, even if their only attachment to the caste order is that they do not stand up energetically as individuals and citizens to eradicate it…

…In adhering to this biological rationalization, specified in the six points stated above, the white man meets certain difficulties. A factual difficulty to begin with is that individual Negroes and even larger groups of Negroes often, in spite of the handicaps they encounter, show themselves to be better than they ought to be according to the popular theory. A whole defense system serves to minimize this disturbance of the racial dogma, which insists that all Negroes are inferior. From one point of view, segregation of the Negro people fulfills a function in this defense system. It is, of course, not consciously devised for this purpose, and it serves other purposes as well, but this does not make its defense function less important. Segregation isolates in particular the middle and upper class Negroes,” and thus permits the ordinary white man in America to avoid meeting an educated Negro. The systematic tendency to leave the Negro out when discussing public affairs and to avoid mentioning anything about Negroes in the press except their crimes also serves this purpose. The aggressive and derogatory altitude toward “uppity” Negroes and, in particular, the tendency to relegate all educated Negroes to this group also belongs to the defense system.

Since he has a psychological need to believe the popular theory of Negro racial inferiority, it is understandable why the ordinary white man is disincline to hear about good qualities or achievements of Negroes. ‘The merits of Negro soldiers should not be too warmly praised, especially in the presence of Americans,” reads one of the advices which the French Military Mission, stationed with the American Expeditionary Army during the First World War, circulated but later withdrew. It should be added that white people who work to help the Negro people and to improve race relations see the strategic importance of this factor and direct their work toward spreading information about Negroes of quality among the whites.

Another difficulty has always been the mulatto. White Americans want to keep biological distance from the out-race and will, therefore, be tempted to discount the proportion of mulattoes and believe that a greater part of the Negro people is pure bred than is warranted by the facts. A sort of collective guilt on the part of white people for the large-scale miscegenation, which has so apparently changed the racial character of the Negro people enforces this interest.

The literature on the Negro problem strengthens this hypothesis. Only some exceptional authors, usually Negroes, gave more adequate estimates of the proportion of mixed breeds, and it was left to Hrdlicka and Herskovits in the late ‘twenties to set this whole problem on a more scientific basis. The under-enumeration of mulattoes by the census takers decade after decade and also, until recently, the rather uncritical utilization of this material, indicate a tendency toward bias. The observations of the present author have, practically without exception, indicated that the nonexpert white population shows a systematic tendency grossly to underestimate the number of mulattoes in the Negro population.

It may, of course, be said against this assumption of a hidden purpose that one should not assume the ability of uninformed and untrained persons to distinguish a mulatto from a pure bred Negro. But the facts of historical and actual miscegenation are fairly well known, at least in the South, and are discussed with interest everywhere. And if a wrong estimate systematical goes in the same direction, there is reason to ask for a cause. It has also been observed that the ordinary white American gets disturbed when encountering the new scientific estimates that the great majority of American Negroes are not of pure African descent. Similarly, the ordinary white American is disturbed when he hears that Negroes sometimes pass for white. He wants, and he must want, to keep biological distance.

But the mulatto is a disturbance to the popular race theory not only because of his numbers. The question is also raised: Is the mulatto a deteriorated or an improved Negro? In fact, there seems never to have been popular agreement among white Americans whether the mulatto is worse than the pure bred Negro, or whether he is better because of his partially white ancestry. The former belief should per se strengthen the anti-amalgamation doctrine, in fact, make adherence to it to the interest of the entire society. The second belief can serve a purpose of explaining away Negro accomplishments which are, with few exceptions, made by mulattoes and which then could be ascribed to the white blood. Actually, I have often heard the same man use both arguments…

Read the entire book here.

Deep Roots and Tangled Branches

The Chronicle of Higher Education
2006-02-03

Troy Duster, Chancellor’s Professor of Sociology
University of California, Berkeley
Also Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institute for the History of the Production of Knowledge
New York University

People who know their biological parents and grandparents typically take the information for granted. Some have a difficult time empathizing with the passionate genealogical quests of adoptees and, increasingly, products of anonymous sperm banks and other new technologies where one or both genetic contributors are unknown. In recent years, new legislation has enabled people to search for information about genetic progenitors – even in cases where there had been a signed agreement of nondisclosure. The laserlike focus of that search can be as relentless as Ahab’s hunt for the white whale.

