Mixed Race Studies

Making Race: The Role of Free Blacks in the Development of New Orleans’ Three-Caste Society, 1791-1812

University of Texas, Austin
May 2007
219 pages

Kenneth Randolph Aslakson, Assistant Professor of History
Union College, Schenectady, New York

Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May, 2007

“Making Race: The Role of Free Blacks in the Development of New Orleans’ Three-Caste Society, 1791-1812” excavates the ways that free people of African descent in New Orleans built an autonomous identity as a third “race” in what would become a unique racial caste system in the United States. I argue that in the time period I study, which encompasses not only the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, but also the rise of plantation slavery and the arrival of over twelve thousand refugees from the revolution torn French West Indies, New Orleans’s free blacks took advantage of political, cultural and legal uncertainty to protect and gain privileges denied to free blacks elsewhere in the South. The dissertation is organized around three sites in which free blacks forged and articulated a distinct collective identity: the courtroom, the ballroom, and the militia. This focus on specific spaces of racial contestation allows me to trace the multivalent development of racial identity. “Making Race” brings together the special dynamism of the Atlantic world in the Age of Revolution with the ability of individuals to act within structures of power to shape their surroundings. I show that changing political regimes (in the time period I study New Orleans was ruled by the Spanish, the French and the Americans) together with the socio-economic, ideological and demographic impact of the Haitian Revolution created opportunities for new social and legal understandings of race in the Crescent City. More importantly, however, I show how members of New Orleans’s free black community, strengthened numerically and heavily influenced by thousands of gens de couleur refugees of the Haitian Revolution, shaped the racialization process by asserting a collective identity as a distinct middle caste, contributing to the creation of a tri-racial system.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
  • Free Blacks in Slave Societies
  • Race and Revolution in the Atlantic World
  • The Laws and Legal Systems in Racially Based Slave Societies
  • Organization of the Dissertation
• Chapter 1 Racial Identity Formation in a Burgeoning Port City
• Chapter 2 “When the Question is Slavery or Freedom:” The Legal Construction of Three Races in Early New Orleans
  • New Orleans in the Age of Slavery and Revolution
  • Making Slavery: The Precariousness of Freedom
  • Making Freedom: Status Suits in the New Orleans City Court
  • Making Race: The Legal Resolution of the Slave-Free Paradox
  • Conclusion
• Chapter 3 The Power of Weakness: Free Black Women in the New Orleans City Court
  • Black Litigation in Spanish Louisiana and the Impact of the Louisiana Purchase
  • Escape From Marriage Law: The Litigiousness of Free Women of African Descent
  • The Power of Weakness: Fraud and Assault Cases in the New Orleans City Court
  • The New Racial Order: Changing Color and Changing Laws
  • Conclusion
• Chapter 4 The Politics of Dancing: Control, Resistance, and Identity in the Early New Orleans Ballroom
  • Fear of Black Dancing and the Origins of the Public Ball
  • Vice, Violence, and the Origins of the (Tri-) Colored Balls
  • The Great Purchase, Immigration, and the Segregation of Dancing Centers
  • Control, Resistance, Identity and the Origins of the Quadroon Balls.143
  • Conclusion
• Chapter 5 “We Shall Serve with Fidelity and Zeal:” The Citizen-Soldiers of the Free Colored Militia
  • The Demographics of Defense: Free Colored Militias in New World Slave Societies
  • Fear and Opportunity: the Free Colored Militia in Spanish Louisiana During the Age of Revolution
  • “Free Citizens of Louisiana:” The Free Colored Militia in Territorial New Orleans
  • The Militia’s Swansong: Andrew Jackson and the Battle of New Orleans
  • Conclusion
• Conclusion “In [and Outside] the Eye of Louisiana Law:” Creole of Color Identity Before and After Plessy
• Bibliography
• Vita

