The Accident of Color: A Story of Race in Reconstruction

Posted in Books, History, Louisiana, Media Archive, Monographs, United States on 2020-06-23 17:36Z by Steven

The Accident of Color: A Story of Race in Reconstruction

W. W. Norton
2020-06-18
336 pages
6.4 x 9.6 in
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-393-24744-2
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-393-53172-5

Daniel Brook

A technicolor history of the first civil rights movement and its collapse into black and white.

In The Accident of Color, Daniel Brook journeys to nineteenth-century New Orleans and Charleston and introduces us to cosmopolitan residents who elude the racial categories the rest of America takes for granted. Before the Civil War, these free, openly mixed-race urbanites enjoyed some rights of citizenship and the privileges of wealth and social status. But after Emancipation, as former slaves move to assert their rights, the black-white binary that rules the rest of the nation begins to intrude. During Reconstruction, a movement arises as mixed-race elites make common cause with the formerly enslaved and allies at the fringes of whiteness in a bid to achieve political and social equality for all.

In some areas, this coalition proved remarkably successful. Activists peacefully integrated the streetcars of Charleston and New Orleans for decades and, for a time, even the New Orleans public schools and the University of South Carolina were educating students of all backgrounds side by side. Tragically, the achievements of this movement were ultimately swept away by a violent political backlash and expunged from the history books, culminating in the Jim Crow laws that would legalize segregation for a half century and usher in the binary racial regime that rules us to this day.

The Accident of Color revisits a crucial inflection point in American history. By returning to the birth of our nation’s singularly narrow racial system, which was forged in the crucible of opposition to civil rights, Brook illuminates the origins of the racial lies we live by.

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Something Old, Something New

Posted in Arts, Audio, Autobiography, Biography, History, Media Archive, Religion, Slavery, United Kingdom, United States on 2015-10-06 15:20Z by Steven

Something Old, Something New

BBC Radio 4
2015-10-06

Johny Pitts, Host

Peter Meanwell, Producer


Recorded & mixed! Finished @BBCRadio4 (Engineer Steve Hellier with Johny Pitts) Source: Peter Meanwell

From Sheffield to South Carolina, Johny Pitts explores alternative Black British identity.

What happens when your Dad’s an African-American soul star [Richie Pitts] and your Mum’s a music-loving girl from working class Sheffield? Are your roots on the terraces at a Sheffield United match, or in the stylings of a Spike Lee film? For writer and photographer Johny Pitts, whose parents met in the heyday of Northern Soul, on the dance floor of the legendary King Mojo club, how he navigates his black roots has always been an issue. Not being directly connected to the Caribbean or West African diaspora culture, all he was told at school was that his ancestors were slaves, so for BBC Radio 4, he heads off to the USA, to trace his father’s musical migration, and tell an alternative story of Black British identity.

From Pitsmore in Sheffield, to Bedford Stuyvesant in New York, and all the way down to South Carolina, where his grandmother picked cotton, Johny Pitts heads off on a journey of self-discovery. On the way he meets author Caryl Phillips, Kadija, a half sister he never knew, and historian Bernard Powers. He visits the Concorde Baptist Church in Brooklyn, New York, and the Bush River Missionary Baptist Church, in Newberry, South Carolina. He tracks down a whole host of long-lost cousins, and talks to Pulitzer winning writer Isabel Wilkerson. On the way he shines a light on the shadows of his ancestry, and finds stories and culture that deliver him to a new understanding of his own mixed race identity and history.

Listen to the story here.

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From Ferguson to Charleston and Beyond, Anguish About Race Keeps Building

Posted in Articles, Law, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2015-06-21 02:59Z by Steven

From Ferguson to Charleston and Beyond, Anguish About Race Keeps Building

The New York Times
2015-06-20

Lydia Polgreen, Johannesburg Bureau Chief

Ferguson. Baltimore. Staten Island. North Charleston. Cleveland.

Over the past year in each of these American cities, an unarmed black male has died at the hands of a police officer, unleashing a torrent of anguish and soul-searching about race in America. Despite video evidence in several of the killings, each has spurred more discord than unity.

Grand juries have tended to give the benefit of the doubt to police officers. National polls revealed deep divisions in how whites and blacks viewed the facts in each case. Whites were more likely to believe officers’ accounts justifying the use of force. Blacks tended to see deeper forces at work: longstanding police bias against black men and a presumption that they are criminals.