Mystery of lineage is the stuff of great literature. Mark Twain made use of it for biting social commentary in his Pudd’nhead Wilson, a story about the mix-up of babies born to a slave and a free person. Sophocles, Shakespeare, Molière, and Dickens built grand tragedy and enduring comedy on the theme. In England in 2002, a white Englishwoman gave birth to mixed-race twins after a mix-up at an in vitro fertilization clinic. Imagine what Shakespeare would have done with that!

If one person’s passions can be so riled by such a puzzle, imagine the emotions involved when the uncertainty applies to a whole group – say, of 12 million people. The middle passage did just that to Americans of recent African descent. Names were obliterated from record books, and slaves were typically anointed with a new single first name. Sometimes no names were recorded, just the slaves’ numbers, ages, and genders. Some African-Americans have deliberately and actively participated in the erasure, showing no desire to pursue a genealogical trail. For others, fragments of oral history generate a fierce longing to do the detective work.

That is the case among the prominent subjects featured in “African American Lives,” a two-night, four-part PBS series scheduled for February 1 and 8. The host and executive co-producer is Henry Louis Gates Jr., chairman of the department of African and African-American studies at Harvard. Gates has assembled eight notably successful African-Americans, among them the media entrepreneur Oprah Winfrey, the legendary music producer Quincy Jones, and the film star Whoopi Goldberg. Each participant, along with Gates, is the subject of some serious professional family-tree tracing. There are surprises for each of them, and the series has undeniable human-interest appeal…

Read the entire article here.

Afroargentines

The Argentina Independent
2007-03-23

Laura Balfour

As a descendant of two slaves, Maria Lamadrid has a hard time biting her tongue when airport officials think her Argentine passport is not real because ‘there are no blacks in Argentina’.
 
And that was in 2002.
 
The 25th of March marks the landmark 200th anniversary of the 1807 Abolition of the Slave Trade Act. Though the trade continued after this date, it marked the beginning of the end of the transatlantic trafficking of Africans.
 
Ms Lamadrid is fighting to alter the common belief that all blacks who live in Argentina are foreigners. In 1997 she founded Africa Vive, a non-governmental organisation that defends the rights of African descendants. Today, she claims, there are 2m Afroargentines in Argentina.
 
Ms Lamadrid and Miriam Gomez, a history professor at the University of Buenos Aires, have dedicated themselves wholly to the NGO’s cause because “there is so much to do and very few people to do it.”…

…Africa Vive has requested that a separate category for African descendants be reintroduced in the 2010 census. Ms Lamadrid said the most frustrating thing is that there used to be one: 1887 was the final year that Afroargentines were recognised in the census; the results showed that 2% of the residents of Buenos Aires were of African descent at that time. She added that indigenous people, who have also suffered discrimination, have their own category because they have more support…

Read the entire article here.

The reawakening of Afro-Argentine culture

Global Post
2009-08-30

Anil Mundra

Descendants of slaves are starting to assert their identity but it’s not easy in South America’s whitest country.

BUENOS AIRES — “Liberty has no color” read the signs held outside a Buenos Aires city courthouse. “Arrested for having the wrong face,” and “Suspected of an excess of pigment,” said others. And more to the point: “Enough racism.”
 
A black street vendor was allegedly arrested without cause or proper procedure earlier this year, prompting this August hearing of a habeas corpus appeal. But leaders of the Afro-Argentine community say this moment goes beyond any particular man or incident, calling it a watershed case that brings to trial the treatment of blacks in Argentina.
 
“It’s not about this prosecutor or that police officer, but rather an institutionally racist system,” said Malena Derdoy, the defendant’s lawyer.
 