Introduction

In October of 2003, having recently arrived in New Orleans to do research for this dissertation, I attended the “Creole Studies Consortium” held at Tulane University. Most of the people attending this gathering (which was part academic conference, part genealogical convention, and part family reunion) called themselves “Creoles of color” or simply “Creoles,” though it soon became clear to me that there was some disagreement as to the precise meaning of this term. For some, a Creole is someone whose ancestors were free people of color when slavery still existed in Louisiana. For others, the European ancestors of Creoles must have been of Spanish or (preferably) French descent. The most exclusive definition holds that a true Creole can trace his or her French and African ancestry back to the colonial period in Louisiana before the Louisiana Purchase. Nevertheless, all agreed that a Creole is a person whose ancestors were free and of mixed European and African descent with roots in pre-Civil War Louisiana. While they do not deny their partial African ancestry, most of Louisiana’s present day Creoles do not self identify as “black” or even “African-American,” even though most people from outside of the state Louisiana (and many within) would consider them to be such.

This dissertation examines the origins of the distinct racial identity of the group of people who today call themselves Louisiana “Creoles” (or “Creoles of Color”) by excavating the ways in which free people of color in early New Orleans built an autonomous identity as a third “race” in what would become a unique racial caste system rise of plantation slavery and the arrival of over twelve thousand refugees from the revolution-torn French West Indies, New Orleans’s free people of color took advantage of political, cultural and legal uncertainty to protect and gain privileges denied to free blacks elsewhere in the South. I show that changing political regimes (in this time period New Orleans was ruled by the Spanish, the French and the Americans), a transforming economy, and the ideological and demographic impact of the Haitian Revolution combined to create opportunities for new cultural and legal understandings of race in the Crescent City. More importantly, however, I show how members of New Orleans’s free colored community, strengthened numerically and heavily influenced by thousands of gens de couleur refugees, shaped the racialization process by asserting a collective identity as a distinct middle caste, contributing to the creation of a tri-racial system. In other words, the emergence of a three tiered racial caste system in the Crescent City was not the necessary product of global structures. Rather, the free people of color of New Orleans made their own distinct racial identity, and protected the relative rights and privileges that went with it.

Read the entire dissertation here.

Representing Mixed Race in Jamaica and England from the Abolition Era to the Present

Routledge: Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures
2010-10-21
204 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-39808-4

Sarah Salih, Professor of English
University of Toronto

This study considers cultural representations of “brown” people in Jamaica and England alongside the determinations of race by statute from the Abolition era onwards. Through close readings of contemporary fictions and “histories,” Salih probes the extent to which colonial ideologies may have been underpinned by what might be called subject-constituting statutes, along with the potential for force and violence which necessarily undergird the law. The author explores the role legal and non-legal discourse plays in disciplining the brown body in pre- and post-Abolition colonial contexts, as well as how are other bodies and identities – e.g. black, white are discursively disciplined. Salih examines whether or not it’s possible to say that non-legal texts such as prose fictions are engaged in this kind of discursive disciplining, and more broadly, looks at what contemporary formulations of “mixed” identity owe to these legal or non-legal discursive formations. This study demonstrates the striking connections between historical and contemporary discourses of race and brownness and argues for a shift in the ways we think about, represent and discuss “mixed race” people.

Table of Contents

• 1: Introduction: The Mulatto in Law and Literature
• 2: Pre-Emancipation Stories of Race: Marly and The Woman of Colour
• 3: Legitimacy, Illegitimacy and Citizenship in the Nineteenth Century: Dinah Craik’s Olive [1850] and Richard Hill’s Lights and Shadows
• 4: Mulattos in the Contact Zone: Mary Seacole and Ozias Midwinter Coda: Modern Mulattos: Mona Lisa and The Crying Game
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Color Struck: Essays on Race and Ethnicity in Global Perspective

University Press of America
April 2010
516 pages
Paper ISBN: 0-7618-5064-3 / 978-0-7618-5064-9
Electronic ISBN: 0-7618-5092-9 / 978-0-7618-5092-2

Edited by

Julius O. Adekunle, Professor of History
Monmouth University, West Long Branch, New Jersey

