Mixed Race Studies

MALUNGU: The African Origin of the American Melungeons

Eclectica Magazine
July/August 2001

Tim Hashaw

Introduction

They settled in Virginia one year before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. They sparked a major conflict between the Engllish Crown and American colonies one hundred and fifty years before the American Revolution. They lived free in the South nearly two hundred and forty years before the American Civil War.  Yet the African ancestors of the American Melungeons have remained elusive ghosts for the past four centuries; the missing characters in the developing saga of America’s largest mixed community. Now finally, though stridently denied by some descendants and misunderstood by others, the African fathers and mothers of Melungia are beginning to emerge from the dim pages of the past to take their rightful places of honor in American history.

One misconception over Melungeon origins comes from confusion over the status of these African-Americans who, along with whites and Indians, gave birth to this mixed community.  Modern scholars mistakenly assume that the African heritage of Melungeons derives from the offspring of white plantation owners and black female chattel slaves in the years 1780 to 1820.

Wrong on two counts. In fact:

1. The very first black ancestors of Melungeons appeared in tidewater Virginia, not in the 18th century, but in 1619.

2. Not one single Melungeon family can be traced to a white plantation owner and his black female slave. The vast majority of the African ancestors of Melungia were freeborn for more than three hundred years.

This bears repeating.

Melungeons are not the offspring of white southern plantation owners and helpless black slaves. Most of the African ancestors of Melungeons were never chattel slaves. They were frequently black men freed from indentured servitude just like many white servants of the 17th century. Less often, African ancestors of the Melungeons either purchased their freedom from slavery or were freed upon the deaths of their masters.

The black patriarchs of the Melungeons were commonly free African-American men who married white women in Virginia and other southern colonies, often before 1700.  Paul Heinegg in his revealing book, Free African Americans in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland and Delaware, provides strong evidence that less than one percent of all free Africans were born of white slave-owners.

Understanding the status of the African-American ancestors of Melungeons and the era, in which they came to America, is critical to understanding their history and the origin of the name “Melungeon”….

Read the entire article here.

The One-Drop Rule in Reverse? Interracial Marriages in Napoleonic and Restoration France

Law and History Review
Volume 27, Number 3
Fall 2009
University of Illinois

Jennifer Heuer, Associate Professor
Department of History
University of Massachusetts at Amherst

In the early nineteenth century, an obscure rural policeman petitioned the French government with an unusual story.  Charles Fanaye had served with Napoleon’s armies in Egypt.  Chased by Mameluks, he was rescued in the nick of time by a black Ethiopian woman and hidden in her home.  Threatened in turn by the Mameluks, Marie-Hélène (as the woman came to be called) threw in her lot with the French army and followed Fanaye to France.  The couple then sought to wed.  They easily overcame religious barriers when Marie-Hélène was baptized in the Cathedral of Avignon.  But another obstacle was harder to overcome: an 1803 ministerial decree banned marriage between blacks and whites.  Though Fanaye and Marie-Héléne begged for an exception, the decree would plague them for the next sixteen years of their romance.

As we will see, Fanaye’s history was atypical in several regards.  But he was far from the only person to confront the ban on interracial marriage. The decree, which seemed to reinstate a 1778 edict, went hand in hand with the reestablishment of slavery after the French Revolution.  It was officially applied to metropolitan France, rather than the colonies, and was circulated throughout the continental Napoleonic Empire.  It would remain in effect even after Napoleon fell from power, quietly disappearing only in late 1818 and early 1819.

This quiet disappearance has persisted in the historical record: both the ban and its application have been almost completely forgotten.  The reasons for this oversight are both conceptual and practical.  While there is burgeoning interest in the history of slavery in the French empire, historians tend to focus on the drama of emancipation during the Revolution, rather than on the more painful return of slavery after 1802.  When scholars of European history think of miscegenation laws, we often turn immediately to colonial arenas, or look to the later nineteenth and twentieth century when social commentators were particularly obsessed with interracial sex; metropolitan France in the early nineteenth century seems an unlikely site for contestations over racial and family law.  More generally, the supposedly race-blind French model of citizenship, that of republican universalism, has often made it difficult to think about racial categories when discussing French history and politics.

There are also pragmatic reasons why the decree has been forgotten.  The black and mulatto population in metropolitan France was small in the period, at most 5000 people, and there are few records that address them as a group.  Many of the relevant documents are buried in a series at the French National Archives on dispensations for marriage.  While a few are grouped together thematically, many are organized alphabetically, within at least 160 cartons of records.  Others are in a series of administrative correspondence catalogued geographically.  A few are scattered in municipal and departmental archives, often under the rubric of local administration.  These are not categories that promise obvious connections to racial or colonial history…

Read the entire article here.

Representations of the Black Body in Mexican Visual Art: Evidence of an African Historical Presence or a Cultural Myth?