Argentina is generally considered the whitest country in South America — 97 percent, by some counts — possibly more ethnically European than immigrant-saturated Europe. There was once a large Afro-Argentine presence but it has faded over the epochs. Now, for the first time in a century and a half, Argentine descendants of African slaves are organizing and going public to assert their identity…

…At the beginning of the 1800s, black slaves were 30 percent of the population of Buenos Aires, and an absolute majority in some other provinces. The first president of Argentina had African ancestry, and so did the composer of the first tango. Even the word “tango,” like many other words common in the Argentine vocabulary, has an African root; so do many beloved foods, including the national vices of the asado barbecue and dulce de leche.
 
The abolition of slavery was a slow process that spanned the better part of the 19th century. At the same time, under the government’s explicit and aggressive policy of whitening the race — to replace “barbary” with “civilization,” in the famous phrase of the celebrated president Sarmiento — Afro-Argentines were inundated by European immigration, the largest such influx in the Americas outside of the United States. Blacks had dwindled to only 1.8 percent of Buenos Aires by the 1887 census, after which their category was replaced with more vague terms like “trigueno” — “wheaty.”

“It’s part of Argentine common sense that there are no blacks, that their entire culture had disappeared toward the end of the 1800s,” said anthropologist Pablo Cirio. “That’s all a lie.”…
 
…The survey was performed with help from the national census bureau and World Bank funding, at the urging of local Afro-Argentine activists who hoped to have the “Afro-descendant” category re-inserted into the Argentine census in 2010 and count themselves as a distinct segment of the populace after a century missing. Soon afterward, DNA tests of blood samples in several Buenos Aires hospitals bolstered the pilot census’ result with a very similar percentage of genes traceable to Africa. Moreover, a much higher number — about 10 percent — was obtained by testing mitochondrial DNA, which traces maternal ancestry. This is consistent with the historical conjecture that many black men were lost after being sent to the frontlines of 19th-century wars, and Afro-Argentines assimilated into the white population when the
remaining women mixed with the hordes of European males who had come to Argentina to work…

Read the entire article here.

When Family Trees Are Gnarled by Race

The New York Times
2012-09-08

Brent Staples

My paternal grandfather, Marshall Staples (1898-1969), was one of the millions of black Southerners who moved north in the Great Migration. Those of us in the family who were born Yankees in the years just after World War II were given an earful about our place in 19th-century Virginia — and specifically about Marshall’s white grandfather, a member of a slaveholding family who fathered at least one child with my great-great-grandmother, Somerville Staples.

Stories like this are typical among African-Americans who have roots in the slave-era South and who have always spoken candidly about themselves and their relationships with slaveholding forebears. In some cases, the Negro second families carried the names of their masters/fathers into Emancipation and settled in the same areas.

This was inconvenient for the white progenitors and their families, who feared the taint of blackness so much that they often declined to acknowledge or speak to their darker relatives on the street. In nullifying these family connections, they embraced the fiction of racial purity that has dominated how white Americans see themselves for hundreds of years…

Read the entire article here.

“Slave genes” myth must die

Salon
2012-07-24

Amy Bass, Associate Professor of History
The College of New Rochelle, New Rochelle, New York

Michael Johnson links African-American sprinters to slavery, and revisits a particularly ugly pseudo-science

In 1988, Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder (in)famously stated that the prowess of African-American football players could be traced to slavery, saying “the black is a better athlete to begin with because he’s been bred to be that way … [They] jump higher and run faster.” The reaction to such obviously racist remarks was fast and furious: Amid the uproar, CBS Sports fired him. So when Olympic gold medalist Michael Johnson predicted this month that African-American and West Indian track athletes would dominate the London Olympics because of the genes of their slave ancestors, I paid little attention, thinking there was no way this could become a viable conversation yet again. “All my life I believed I became an athlete through my own determination, but it’s impossible to think that being descended from slaves hasn’t left an imprint through the generations,” Johnson told the Daily Mail. “Difficult as it was to hear, slavery has benefited descendants like me—I believe there is a superior athletic gene in us.”