Hettie V. Williams, Lecturer, African American History
Department of History and Anthropology
Monmouth University, West Long Branch, New Jersey

Color Struck: Essays of Race and Ethnicity in Global Perspective is a compilation of expositions on race and ethnicity, written from multiple disciplinary approaches including history, sociology, women’s studies, and anthropology. This book is organized around a topical, chronological framework and is divided into three sections, beginning with the earliest times to the contemporary world. The term “race” has nearly become synonymous with the word “ethnicity,” given the most recent findings in the study of human genetics that have led to the mapping of human DNA. Color Struck attempts to answer questions and provide scholarly insight into issues related to race and ethnicity.

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction

Part 1: The First Complex Societies to Modern Times

1. Race, Science, and Human Origins in Africa
Julius O. Adekunle

2. Race and the Rise of the Swahili Culture
Julius O. Adekunle

3. ‘Caste’-[ing] Gender: Caste and Patriarchy in Ancient Hindu Jurisprudence
Indira Jalli

4. Comparative Race and Slavery in Islam, Judaism, and Christianity: Texts, Practices, and Current Implications
Magid Shihade

5. The Dark Craven Jew: Race and Religion in Medieval Europe
James M. Thomas

6. Growth of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Racial Slavery in the New World
Kwaku Osei Tutu

7. The Yellow Lady: Mulatto Women in the Suriname Plantocracy
Hilde Neus

Part 2: Race and Mixed Race in the Americas

8. Critical Mixed Race Studies: New Approaches to Resistance and Social Justice
Andrew Jolivétte

9. Militant Multiraciality: Rejecting Race and Rejecting the Conveniences of Complicity
Rainier Spencer

10. Whiteness Reconstructed: Multiracial Identity as a Category of “New White”
Kerry Ann Rockquemore and David L. Brunsma

11. Conversations in Black and White: The Limitations of Binary Thinking About Race in America
Johanna E. Foster

12. The Necessity of a Multiracial Category in a Race-Conscious Society
Francis Wardle

13. Mixed Race Terminologies in the Americas: Globalizing the Creole in the Twenty First Century
DeMond S. Miller, Jason D. Rivera, and Joel C. Telin

14. Examining the Regional and Multigenerational Context of Creole and American Indian Identity
Andrew Jolivétte

15. Race, Class, and Power: The Politics of Multiraciality in Brazil
G. Reginald Daniel and Gary L. Haddow

16. All Mixed Up: A New Racial Commonsense in Global Perspective
G. Reginald Daniel and Gary L. Haddow

Part 3: Race, Ethnicity, and Conflict in Contemporary Societies

17. Black No More: African Americans and the ‘New’ Race Science
Hettie V. Williams

18. Contesting Identities of Color: African Female Immigrants in the Americas
Philomina Okeke-Ihejirika

19. Burdened Intersections: Black Women and Race, Gender, and Class
Marsha J. Tyson Darling

20. Ethnic Conflicts in the Middle East: A Comparative Analysis of Communal Violence within the Matrix of the Colonial Legacy, Globalization, and Global Stability
Magid Shihade

21. Ethnic Identity in China: The Politics of Cultural Difference
Dru C. Gladney

22. Shangri-la has Forsaken Us: China’s Ethnic Minorities, Identity, and Government Repression
Reza Hasmath

23. The Russian/Chechen Conflict and It’s Consequences
Mariana Tepfenhart

Contributors
Index

On Racial Frontiers: The New Culture of Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, and Bob Marley

Cambridge University Press
June 1999
342 pages
8 b/w illus.
Size: 228 x 152 mm
Paperback ISBN-13: 9780521643931; ISBN-10: 0521643937