Journal of Black Studies
Volume 39, Number 5 (May 2009)
pages 761-785
DOI: 10.1177/0021934707301474

Wendy E. Phillips, Photographer
Atlanta, GA

Although Africans have been present in Mexico since the time of the Afro-Atlantic slave trade, the larger Mexican culture seems to have forgotten this aspect of its history.  Although the descendents of these original Africans continue to live in the communities of coastal Oaxaca, Guerrero, and Veracruz states, many Mexicans seem to be unaware of their existence. This article reviews works of visual art made from the 1700s through the present that represent images of Mexicans of African descent and provide evidence of a historical Afromestizo presence in Mexico.  The works are also considered as possible sources of evidence about prevailing attitudes about Mexicans of African descent and anxieties about race mixing.  This article provides a brief overview of Mexico’s historical relationship with Africa as a participant in the Afro-Atlantic slave trade and considers the work of muralists, painters, and photographers who have created works of art in various regions of the country.

Read or purchase the article here.

The Specter of Sex: Gendered Foundations of Racial Formation in the United States

State University of New York (SUNY) Press
August 2009
323 pages
Hardcover ISBN13: 978-1-4384-2753-9
Paperback ISBN13: 978-1-4384-2754-6

Sally L. Kitch, Distinguished Professor of Women and Gender Studies
Arizona State University

Genealogy of the formation of race and gender hierarchies in the U.S.

Theories of intersectionality have fundamentally transformed how feminists and critical race scholars understand the relationship between race and gender, but are often limited in their focus on contemporary experiences of interlocking oppressions. In The Specter of Sex, Sally L. Kitch explores the “backstory” of intersectionality theory—the historical formation of the racial and gendered hierarchies that continue to structure U.S. culture today. Kitch uses a genealogical approach to explore how a world already divided by gender ideology became one simultaneously obsessed with judgmental ideas about race, starting in Europe and the English colonies in the late seventeenth century. Through an examination of religious, political, and scientific narratives, public policies and testimonies, laws, court cases, and newspaper accounts, The Specter of Sex provides a rare comparative study of the racial formation of five groups—American Indians, African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and European whites—and reveals gendered patterns that have served white racial dominance and repeated themselves with variations over a two-hundred-year period.

“This gracefully written synthesis of existing historical scholarship advances a position that both asserts distinction between ‘race’ and ‘gender’ as categories and privileges the gendered process of racial formation as key to understanding power and hierarchy in the United States. It is perfect for the classroom and will serve as a guide for theorists who need grounding in history.

Table Of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The “Purloined Letter” of Gendered Race
• Part I: Roots As the Twig is Bent
  • 1. “Women are a Huge Natural Calamity”: The Roots of Western Gender Ideology
  • 2. The First Races in Society: Gendered Roots of Race Formation
  • 3. Gendered Racial Institutions: World Slavery and Nationhood
  • Conclusion: From Gender to Race
• Part II: Bodies Whose Too, Too Solid Flesh?
  • 4. The American “Body Shop”: Gendered Racial Formation in the Colonies and New Republic
  • 5. Enslaved Bodies and Gendered Race
  • 6. Sexual Projection and Race: Science, Politics, and Lust
  • Conclusion: Embodying Race
• Part III: Blood “Off Women Com Owre Manhed”
  • 7. Defining, Measuring, and Ranking Racial Blood: The Ungendered Surface
  • 8. Hardly Gender Neutral
  • 9. Gendered Anti-Miscegenation: Laws and Their Interpretation
  • 10. Preserving White Racial Blood: Rape Accusations and Motherhood
  • Conclusion: Miscegenation as Racial Reconciliation?
• Part IV: Citizenship “My Folks Fought for This Country”
  • 11. What is Citizenship?: Gender and Race
  • 12. Engendering Citizenship: Dependency and Sex
  • 13. “No Can Do” Men and Their Others: Dependency and Inappropriate Gender
  • 14. Mixed Race, Suspect Gender: Both White and . . . Whatever
  • Conclusion: Homosexual Citizenship: A Gendered Racial Oxymoron
• Part V: Implications Patterns for a New Bridge
  • 15. Implications for Feminist Theories of Racial Difference and Antisubordination Politics
  • 16. Gender Implications for Theories of Racial Formation
• Conclusion: Interdependence
• Notes
• Index

The Mulatta and the Politics of Race

University Press of Mississippi
2004
272 pages
bibliography, index
ISBN: 157806676X (9781578066766)

Teresa C. Zackodnik, Professor of English
University of Alberta, Canada

An analysis of how black women used the mulatta figure to contest racial barriers.

From abolition through the years just before the civil rights struggle began, African American women recognized that a mixed-race woman made for a powerful and, at times, very useful figure in the battle for racial justice.

The Mulatta and the Politics of Race traces many key instances in which black women have wielded the image of a racially mixed woman to assault the color line.  In the oratory and fiction of black women from the late 1840s through the 1950s, Teresa C. Zackodnik finds the mulatta to be a metaphor of increasing potency.

Before the Civil War white female abolitionists created the image of the “tragic mulatta,” caught between races, rejected by all. African American women put the mulatta to diverse political use.  Black women used the mulatta figure to invoke and manage American and British abolitionist empathy and to contest racial stereotypes of womanhood in the postbellum United States.  The mulatta aided writers in critiquing the “New Negro Renaissance” and gave writers leverage to subvert the aims of mid-twentieth-century mainstream American culture.

