Mixed Race Studies

Employee’s Change in Racial Self-Identification Cannot Support Discrimination Claim if Employer Unaware of Change

JD Supra Business Advisor
2015-10-05

Jonathan Crotty
Parker Poe Adams & Bernstein LLP, Charlotte, North Carolina

Michael Vanesse
Parker Poe Adams & Bernstein LLP, Charlotte, North Carolina

In recent years, more Americans have begun identifying themselves as biracial or of mixed racial heritage. This shift has resulted in changes to census and other forms where people are asked to self-identify by race. In addition, some persons of mixed heritage may change their personal identification with one racial category over time. However, as recently pointed out by the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, this change cannot form the basis for a race discrimination claim if unknown to the employer at the time the questioned decisions were made.

In Fagerstrom v. City of Savannah, the plaintiff was a police captain of Swedish and Japanese heritage. When filling out forms used for affirmative action purposes, the plaintiff had identified himself as white. When passed over for promotion to major, the plaintiff sued, alleging that he had been discriminated against based on his race in favor of two white captains. The plaintiff said that he changed his self-identification to Asian-American several years previously…

Read the entire article here.

The Cherokee Rose: A Novel Of Gardens & Ghosts

John F. Blair
2015-04-07
264 pages
6×9
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-89587-635-5

Tiya Miles, Elsa Barkley Brown Collegiate Professor of African American Women’s History
University of Michigan

Written by an award-winning historian and recipient of a recent MacArthur “Genius Grant,” The Cherokee Rose explores territory reminiscent of the bestselling and beloved works of Alice Walker, Octavia Butler, and Louise Erdrich. Now, Tiya Miles’s luminous but highly accessible novel examines a little-known aspect of America’s past—slaveholding by Southern Creeks and Cherokees—and its legacy in the lives of three young women who are drawn to the Georgia plantation where scenes of extreme cruelty and equally extraordinary compassion once played out.

Based on the author’s in-depth and award-winning research into archival sources at the Chief Vann House Historic Site in Chatsworth, Georgia, and the Moravian mission sponsored there in the early 1800s, Miles has blended this fascinating history with a contemporary cast of engaging and memorable characters, including Jinx, the free-spirited historian exploring her tribe’s complicated racial history; Ruth, whose mother sought refuge from a troubled marriage in her beloved garden and the cosmetic empire she built from its bounty; Cheyenne, the Southern black debutante seeking to connect with a meaningful personal history; and, hovering above them all, the spirit of long-gone Mary Ann Battis, a young woman suspected of burning a mission to the ground and then disappearing from tribal records. Together, the women’s discoveries about the secrets of the Cherokee plantation trace their attempts to connect with the strong spirits of the past and reconcile the conflicts in their own lives.

Down Blige Road: Where There’s No Place Like Home

Richmond Hill Reflections
Richmond Hill, Georgia
Volume 10, Number 4 (September 2014)
pages 57-60

Leslie Ann Berg (Photos by Callie Beale Photography)

Richmond Hill’s history is engrained deep within the walls of its old buildings, street names, and its land. But there is another place where history runs deep in Richmond Hill. It is a living, breathing history that not only thrived centuries ago, but is still thriving today. It is a history that courses through the very veins of the Richmond Hill people: It is the history of bloodlines.

Some of us are military families that found our way to Richmond Hill because of our duty, others transferred here for a job, and still others came to Richmond Hill for its quiet, safe community and great schools. But there is a very real and permanent group of people who live in Richmond Hill because it is home in the deepest sense of the word: Richmond Hill is where their ancestors settled and where they choose to remain. This group of people is the Blige family.

Meeting a member of the Blige family is like meeting an old friend. They are warm, welcoming, and full of jovial conversation. As I sat around Albertha Blige’s dining room table with her cousin Francis, and her mother Dorothy, and Uncle Pete, both in their 80s, we discussed Blige family history, traditions, and folklore. The women were tight-lipped when it came to telling stories, but Uncle Pete opened up and let me in on who exactly the Bliges were and are.

The Bliges made their way to Richmond Hill after the Civil War in 1875, when three brothers, Andrew, Benjamin, and Rently Blige, migrated south from Charleston, South Carolina. All three bothers married and had eight, nine, and 11 children respectively and so began the large Blige family of Richmond Hill. The brothers worked for wages at the Ogeechee River plantations. As their children grew, the family purchased land from Thomas Savage Clay, a man who owned several plantations in the Richmond Hill area.