Gregory Stephens

Douglass, Ellison and Marley lived on racial frontiers. Their interactions with mixed audiences made them key figures in an interracial consciousness and culture, integrative ancestors who can be claimed by more than one group. An abolitionist who criticized black racialism; the author of Invisible Man, a landmark of modernity and black literature; a musician whose allegiance was to “God’s side, who cause me to come from black and white.” The lives of these three men illustrate how our notions of “race” have been constructed out of a repression of the interracial.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• 1. Interraciality in historical context
• 2. Frederick Douglass as integrative ancestor: the consequences of interracial co-creation
• 3. Invisible community: Ralph Ellison’s vision of a multiracial ideal democracy
• 4. Bob Marley’s Zion: a trans-racial ‘blackman redemption’

Black and white sexual pairings, therefore, became a widespread phenomenon that originated from a demographic imbalance, but expanded and developed through a cultural fetishization of women of color. The islands, built upon complex systems of violence and sexual control, promoted and legitimated interracial relationships. Caribbean visitors certainly held this impression. Pierre McCallum emphasized the importance of finding a lover of color in Trinidad: “On the arrival of the European, his first object is, to look out for a mistress, either of the black, yellow, or livid kind.” “As for the native creole,” McCallum continued, “a female companion is provided for him from among the slaves of the family, at an early age, to prevent his going astray to increase the stock of his neighbours.” McCallum’s account indicates the ubiquity of West Indian miscegenation, its role as a measure of status, and its sanction by all members of society, including relatives. Not only did family members support such behavior, but they promoted it within a plantation endogamy to increase further slave holdings – albeit enslaved kin. Such descriptions reveal a West Indian system perfectly at ease with interracial pairings, if not encouraging of them. This sexual tolerance dramatically grew the islands’ population of color…

…The culture of miscegenation that developed in the British West Indies came from demographic conditions, as well as customary promotions of common practice. Although white men grossly outnumbered white women in most Caribbean islands, white families still survived. Indeed, white islanders’ seemingly universal engagement with women of color belied actual gender imbalances within their populations. Cross-racial relations became a part of West Indian culture; married and single men alike had their mistresses of color. For imperial observers, this confirmed long-standing associations between the West Indies and anarchic morality. The mistress of color, so often portrayed in travel accounts and expositions, visibly embodied island vice. British commentary condemned her, her lover, and West Indian society as a whole. The men in these relationships were, after all, not simply colonial “others,” but friends and relatives of Britons back home.

Daniel Alan Livesay, “Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Migration from the West Indies to Britain, 1750-1820” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2010) pages 29-30 .

Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family

Beacon Press
1999-08-01 (originally published in 1956)
304 pages
Size: 5-3/8″ X 8″ Inches
Paperback ISBN: 978-080707209-7

Pauli Murray (Anna Pauline Murray) (1910-1985)

First published in 1956, Proud Shoes is the remarkable true story of slavery, survival, and miscegenation in the South from the pre-Civil War era through the Reconstruction. Written by Pauli Murray the legendary civil rights activist and one of the founders of NOW, Proud Shoes chronicles the lives of Murray’s maternal grandparents. From the birth of her grandmother, Cornelia Smith, daughter of a slave whose beauty incited the master’s sons to near murder to the story of her grandfather Robert Fitzgerald, whose free black father married a white woman in 1840, Proud Shoes offers a revealing glimpse of our nation’s history.

Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Migration from the West Indies to Britain, 1750-1820

The University of Michigan
2010
481 pages

Daniel Alan Livesay, Assistant Professor of History
Drury University, Springfield, Missouri

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (History) in The University of Michigan 2010

This dissertation shows that the migration of mixed-race individuals from the Caribbean to Britain between 1750 and 1820 helped to harden British attitudes toward those of African descent. The children of wealthy, white fathers and both free and enslaved women of color, many left for Britain in order to escape the deficiencies and bigotry of West Indian society. This study traces the group’s origin in the Caribbean, mainly Jamaica, to its voyage and arrival in Britain. It argues that the perceived threats of these migrants’ financial bounty and potential to marry and reproduce in Britain helped to collapse previous racial distinctions in the metropole which had traditionally differentiated along class and status lines and paved the way for a more monolithic racial viewpoint in the nineteenth century.