The Mulatta and the Politics of Race focuses on the antislavery lectures and appearances of Ellen Craft and Sarah Parker Remond, the domestic fiction of Pauline Hopkins and Frances Harper, the Harlem Renaissance novels of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen, and the little-known 1950s texts of Dorothy Lee Dickens and Reba Lee.  Throughout, the author discovers the especially valuable and as yet unexplored contributions of these black women and their uses of the mulatta in prose and speech.

Sweet Liberty: The Final Days of Slavery in Martinique

University of Pennsylvania Press
July 2009
312 pages
6 x 9; 7 illustrations
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8122-4172-3
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8122-2227-2
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-8122-0356-1

Rebecca Hartkopf Schloss, Associate Professor of History
Texas A & M University

From its founding, Martinique played an integral role in France’s Atlantic empire. Established in the mid-seventeenth century as a colonial outpost against Spanish and English dominance in the Caribbean, the island was transformed by the increase in European demand for sugar, coffee, and indigo. Like other colonial subjects, Martinicans met the labor needs of cash-crop cultivation by establishing plantations worked by enslaved Africans and by adopting the rigidly hierarchical social structure that accompanied chattel slavery.  After Haiti gained its independence in 1804, Martinique’s economic importance to the French empire increased.  At the same time, there arose questions, both in France and on the island, about the long-term viability of the plantation system, including debates about the ways colonists—especially enslaved Africans and free mixed-race individuals—fit into the French nation.

Sweet Liberty chronicles the history of Martinique from France’s reacquisition of the island from the British in 1802 to the abolition of slavery in 1848. Focusing on the relationship between the island’s widely diverse society and the various waves of French and British colonial administrations, Rebecca Hartkopf Schloss provides a compelling account of Martinique’s social, political, and cultural dynamics during the final years of slavery in the French empire. Schloss explores how various groups—Creole and metropolitan elites, petits blancs, gens de couleur, and enslaved Africans—interacted with one another in a constantly shifting political environment and traces how these interactions influenced the colony’s debates around identity, citizenship, and the boundaries of the French nation.

Based on extensive archival research in Europe and the Americas, Sweet Liberty is a groundbreaking study of a neglected region that traces how race, slavery, class, and gender shaped what it meant to be French on both sides of the Atlantic.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: Sweet Liberty: The Final Days of Slavery in Martinique
• 1. “That Your Hearts Will Blossom and Again Become French”: The Early Napoleonic Period
• 2. “Happy to Consider Itself an Ancient British Possession”: The British Occupation of Martinique
• 3. “Your French and Loyal Hearts”: The First Decade of the Restoration
• 4. “In the Colonies, It Is Impossible That a White Would Align Himself With Slaves”: Shifts in Colonial Policy
• 5. “To Ensure Equality Before Those Laws to Free Men, Whatever Their Color”: Changing Ideas of French Citizenship
• 6. “Amelioration of the White Race” and “The Sacred Rights of Property”: The End of Slavery in the French Atlantic
• Conclusion
• List of Abbreviations
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments

Fathers of Conscience: Mixed-Race Inheritance in the Antebellum South

University Of Georgia Press
February 2009
216 pages
6 x 9 in.
ISBN: 0820332518 (paper), 0820329800 (cloth)

Bernie D. Jones, Associate Professor of Law
Suffolk University

How the courts dealt with wills bequeathing property or freedom to mixed race children.

Fathers of Conscience examines high-court decisions in the antebellum South that involved wills in which white male planters bequeathed property, freedom, or both to women of color and their mixed-race children. These men, whose wills were contested by their white relatives, had used trusts and estates law to give their slave partners and children official recognition and thus circumvent the law of slavery. The will contests that followed determined whether that elevated status would be approved or denied by courts of law.

Bernie D. Jones argues that these will contests indicated a struggle within the elite over race, gender, and class issues-over questions of social mores and who was truly family. Judges thus acted as umpires after a man’s death, deciding whether to permit his attempts to provide for his slave partner and family. Her analysis of these differing judicial opinions on inheritance rights for slave partners makes an important contribution to the literature on the law of slavery in the United States.

Contents

• Preface
• Introduction. Inheritance Rights in the Antebellum South
• Chapter One. Righteous Fathers, Vulnerable Old Men, and Degraded Creatures
• Chapter Two. Slavery, Freedom, and the Rule of Law
• Chapter Three. Justice and Mercy in the Kentucky Court of Appeals
• Chapter Four. Circling the Wagons and Clamping Down: The Mississippi High Court of Errors and Appeals
• Chapter Five. The People of Barnwell against the Supreme Court of South Carolina: The Case of Elijah Willis
• Conclusion. The Law’s Paradox of Property and Power: The Significance of Geography
• Appendix One. Case Indexes
• Appendix Two. Opinions on the Emancipation of Slaves during George Robertson’s Tenure as Chief Justice
• Appendix Three. Supplementary Information Regarding Willis v. Jolliffe
• Notes
• Bibliographic essay
• Index