Then, on Wednesday night, a young white man walked into a historic black church in Charleston, S.C., and joined a group of worshipers as they bowed their heads over their Bibles. He shot and killed nine of them. In his Facebook profile picture, the suspect, Dylann Roof, wore the flags of racist regimes in South Africa and the former Rhodesia.

The massacre at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston was something else entirely from the police killings. But it, too, has become a racial flash point and swept aside whatever ambiguity seemed to muddle those earlier cases, baldly posing questions about race in America: Was the gunman a crazed loner motivated by nothing more than his own madness? Or was he an extreme product of the same legacy of racism that many black Americans believe sent Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, Eric Garner, Walter Scott and Tamir Rice to their graves?

The debate has already begun…

…America is living through a moment of racial paradox. Never in its history have black people been more fully represented in the public sphere. The United States has a black president and a glamorous first lady who is a descendant of slaves. African-Americans lead the country’s pop culture in many ways, from sports to music to television, where show-runners like Shonda Rhimes and Lee Daniels have created new black icons, including the political fixer Olivia Pope on “Scandal” and the music mogul Cookie Lyon on “Empire.”

It has become commonplace to refer to the generation of young people known as millennials as “post-racial.” Black culture has become so mainstream that a woman born to white parents who had claimed to be black almost broke the Internet last week by saying that she was “transracial.”

Yet in many ways, the situation of black America is dire…

Read the entire article here.

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Emil Guillermo: Rachel Dolezal, Dylann Roof, and Father’s Day

Posted in Articles, Census/Demographics, Law, Media Archive, Passing, United States on 2015-06-21 02:38Z by Steven

Emil Guillermo: Rachel Dolezal, Dylann Roof, and Father’s Day

Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund
2015-06-20

Emil Guillermo

Rachel Dolezal nearly wrecked everyone’s Father’s Day.

You don’t often see a daughter outed so publicly by her white father for passing as an African American, but I guess post-racial filial love isn’t necessarily unconditional.

I admit to being somewhat sympathetic of Rachel D., at first. The Census, our demographic standard, is, after all, a “you are what you say you are” proposition. You can self-identify to your heart’s content. No one is going to enforce a “one drop rule,” like they did in Virginia for hundreds of years to keep marriage a segregated institution.

But Dolezal’s “no drop” rule can also be problematic. And when her family’s outing her became like a reality show audition, leave it to the black man whom she called dad, Albert Wilkerson, to bring things back to earth. “There are bigger issues in this country to be discussing,” he told People magazine. “[But] I’m not going to throw her under the bus.”

Now that’s the kind of love you’ll only find from a real, though fake, “Dad.”…

Read the entire article here.

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Charleston and the Age of Obama

Posted in Articles, Barack Obama, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2015-06-21 02:28Z by Steven

Charleston and the Age of Obama

The New Yorker
2015-06-19

David Remnick, Editor

Between 1882 and 1968, the year Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated, three thousand four hundred and forty-six black men, women, and children were lynched in this country—a practice so vicious and frequent that Mark Twain was moved, in 1901, to write an essay called “The United States of Lyncherdom.” (Twain shelved the essay and plans for a full-length book on lynching because, he told his publisher, if he went forward, “I shouldn’t have even half a friend left down [South].”) These thousands of murders, as studied by the Tuskegee Institute and others, were a means of enforcing white supremacy in the political and economic marketplaces; they served to terrorize black men who might dare to sleep, or even talk, with white women, and to silence black children, like Emmett Till, who were deemed “insolent.”

That legacy of extreme cruelty and unpunished murder as a means of exerting political and physical control of African-Americans cannot be far from our minds right now. Nine people were shot dead in a church in Charleston. How is it possible, while reading about the alleged killer, Dylann Storm Roof, posing darkly in a picture on his Facebook page, the flags of racist Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa sewn to his jacket, not to think that we have witnessed a lynching? Roof, it is true, did not brandish a noose, nor was he backed by a howling mob of Klansmen, as was so often the case in the heyday of American lynching. Subsequent investigation may put at least some of the blame for his actions on one form of derangement or another. And yet the apparent sense of calculation and planning, what a witness reportedly said was the shooter’s statement of purpose in the Emanuel A.M.E. Church as he took up his gun—“You rape our women and you’re taking over our country”—echoed some of the very same racial anxieties, resentments, and hatreds that fuelled the lynchings of an earlier time.