This study makes three major contributions to the history of the British Atlantic. First, it provides a thorough examination of the West Indies’ elite population of color, showing its connection to privileged white society in both the Caribbean and Britain. Those who moved to the metropole lend further proof to the agency and influence of such individuals in the Atlantic world. Second, it expands the notion of the British family at the turn of the nineteenth century. Through analyses of wills, inheritance disputes, and correspondence, this project reveals the regularity of British legal and personal interaction with relatives of color across the Atlantic, as well as with those who resettled in the metropole. Third, it allows for a material understanding of Atlantic racial ideologies. By connecting popular discussions in the abolition debate and the sentimental novel to biographical accounts of mixed-race migrants, British notions of racial difference are more strongly linked to social reality. Uncovering an entirely new cohort of British people of color and its members’ lived experiences, this dissertation provides crucial insight into the tightening of British and Atlantic racial attitudes.

INTRODUCTION

In 1840, the Reverend Donald Sage completed his memoirs. Reflecting on the meandering twists and turns of life, he wrote extensively on his education and the different schools he attended as a youth. One of these institutions, where he stayed only briefly between 1801 and 1803, was located in the small seaside town of Dornoch, in the Scottish Highlands. Sage described the village as a “little county town” which had been “considerably on the decrease” by the time his family had arrived. As one would do in such a journal, Sage thought back on his boyhood friends, and noted that while at Dornoch he and his brother became close companions with the Hay family. Like Sage, the three Hay brothers were not originally from the village; they had instead been born in the West Indies. In fact, Sage revealed that they were “the offspring of a negro woman, as their hair, and the tawny colour of their skin, very plainly intimated, [and] [t]heir father was a Scotsman.” Sage became particularly good friends with Fergus, the eldest of the three, of whom he gave a very qualified endorsement: “Notwithstanding the disadvantages of his negro parentage, Fergus was very handsome. He had all the manners of a gentleman, and had first-rate abilities.”

It may seem out of place for three West Indian children, the offspring of an interracial couple, to be living in a small village at Scotland’s northern tip in 1801. Historians tend to think of an Afro-Caribbean presence in Britain as a phenomenon of the last sixty-plus years, and one localized around major urban centers. At the same time, only recently has the topic of inter-racial unions been addressed in the “new” multicultural Britain. The story of the Hay children in Dornoch, however, was not at all unique at the turn of the nineteenth century. Rather, the Hays were members of a regular migration of mixed-race West Indians who arrived in the home country during the period. Facing intense discrimination, few jobs opportunities, and virtually no educational options in the colonies, West Indians of color fled to Britain with their white fathers’ assistance. Once arrived, they encountered myriad responses. While some white relatives accepted them into their homes, others sued to cut them off from the family fortune. Equally, even though a number of fictional and political tracts welcomed their arrival, others condemned their presence and lobbied to ban them from landing on British soil. Regardless of these variable experiences, mixed-race migrants traveled to Britain consistently during the period. The Hay children may have turned heads on the roads of Dornoch, but they would not have been a wholly unfamiliar sight.

This study examines the movement of mixed-race individuals from the Caribbean to Britain at the end of the long eighteenth century. It argues that the frequent and sustained migration of these children of color produced a strong British reaction, at both the personal and popular levels, against their presence, and helped contribute to the simplification and essentialization of British racial ideology in the nineteenth century. A number of personal histories are followed through the various stages of this transplantation, and are compared to published accounts of the phenomenon in general. White patronage and parental ties were vital in the colonies if a mixed-race individual was to leave for Britain. Connected through these kinship and business associations, elite West Indians of color maintained their own Atlantic networks. Once in Britain, they had to monitor their finances vigilantly against rival claimants to Caribbean fortunes. Family attempts at disinheritance were a frequent problem, and demonstrated an increasing British disgust at colonial miscegenation, along with mixed-race resettlement. With the advent of the abolition movement in the 1770s and 1780s, the issue took on greater political importance. Rich heirs of color now in Britain seemed to herald the cataclysmic prophesies of slavery supporters. Certain that abolition would destroy the racial and class barriers between black and white, many Britons recoiled at those of hybrid descent now resident in the metropole. If class distinctions had restrained racial prejudice in the early years of the eighteenth century, they no longer produced the same moderating effects at the century’s close…