Owning land was monumental for the families of emancipated slaves like the Bliges, yet life wasn’t easy. Uncle Pete, Benjamin Blige’s grandson and one of 20 children, recalls what life was like when he was a boy: “[My father] worked about 60 miles from [Richmond Hill]. He left on Sunday evenings and didn’t come back for 2 weeks. My mother was here taking care of the farm. The kids worked… that’s why they had so many kids. Kids carried the farm and my mother did the housework and watched the kids.”…

…Uncle Pete’s accounts of his family may sound like a typical African American ancestral history in the southeastern United States, but beneath the commonalities lies a forgotten history, a history that never made its way into the history books.

The Blige’s African American ancestry is vibrant and evident, yet they are also of Cherokee Indian decent. African-Native Americans? Yes, and in fact, African-Native Americans made up a significant percentage of Native Americans living in the South in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Yet their existence is not widely accounted for in history.

The American history that most of us are familiar with is one that paints a picture of segregated ethnic groups, depicting Whites as slave owners, Africans as slaves, and Native Americans as tribe members. In most of our minds, all three groups were separate and played a very specific and hierarchical role in history. Yet, before North America was widely colonized, distinct segregation did not exist, and the interaction between Africans and Native Americans was somewhat frequent. Enslaved Africans escaped to Native American tribes (some tribes even hosted stops on the Underground Railroad), some Native Americans were enslaved by Europeans alongside Africans, and some Native Americans had African slaves. Often times, the two groups worked alongside each other, lived together, and shared recipes, myths, legends, and herbal remedies. Africans and Native Americans intermarried and had children. In fact, relations were so frequent that when a census was taken in the early 1800s, 10% of the Cherokee Nation was of African descent; 100 years later, this number increased to 50%.

As interaction between the Africans and Native Americans increased, colonists felt a need to break their alliance and issue laws that secured the land and property the Europeans had acquired. Once the American government was established and began to thrive, such laws were carried out. Only then did the rights ot slave owners gain tremendous strength, while the rights of Africans and Native Americans fell to the wayside. In order to enforce the new laws and segregate the two ethnic groups, a census was taken to categorize all individuals as African or Native American. Categorization was based solely on skin color; consequently, much of the African-Native American history, culture, and ancestral lines were erased. Fast forward 300 years and most Americans know very little, it anything, about this fascinating ethnic group.

The Blige family shares in this incredible story of the African-Native Americans. Their bloodline is unique and in many ways, we wall never truly uncover the rich culture ot the African-Native American due to the lack ot documentation. But the Blige family has main tained a connection to their African-Native American ancestors in their ability to live off the land and their lifelong practice olt faith and spirituality…

Read the entire article here.

Black History Month celebrates both race and ethnicity

The Red & Black
University Georgia Student Newspaper
Athens, Georgia
2014-07-02

Mariya Lewter, Sphomore
Decatur, Georgia

As a person of “mixed” race, I’ve always found it difficult to truly racially identify myself. Not because I don’t know who I am, but because others refused to accept my definition of who I am.

Growing up, I attended predominantly black schools. There were few kids who looked like me, and I can probably count on one hand how many students were not African-American.

My peers had a hard time guessing my race because I have a light skin complexion, but black facial features and curly hair. So I often got asked the question, “What are you?”…

…I know how I look, but I also know how I feel and how I was raised. I was raised with black culture in a black community with a black family. My blood is only one-fourth Caucasian, but according to everyone around me, because I’m fair-skinned, there was no way I could be black.

This mindset needs to change…

Read the entire article here.

Growing Up Black in American Apartheid – Ford Pt1

Reality Asserts Itself
The Real News Network
2013-10-23

Paul Jay, Host

Glen Ford, Executive Editor
Black Agenda Report

On Reality Asserts Itself with Paul Jay: Glen Ford, Executive Editor of Black Agenda Report, tells his story as a red-diaper baby, growing up facing racism in the North living with his white activist mother, and living in the Deep South with his black deejay father.