But the words attributed to the shooter are both a throwback and thoroughly contemporary: one recognizes the rhetoric of extreme reaction and racism heard so often in the era of Barack Obama. His language echoed the barely veiled epithets hurled at Obama in the 2008 and 2012 campaigns (“We want our country back!”) and the raw sewage that spewed onto Obama’s Twitter feed (@POTUS) the moment he cheerfully signed on last month. “We still hang for treason don’t we?” one @jeffgully49, who also posted an image of the President in a noose, wrote…

…Obama hates to talk about this. He allows himself so little latitude. Maybe that will change when he is an ex-President focussed on his memoirs. As a very young man he wrote a book about becoming, about identity, about finding community in a black church, about finding a sense of home—in his case, on the South Side of Chicago, with a young lawyer named Michelle Robinson

Read the entire article here.

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Miscegenation is practiced here.

Posted in Excerpts/Quotes on 2012-07-12 04:22Z by Steven

Speaking of morals, you asked me what effect the female population of mixed blood was going to have on society here [in Charleston, South Carolina]. I have looked somewhat into the matter since my return, from what I can learn, I believe there is hardly a young man here of Southern birth, who can afford the expense, who does not protect one of these girls, and few married men who have not two families. Miscegenation is practiced here. I know of nearly a dozen cases where the parties are married. These girls are many of them beautiful, many almost pure white, with blue eyes and light hair, of fine figures and lady-like appearance. Many of them are much whiter than the majority of pure whites, who seem to belong to the order of women known as scraggy, and are the color of a liver colored pointer, having tan colored paws and faces. But few children are born where these girls are protected by single men, while some of the old men have larger colored families. Nothing can be done to rectify this evil, as these girls will not on any account marry a man with a drop of “nigger blood” in his veins.

Life in the South,” Franklin Repository (via: Valley of the Shadow: Civil War Era Newspapers, University of Virginia Library), January 23, 1867, 2 (column 3). http://valley.lib.virginia.edu/news/fr1867/pa.fr.fr.1867.01.23.xml#02

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Life in the South

Posted in Articles, Media Archive, United States on 2012-07-11 22:21Z by Steven

Life in the South

Franklin Repository
Franklin County, Virginia
1867-01-23
page 2, column 3

Source: Valley of the Shadow: Civil War Era Newspapers, University of Virginia Library

The report provides a bleak assessment of life in post-war South Carolina, particularly for union men and blacks who “are at the mercy of a set of wretches, as unprincipled as they are cruel.” The war may have brought about the destruction of the Confederacy, relates the piece, but the outcome has had little impact on everyday life; the antebellum elite continues to rule over society and the ex-slaves are virtually powerless to defend themselves from violence perpetrated by whites.

A friend who is spending the winter in South Carolina for his health, writes us as follows from Charleston, as to the condition of the Freedmen and society generally among the chivalry. It is indeed a painful chapter of human degradation, treason, brutality and misery:

You know that any code of laws suited to a system of slavery must necessarily be barbarous, suited to the 14th or 15th century, but not to the 19th. Civil law here means power to the wealthy few to do as they please, but there is no law for the “poor white,” the Union man, or the Moke. Civil law whips for theft, hangs for larceny and burglary, and as you may have seen from the papers, they have a man now in Walterboro jail sentenced to death, for highway robbery, in that, he took while in our army, and upon a foraging expedition under orders, a wagon load of bacon. He was to have been hung on Jan. 4th or 7th, but an intimation having been given from the headquarters here that most probably their amusement would be interfered with, the Governor has respited him until Feb. 1st. A report of the investigation has been forwarded to the President; what he will do, who knows? The President has disapproved Gen. Howard’s order “to establish Bureau Courts where necessary,” in accordance with the Bureau bill, and consequently there is no protection of any kind for the Freedmen; they are at the mercy of a set of wretches, as unprincipled as they are cruel. What power the President has to set aside any provision of a law passed by Congress, we don’t know; [illeg] that as Commander in Chief of the Army, he can render any law of Congress a farce, by refusing the power necessary to enforce obedience, we do know, and we know also that this is just the situation here. The only thing the U. S. forces here now are doing, is aiding a half civilized people to reduce a defenseless herd to a worse condition than slavery ever was. Should Moke object to being shot and beaten, to being robbed, plundered and cheated, and exercise the right of self defense, these cowardly wolves call at once on the military for aid, in the name of civil law, and it is given; the President has ordered it. The officers of the Bureau are now mere advisory protectors no more, and are compelled to stand powerless and see, and listen, to acts and complaints that make the blood boil.