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Abbreviations
• Abstract
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The World They Left Behind: Family Networks and Mixed-Race Children In the West Indies
• Chapter 2: Patterns of Migration: Push and Pull Factors Sending West Indians of Color to Britain
• Chapter 3: Inheritance Disputes and Mixed-Race Individuals in Britain
• Chapter 4: Success and Struggle in Britain
• Chapter 5: West Indians of Color in Britain, and the Abolition Question
• Chapter 6: Depictions of Mixed-Race Migrants in British Literature
• Conclusion
• Bibliography

List of Figures

• Brunias, 1779
• 1.2 “The Barbadoes Mulatto Girl,” by Agostino Brunias, 1779
• 1.3 “Joanna,” by William Blake, 1796
• 1.4 Percentages of Children Born of Mixed Race, and the Percentage of Mixed-Race Children Born in Wedlock, St. Catherine, Jamaica, 1770-1808
• 1.5 Percentage of Mixed-Race Children Born in Wedlock, Kingston, Jamaica, 1809-1820
• 1.6 Percentage of Free, Mixed-Race Children with Interracial Parents, Kingston, Jamaica, 1750-1820
• 1.7 Thomas Hibbert’s House, Kingston, Jamaica, 2008 (erected 1755)
• 2.1 Deficiency Fines Collected (in pounds current), St. Thomas in the Vale Parish, Jamaica, 1789-1801
• 2.2 Percentage of West Indians in Student Body (University of Edinburgh Medical School and King’s College, Aberdeen), 1750-1820
• 2.3 “Johnny New-Come in the Island of Jamaica,” by Abraham James, 1800
• 4.1 “A Scene on the quarter deck of the Lune,” by Robert Johnson from his Journal, April 8, 1808
• 4.2 Cartoon by Robert Johnson from his Journal, April 8, 1808
• 4.3 Kenwood House, Hampstead Heath, London
• 4.4 “Dido Elizabeth Belle and Lady Elizabeth Murray,” unknown artist (formerly attributed to John Zoffany), c. 1780
• 4.5 “The Morse and Cator Family,” by John Zoffany, c. 1783
• 4.6 “Nathaniel Middleton,” by Tilly Kettle, c. 1773
• 4.7 “William Davidson,” by R. Cooper, c. 1820
• 4.8 “Robert Wedderburn,” 1824..306
• 5.1 “Sir Thomas Picton,” c. 1810
• 5.2 Calderon’s Torture, from The Trial of Governor Picton
• 5.3 Calderon’s Torture, and “Flagellation of a Female Samboe Slave,” by William Blake, 1793
• 6.1 “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” by Josiah Wedgwood, 1787

List of Tables

• 1.1 Racial Classification of the Mothers of Mixed-Race Children with White Fathers, by Percentage, 1770-1820
• 1.2 Percentages of Interracial Parents vs. Two Parents of Color Amongst Mixed-Race Children in Jamaica, 1730-1820
• 2.1 Percentage of white men’s wills, proven in Jamaica, with bequests for mixed-race children in Britain (either presently resident, or soon to be sent there), 1773-1815
• 2.2 Percentage of white men’s wills with acknowledged mixed-race children, proven In Jamaica, that include bequests for mixed-race children in Britain (either presently resident, or soon to be sent there), 1773-1815.131
• 2.3 Professions of testators sending mixed-race children to Britain, by percentage, 1773-1815
• 2.4 Destinations of mixed-race Jamaicans, by percentage, 1773-1815

Redeeming the “Character of the Creoles”: Whiteness, Gender and Creolization in Pre-Revolutionary Saint Domingue

Journal of Historical Sociology
Volume 23, Issue 1 (March 2010)
pages 40–72
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-6443.2009.01359.x