Amalgamation

Weekly Banner-Watchman
Athens, Georgia
1889-03-26
page 1, columns 3-4
The Athens Historic Newspaper database is a project of the Digital Library of Georgia as part of Georgia HomePLACE.
Transcribed by Steven F. Riley

A Reply By Rev. S. P. Richardson D. D. to a Sermon By Dr. Talmage, Preached in Brooklyn, N.Y. March 3rd, on “The United States, Immigration Ethology, and the Amalgamation of All the Races.

Text Acts XVII and part of the 20th verse, “And hath made of one blood all nations,” (the whole verse) of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation.” The whole verse shows clearly that God, instead of intending to unite by immigration and amalgamation all nationalities, before determined and appointed their bounds of separation. He gave Africa to Ham, Asia to Shem and Europe and the West to Japheth. He also gave form, brain and color to each family suited to develop the countries in which he placed them.

Dr. Talmadge says: “The advantage of the influx of nations, through mighty additions of foreign population to our above population I think God is giving, to fill this land with a race of people 95 per cent superior to anything the world has ever seen. Marriage outside of one own nationality and with another style of nationality is a mighty gain.”

The Doctor then speaks of himself and of the very great gain by mixing the Scotch and Irish. Dr. Talmage knows that the European nations are largely made up of the white or Japhethic race, all of the one primordial race. The Doctor is a great man in some respects, but what would he have been if only his Scotch and Irish blood had been supplemented with a little sprinkling of negro, Indian and Hottentot? He proposes to make (not the North) “but the whole United States a great caldron, in which to mix all races and all nationalities, and to formulate in this caldron, out of all races, a new race or manhood “95 par cent, superior to anything this world has ever seen.”

The Doctor proves, as he thinks, from his garbled text, and from a scientific analysis of one single part of man, “the blood” that all men are the same. Now if the Doctor really wanted to be fair in his presentation of his subject to the world, why did he not subject the hair, skin, bones and odor of all the races to the same analysis? Why just take one thing, “the blood.” All animals have some one thing in common with man, seeing, hearing and tasting belong to the ass as well as the man.

If all the races are one when put into his big caldron, will they not still be one when he takes them out? If the putting of all the races into the big caldron, with all their different colors and odors, would make them all Scotch-Irish, it might be well to put them in, but so far as the experiment has been made up to date, the facts are that in exact proportion as you put in white, black, or yellow, it comes out white, black or yellow in the very same proportion it was put in. If the white and black mix they will be mulattoes in all coming generations.

I have never seen the results of amalgamation on so large a scale as the Doctor proposes with his great caldron; but I have seen the white, black and Indian, all mixed up in one person, but that person was nothing like Dr. Talmage’s beauty nor was he 95 per cent. beyond anything I had ever seen. The white and yellow were very much marred in the mixture, and the black not much improved, if improved at all. The mulatto may, in some respects, be an improvement on the negro, but he is certainly no improvement on the white man, and in the long run the mulatto, like all the other hybrids, becomes extinct. My long observation goes to prove that in mixing the races all are weakened and none are benefitted. All the different families of the same race may be benefitted by mixing, like the Scotch and the Irish, but never by mixing the races. If God had intended the amalgamation of all the races, why did He, by creation, or miraculous interposition separate the races, and appoint them bounds, and give to each the place of his habitation. The negro is not a human invention, nor is the white or yellow man, but a divine appointment. The three colors are primordial, and are not radically changed by food, or climate. The negro was black four thousand years ago, as he is now. God says he cannot change his skin any more than the leopard can change his spots, and yet the Doctor would change God’s decree.

Europe and the North brought the negro from his God-given home, and sold him to the South, then becoming dissatisfied with what they had done, destroyed a half million of Southern white people to set the four million of negroes free. In their modes of warfare they showed that they were capable of the deepest depravity, and really acted worse than common Savages. Now they are dissatisfied with the freedom of the negro, and their most popular and sensational preacher sounded the bugle note on the 3d of March in Brooklyn, N.Y., to rig up a big caldron, into which be proposes to cast both negroes and whites, and stew them both down to a common mulatto, and destroy both the white and black races, and substitute them with a race of mulattoes, a type of humanity God never made. There is not a mulatto or mule in the primordial type, in the kingdom of nature. The Bible, experience and God in universal nature, are all pronounced against the amalgamation of the races. I have never known a Scotch-Irishman, Dutchman or Englishman, not even a cold blooded Yankee to improve their posterity by mixing with negroes and Indians. Nor have I ever known the negro or Indian much improved by mixing with them. The real facts are the negro has no more affinities for the white and yellow races, than they have for him.