We’ll state a few instances of what is occurring all over the State. On Christmas eve and day, four Freedmen were murdered on the streets of this city, and a number more cut and stabbed. In Edgefield, on Friday, one of these kind, gentle massas, a high-toned chivalry, chopped the head off a Freedman with an axe.

Over near Lawtonville they work the Moke under the lash, as of yore, in the cotton field and at the port, and extend to him all the other kindnesses of the old system. One high bred Southern gentleman, brim full of the milk of human kindness, boasts that he has shot eighteen niggers. That dozens of these poor creatures are murdered and left to rot in the woods, of whom nothing is known, is true. While out shooting last winter within three miles of this town, we saw where a Moke had just been found with a rifle bullet through his head. When they cannot treat them with cruelty, they cheat and plunder them in every conceivable way. Any thing meaner than a S. C. planter, is impossible to imagine. What redress has Moke? None. If he dislikes this style of thing and complains, we can only say “go to a magistrate and make a complaint.” If he does so, he must give security in $200 or $300, to prosecute, or his complaint is not heard. This is the redress he has, and the satisfaction he gets, unless the certainty of feeling that he’ll be shot the first good opportunity, can be called satisfaction, a fact we don’t see in that light. There are a few localities in which the Justices(?) have some little humanity and regard for justice, but they dare not act. Should they act, and even express a desire to do justice to a Moke, any life insurance company would be warranted in cancelling their policy instanter. Another insuperable obstacle to anything like justice being done is the extensive ramification of the family relation. Suppose the whole of Franklin Co., divided into some hundred plantations and owned in one family connection; all the Mokes and poor whites (“tresh buccra”) under the old system would have been owned by that family connection. Now supposing all the property owners, actuated first by a deadly hatred to the government, second by a hatred to the Moke because he is free, and you see at once, that all the magistrates being members of that family, Moke or “tresh buccra” would have little to show. If they let him live, and shoot and beat him now and then, he ought to be satisfied. The last dodge in North Carolina is this: No one in N. C. who has ever been whipped can vote; therefore they are arresting all Mokes, for anything or nothing,–perjury is, you know, no crime in the South–and whipping them; and have announced their determination to whip every nigger in N. C., so as to disqualify him from voting for members of that convention. The N. C. delegation forgot to mention this amiable resolve in Washington, and so we had to send it on.

The last dodge in S. C. is this: A man sees a “likely nigger,” and preferring to have his services for nothing, swears out a warrant and has him arrested. Having let him lie in a S. C. jail for a few days, he goes to him, and offers to get him out, if he’ll agree to work for him six months or a year for nothing; of course Moke will do anything to get out, and we, from the moral obliquity of our vision, perhaps fail to see much difference between his former and his present condition. During the past week, the humane son of the jailor in this town, has with a club killed one and abused several freedmen in the jail. Suit will be brought against him to-morrow. High toned, honorable men, these moral church going community. Speaking of morals, you asked me what effect the female population of mixed blood was going to have on society here. I have looked somewhat into the matter since my return, from what I can learn, I believe there is hardly a young man here of Southern birth, who can afford the expense, who does not protect one of these girls, and few married men who have not two families. Miscegenation is practiced here. I know of nearly a dozen cases where the parties are married. These girls are many of them beautiful, many almost pure white, with blue eyes and light hair, of fine figures and lady-like appearance. Many of them are much whiter than the majority of pure whites, who seem to belong to the order of women known as scraggy, and are the color of a liver colored pointer, having tan colored paws and faces. But few children are born where these girls are protected by single men, while some of the old men have larger colored families. Nothing can be done to rectify this evil, as these girls will not on any account marry a man with a drop of “nigger blood” in his veins.

Thousands of the freed people here desire to quit the State. Many are going to Florida, some to Mississippi, and a large number to Texas. Northern men have purchased land in Florida, and are here now getting hands.