Yvonne Fabella, Lecturer of History
University of Pennsylvania

This article examines the political significance of white creolization in pre-revolutionary French Saint Domingue. Eighteenth-century Europeans tended to view white creoles as having physically, morally, and culturally degenerated due to the tropical climate, the monotony of plantation life, and their interaction with enslaved and free people of color. Yet elite white colonists in Saint Domingue claimed that white creoles possessed certain positive traits due to their new world birth, traits that rendered them physically stronger and potentially more virtuous than the French. Focusing on little-known publications authored by the white creole Moreau de Saint-Méry, this article highlights the deployment of gendered notions of virtue and noble savagery in debates over white creolization. Moreau’s claims, when placed in the context of a conflict between local colonial magistrates and the French Colonial Ministry, challenge interpretations of white creolization as an undesirable, subversive side-effect of colonial slavery. Rather, white colonial men claimed that white colonists knew best how to ensure the obedience of the enslaved precisely because of their creolization.

Read or purchase the article here.

Damn Near White: An African American Family’s Rise from Slavery to Bittersweet Success

University of Missouri Press
October 2010
192 pages
15 illustrations, bibliography index
ISBN-10: 0826218997
ISBN-13: 978-0826218995

Carolyn Marie Wilkins, Professor
Berklee College of Music, Boston, Massachusetts

Carolyn Wilkins grew up defending her racial identity. Because of her light complexion and wavy hair, she spent years struggling to convince others that she was black. Her family’s prominence set Carolyn’s experiences even further apart from those of the average African American. Her father and uncle were well-known lawyers who had graduated from Harvard Law School. Another uncle had been a child prodigy and protégé of Albert Einstein. And her grandfather [J. Ernest Wilkins] had been America’s first black assistant secretary of labor.

Carolyn’s parents insisted she follow the color-conscious rituals of Chicago’s elite black bourgeoisie—experiences Carolyn recalls as some of the most miserable of her entire life. Only in the company of her mischievous Aunt Marjory, a woman who refused to let the conventions of “proper” black society limit her, does Carolyn feel a true connection to her family’s African American heritage.

When Aunt Marjory passes away, Carolyn inherits ten bulging scrapbooks filled with family history and memories. What she finds in these photo albums inspires her to discover the truth about her ancestors—a quest that will eventually involve years of research, thousands of miles of travel, and much soul-searching.

Carolyn learns that her great-grandfather John Bird Wilkins was born into slavery and went on to become a teacher, inventor, newspaperman, renegade Baptist minister, and a bigamist who abandoned five children. And when she discovers that her grandfather J. Ernest Wilkins may have been forced to resign from his labor department post by members of the Eisenhower administration, Carolyn must confront the bittersweet fruits of her family’s generations-long quest for status and approval.

Damn Near White is an insider’s portrait of an unusual American family. Readers will be drawn into Carolyn’s journey as she struggles to redefine herself in light of the long-buried secrets she uncovers. Tackling issues of class, color, and caste, Wilkins reflects on the changes of African American life in U.S. history through her dedicated search to discover her family’s powerful story.

Personal passion fuels Smithsonian exhibit

San Francisco State University News
2010-02-12

Denize Springer

The search for identity is particularly complex for Americans of both African and Native American heritage, according to Assistant Professor of American Indian Studies Robert Keith Collins.

Of Choctaw and African American descent, Collins has turned a personal passion into a career. His research, featured in a major exhibit at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, focuses on the racially motivated laws and other influences and issues that continue to complicate the lives of mixed-heritage people throughout the Americas.

According to the 2000 U.S. census, hundreds of thousands of Americans claim both African and Native American heritage. The tangled relationship between these groups began when Native Americans were enslaved, took African slaves, rescued them from slavery and married freed or freeborn African slaves. Collins’ research involves scouring historical records of the Americas, particularly the slave narratives compiled by the WPA (Works Project Administration) during the Great Depression, which illuminated the dynamics of slave life within Native American nations…

Read the entire article here.