Dr. Talmage says: “There was a time when I entertained race prejudices, but thanks to God that prejudice is gone and if I set in a church on one side a black man and on the other side an Indian and before me a Chinaman and behind me a Turk, I would be as happy as I am now standing in the presence of this brilliant auiience. The sooner we get this corpse of race prejudice buried the healthier will be (not our Northern) but American atmosphere.”  This is the most pronounced social equality and amalgamation I have ever heard from any man. I have denied, that the Northern churches held any such views, and that it was only a ghost of Southern imagination. Dr. Talmage is a representative mam, and knows the mind and feelings of the North.

Dr. Talmage ought to be a good Presbyterian and let God’s divine decrees alone. Did God not ordain the races? The Doctor ought to be tried for heresy and put out of the church for trying to violate the divine decrees by making mulattoes out of people which God has made white and black. I would suggest to the good Doctor and his brilliant congregation, to make the experiment of mixing the races on a smaller scale, and not have so large a funeral all at onca. Let one of the Doctor’s daughters marry a negro, and another a Chinamen, and another a Hottentot, and then let his Elders follow his exaple, and take time and see if, on a small scale, they can produce a race 95 per cent above anything the world has ever seen.  Then show his picture of this new development to his Northern friends, who drive the negro children out of their white public schools.  If the North will fix up large gardens and invite the negroes to come up North among their friends, and then enter into a hearty amalgamation, the negro problem may be solved.

If the good Doctor will take the time and pains to review the history of nations, their decay and final fall, he will see that in most instances their ruin was the result, both religiously and politically of mixing nations and amalgamation. God forbade the Jews to mix with other nations. Dr. Talmage, in the face of the Bible, proposes to build up a great nation out of the very causes that have destroyed greater nations. I have no doubt but our good Dr. Talmage and brilliant Brooklyn congregations would suffer crucifixion before they would mix their families with negroes, Chinamen and Hottentots. This great country has been built up, not by the Hametic or Shemetic races, but by the children of Japheth–English, Dutch, Scotch and Irish, and the country will never be injured by the immigration, of those nationalities, or our amalgamation with them. I am English and German, but no negro or Chinaman. An Englishman or Scotchman is not a foreigner in this country, but one of the same white family. —S. P. Richardson.

The Life and Times of Mary Musgrove

University Press of Florida
2012-10-21
296 pages
6 x 9
Cloth ISBN 13: 978-0-8130-4221-3

Steven C. Hahn, Associate Professor of History
St. Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota

One of the most recognizable names of the colonial Deep South

The story of Mary Musgrove (1700-1764), a Creek Indian-English woman struggling for success in colonial society, is an improbable one.

As a literate Christian, entrepreneur, and wife of an Anglican clergyman, Mary was one of a small number of “mixed blood” Indians to achieve a position of prominence among English colonists. Born to a Creek mother and an English father, Mary’s bicultural heritage prepared her for an eventful adulthood spent in the rough and tumble world of Colonial Georgia Indian affairs.

Active in diplomacy, trade, and politics—affairs typically dominated by men—Mary worked as an interpreter between the Creek Indians and the colonists–although some argue that she did so for her own gains, altering translations to sway transactions in her favor. Widowed twice in the prime of her life, Mary and her successive husbands claimed vast tracts of land in Georgia (illegally, as British officials would have it) by virtue of her Indian heritage, thereby souring her relationship with the colony’s governing officials and severely straining the colony’s relationship with the Creek Indians.

Using Mary’s life as a narrative thread, Steven Hahn explores the connected histories of the Creek Indians and the colonies of South Carolina and Georgia. He demonstrates how the fluidity of race and gender relations on the southern frontier eventually succumbed to more rigid hierarchies that supported the region’s emerging plantation system.