As a historian, what I find to be stunning about what he said is the claim that the supremacy of black athletes in track had never “been discussed openly before.” Actually, with his words, Johnson plunged himself into a century-old debate that seems to rear its (rather ugly) head every four years, just in time for the opening of sport’s largest global stage. Johnson supported his theory with the example of the men’s 100m final at the Beijing Olympics: Three of the eight finalists came from Jamaica, including record-breaking winner Usain Bolt, and two from Trinidad; African-Americans Walter Dix and Doc Patton and Dutch sprinter Churandy Martina, who hails from Curacao, rounded out the line.

But racial assumptions don’t work as easily as simply noting that four years ago all eight finalists in the quest to be “world’s fastest man” likely had ancestors who were slaves, because race is, well, never simple, but rather works as an amoebic identity formation that changes throughout history. It’s a social construction deeply entangled with definitions of class, gender, sexuality and so on…

…Such scientists first engaged in racialized theories of athletic aptitude in the 1930s, during the large-scale breakthrough of African-Americans in track and field:  following DeHart Hubbard’s gold medal at the Paris Olympics in 1924; the success stories of Ed Gordon, Eddie Tolan and Ralph Metcalfe; and, of course, Jesse Owens’ legendary performance at the Berlin Games in 1936. Although the number of African-American track champions would greatly decline in subsequent decades, the belief in some sort of quantifiable connection between race and physical ability would not wane, with scientists creating comparative analyses between “white” and “black” calf muscles, bone densities, heel lengths and so on. “Is there some difference between Negroes and white in proportions of the body,” asked Iowa State physical educator Eleanor Metheny, “which gives the Negro an advantage in certain types of athletic performance?”

While one such study was plagued with what to do about subjects of “mixed parentage,” and Metheny admitted that “Negro” was heterogeneous by its very constitution, few scientists defined “Negro” or “white” beyond skin color, never pausing to wonder how they quantified categories that were subjective to begin with.  These scientists easily translated the racially infused stereotypes of the 19thcentury minstrel stage, in which physical traits such as fat lips, wide-open red mouths and large noses existed alongside the perceived innate ability to dance and sing, to have athletic bodies.  In doing so, these studies – which took place in labs at Harvard, Vanderbilt and Duke – produced some of sport’s most venerable racist convictions: Black athletes are more adept at sprinting, more relaxed, make better running backs than quarterbacks, and jump farther, all of which reduced their athleticism to a solely physical condition with no room for intellectual capacity, training nor discipline.

One notable exception was W. Montague Cobb, Howard University, the first black physical anthropologist in the United States. His extensive work on “the physical anthropology of the American Negro” never referenced slavery directly, but did make several assertions regarding the environmental and physical challenges African-Americans historically faced as a means for survival in the modern world. Yet Cobb, whose most famous subject was Owens himself, refused to simplify the complexities of race, which he insisted could not be a fixed category because of “interbreeding.” Indeed, he concluded, Owens was more “Caucasoid rather than Negroid in type” based on measurements of his foot, heel bone and calves. Jesse Owens, according to Cobb, did not have the body of a “Negro star.”…

Read the entire article here.

Lift Up Thy Voice: The Grimke Family’s Journey from Slaveholders to Civil Rights Leaders

Penguin Press
December 2002
432 pages
Paperback ISBN 9780142001035

Mark Perry

A story of race consciousness and the fight for equality told through the lives of one extraordinary American family

In the late 1820s Sarah and Angelina Grimké traded their elite position as daughters of a prominent white slaveholding family in Charleston, South Carolina, for a life dedicated to abolitionism and advocacy of women’s rights in the North. After the Civil War, discovering that their late brother had had children with one of his slaves, the Grimké sisters helped to educate their nephews and gave them the means to start a new life in postbellum America. The nephews, Archibald and Francis, went on to become well-known African American activists in the burgeoning civil rights movement and the founding of the NAACP. Spanning 150 eventful years, this is an inspiring tale of a remarkable family that transformed itself and America.

Obama is a Descendant of Nefertiti & Confucius Too

Dominion of New York
2012-07-31

Alondra Nelson, Associate Professor of Sociology
Columbia University

There was breaking news yesterday in the lively world of presidential genealogy. Barack Obama–who is regarded as an inauthentic African-American by some because his late mother, Stanley Anne Dunham, was a white woman and his father’s ancestry traced to Kenya rather than Kentucky or the Carolinas–was suggested to be descended on his maternal side from John Punch, a black man.