The people of Orangeburg rose and attempted to drive out the guard there, but the boys in blue having met Johnny before, formed, opened fire and cleared the streets in short order. There is a band there calling themselves “Dead Heads,” who have sworn to kill and drive out all freedmen from that section, and they have murdered four within a week. The cavalry, a detachment of Capt. William Brown’s Anotemicals, are after them.

That these people are slowly emerging from the darkness in which they have lived so long, is evinced by the passage of an act by the Legislature of this State, taxing all books, periodicals and papers coming from other States, twenty-five per cent. on their first cost, and by Georgia passing an act prohibiting all foreigners from holding real estate in that State—foreigners meaning all others than Georgians—which has since been reconsidered. Truly life among such a people is mere existence. Here in Charleston is the only spot where one can live with even a semblance of decency and comfort, and why? Because they know, that the troops once withdrawn, the freedmen would take this town and burn it in less than twenty-four hours. There is but one way to deal with this people, and that is the Irishman’s way with his wife. Appeal to them by the hair, expostulate with them by the shoulders, plead with them over the head. Add to this a sufficient quantity of moral suasion in the shape of bayonets and argumentative bullets, and something may be made of them in time. I would not have you understand that there is no leaven in this lump of the commonest humanity. There are among the young men, the soldiers, and to their credit be it said, they are heartily ashamed of the State, and will one and all quit it as soon as they can command the means. But the power, and the press and pulpit, are in the hands of an old, effete race, and young blood has no opportunity to make itself felt or heard.

That the colored race is doomed to extinction any observant man can see, and but few will be left to trouble the people of 1900. This fact that time will remove the cause of trouble, makes the trouble no less now. Time will cure the toothache, but it hurts at the time for all that. That the race is doomed is evident, and from these and other causes. They are incapable, or too careless to care for each other when sick. I have known them when sick of small-pox or pneumonia rise from their bed and go out into a cold, drizzling rain, yet feel it an outrage if compelled to do so. “We take care of she, we’s free as a frog, hab to take care of she, dats not bein free as a frog.” They care little for their children, and but few are being reared outside of the towns. They will leave their own sick and go any distance to nurse whites, and sit up with them night after night.

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Wealthy free women of color in Charleston, South Carolina during slavery

Posted in History, Media Archive, Slavery, United States, Women on 2011-12-16 04:55Z by Steven

Wealthy free women of color in Charleston, South Carolina during slavery

University of Massachusetts, Amherst
2007
271 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3275800
ISBN: 9780549175599

Rita Reynolds, Assistant Professor of History
Wagner College, Staten Island, New York

This dissertation focuses on the lives and experiences of a small group of affluent free mulatto women in antebellum Charleston, South Carolina. Unlike their enslaved sisters we know very little about their community and the place they occupied in it. To comprehend the everyday world wealthy free women of color inhabited I begin by examining the origins of the wealthy free colored community in Charleston. I then investigate individual case studies of five wealthy free mulatto and black women and how their varying choices, made under differing degrees of societal duress, molded and formed their lives. Biographical sketches of Rachel and Martha Inglis, Nancy Randall, Hagar Richardson and Margaret Bettingall consider the different options each woman experienced under the same social, economic and racial framework. All five women (whose stories are told here for the first time) dealt with enslavement from either a personal perspective as slaves themselves, or as a recent memory in recalling a mother or grandmother’s bondage. Their stories relate how the lives of wealthy free women of color were paradoxical and how they often dealt with triumph and tragedy in the same instance.

Like the majority of wealthy southern white women who spent a portion of their time as sophisticated urbanites, wealthy free women of color also set out to participate as free people in a slave society. To fully share in the economic and social benefits of society these women made deliberate efforts to improve their station through education, religious participation, social institutions and caste and racial identification with their wealthy white neighbors. However, the oppressive nature of Southern slave society greatly thwarted their best efforts. As a result, free blacks basic rights were fundamentally denied. This examination of five wealthy free women of color will analyze the manner in which social, community and family relationships influenced the world these women occupied. Racial and class status were also defining creeds for free wealthy women of color. By probing into the importance of race and class affiliations in the free mulatto community a clearer portrait of racial hierarchy among the wealthy emerges.

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