Researchers at Ancestry.com, the online root-seeking company, derived Obama’s relationship to Punch using a combination of standard genealogical research and Y-chromosome genetic analysis. (Y-DNA is passed essentially unchanged from fathers to sons to grandsons to great-grandsons, etc.) The timing of this announcement could not be better for the Provo, Utah company that just reported booming fourth quarter profits and is rumored to be seeking a buyer.

An indentured servant in 17th century Virginia, Punch would earn the lamentable designation of “the first documented African enslaved for life in American history” when he was reduced to chattel as punishment for his attempt to escape servitude. Punch, like Obama the elder, was an African; tragically, what makes Punch “African-American” is his slave status. With rebellious, freedom-loving roots firmly planted in the New World, our nation’s first president of African descent —Punch’s 11th great grandson–may just be “black enough” after all…

…We have a high threshold for political gossip and, in the digital age, genealogy is a fast fad that shows no sign of passing out of vogue. But the primary reason these ancestry stories entrance us is because they bring us face-to-face with our national fascination with and anxieties about racial miscegenation. Take, for example, the minor controversy over Rachel L. Swarns recently published American Tapestry: The Story of the Black, White and Multicultural Ancestors of Michelle Obama. Megan Smolenyak, the prominent genealogist who conducted the research for Swarns’ widely-read 2007 co-authored article that revealed Michelle Obama’s white slavery-era ancestors, critiqued it in the Huffington Post. Smolenyak was stunned that:

the maternal half of the first lady’s family tree — her mother Marian (Shields) Robinson’s side [was] overlooked. Though Michelle Obama has classic Great Migration roots winding their way back to at least eleven states, southern Virginia — and especially Henry and Pittsylvania counties — can claim more of her heritage than any other location. Fully a quarter of her ancestry traces to this area on the North Carolina border, but inexplicably, it’s this portion of her family tree that’s given short-shrift.

Smolenyak further complained that “the ‘revelation’ of the white ancestor via DNA testing” wasn’t unexpected; “the only true surprise in the book” she concluded, was “the absence of over a third of Mrs. Obama’s known ancestors.”…

Read the entire article here.

Ancestry.com Discovers President Obama Related to First Documented Slave in America

Ancestry.com
Provo, Utah
2012-07-30

Research Connects First African-American President to First African Slave in the American Colonies

PROVO, UTAH – July 30, 2012 – A research team from Ancestry.com (NASDAQ:ACOM), the world’s largest online family history resource, has concluded that President Barack Obama is the 11th great-grandson of John Punch, the first documented African enslaved for life in American history. Remarkably, the connection was made through President Obama’s Caucasian mother’s side of the family.

The discovery is the result of years of research by Ancestry.com genealogists who, through early Virginia records and DNA analysis, linked Obama to John Punch. An indentured servant in Colonial Virginia, Punch was punished for trying to escape his servitude in 1640 by being enslaved for life. This marked the first actual documented case of slavery for life in the colonies, occurring decades before initial slavery laws were enacted in Virginia.

In the 372 years since, many significant records have been lost—a common problem for early Virginia (and the South in general)—destroyed over time by floods, fires and war. While this reality greatly challenged the research project, Ancestry.com genealogists were able to make the connection, starting with Obama’s family tree.

President Obama is traditionally viewed as an African-American because of his father’s heritage in Kenya. However, while researching his Caucasian mother, Stanley Ann Dunham’s lineage, Ancestry.com genealogists found her to have African heritage as well, which piqued the researchers’ interest and inspired further digging into Obama’s African-American roots. In tracing the family back from Obama’s mother, Ancestry.com used DNA analysis to learn that her ancestors, known as white landowners in Colonial Virginia, actually descended from an African man. Existing records suggest that this man, John Punch, had children with a white woman who then passed her free status on to their offspring. Punch’s descendants went on to be free, successful land owners in a Virginia entrenched in slavery…

…More details and supporting information on this discovery and additional research on President Obama’s family lineage can be found at www.ancestry.com/obama…

Read the entire press release here.