Cherokee Phoenix: Remarks on the Report of the Committee on Indian Affairs in the House of Representatives

Cherokee Phoenix and Indians’ Advocate
New Echota, Georgia
Wednesday, 1830-03-30
Volume II, Number 50
Page 1, column 1b; Page 2, column 2b
Source: Hunter Library, Western Carolina University and Georgia Historic Newspapers

We have read that part of the report of the Committee on Indian Affairs in the House of Representatives, which describes the condition of the Cherokees, with feelings of indignation, and sincere regret that otherwise intelligent men should be prompted by self-interest, to the reiteration of studied and criminal misrepresentations.  We were aware, considering the political opinions of a majority of the committee, of the general principles which would be promulgated by them, still we did not in the least suppose that, to justify the policy of removing the Cherokees, such unfounded and untenable premises would be resorted to.  But it is even so.  As truth cannot be brought to second their design, misstatements and falsehoods, derived from interested and mercenary persons must be put in requisition.  It matters not what is sacrificed, so that the great arm of removing and destroying (as we do now verily believe) the Indians may be accomplished.  We can now no longer exercise charity for the advocates of Indian emigration, when it is apparent that their design is intended to be brought about by deception-this is the battery to demolish truth and justice, & with what skill and dexterity it is handled, may be learnt from the following extracts of the report.

The committee are constrained to believe, from the effects of the new institutions, [Cherokee Government]  and the sentiments and principles of most of those who have the direction of them that the Cherokee Indians of pure blood, as they did not understand the design, so they are not likely to profit by the new order of things.

The committee here hazard assertions gratuitously. How do they know in the first place, “the sentiments and principles of most of those who have the direction of these new institutions?”  By what process have they been led to the knowledge and  what are the sentiments and principles here spoken of?  Should they not in justice to themselves, have stated what they are?  The sentiments and principles of the Cherokees are contained in the written constitution long ago made public, which secures to every free man equal rights and privileges.- In the second place, how do the committee know that the full blooded Cherokees did not understand the design of these new institutions, and of course are not likely to be profited.  We take it for granted that they did understand them, for these new institutions were sanctioned by them, having been reduced into a written form by persons (some of pure blood too) elected for the purpose by their votes.
 
When the mixed race began to assert its superiority, may be dated the commencement of the deterioration of the mass of the tribe.

When the mixed Cherokees were admitted into the councils of the nations “may be dated,” the overthrow of Indian prejudices against civilization, and consequently the commencement of that improvement which has so justly distinguished the Cherokees, the assertions of the committee to the contrary notwithstanding.

That part of their ancient usages which secured an equal division of the presents and spoils which fortune threw in their way, has been slowly undermined.  Wealth has long since become the principal badge of distinction among them, and those who possess it constitute a distinct class.  However patriotic or public spirited some few individuals of those who were active in forming the new government may have originally been they have at last been compelled to yield to the general spirit of those around them; and the only tendency yet perceivable in the new institutions has been to enable those who control them to appropriate the whole resources of the tribe to themselves.  For this purpose, they have in effect, taken the regulation of their trade into their own hands.  They appear, also to have established something in the nature of a loan office or bank, in which are deposited the funds arising from the annuities payable by the Government; and these are lent out among themselves or their favorites.  The committee have not been able to learn, that the common Indians have shared any part of the annuities of the tribe, for many years.  The number of those who control the Government are understood not to exceed twenty-five or thirty persons.  These, together with their families and immediate dependents and connexions (sic), may be said to constitute the whole commonwealth, so far as any real advantages can be said to attend the new system of government.  Besides this class, which embraces all the large fortune holders, there are about two hundred families, constituting a middle class in the tribe.  This class is composed of the Indians of mixed blood, and white men with Indian families.  All of them have some property, and may be said to live in some degree of comfort.  The committee are not aware that a single Indian of unmixed blood, belongs to either of the two higher classes of Cherokees, but they suppose there may be a few such among them.  The third class of the free population is composed of Indians, properly so denominated, who, like their brethren of the red race everywhere else, exhibit the same characteristic traits of unconquerable indolence, improvidence, and inordinate love of ardent spirits.  They are the tenants of the wretched huts and villages in the recesses of the mountains and elsewhere, remote from the highways and the neighborhood of the wealthy and prosperous.

In regard to the annuities, we have stated in a previous number of the Phoenix, that they are not divided among the people as in ancient time, but paid into the treasury of the nation and kept as a public fund for the support of the government and other public objects.  Do the committee suppose that these annuities are so large that they are the cause of much wealth and corruption to the “mixed class?”  ???_try do we can tell them better.  The whole amount of these annuities is very little over six thousand dollars and the sum paid yearly to each member of the council “mixed” and “pure blood” for services, is from seventy to one-hundred  dollars.- This small pittance is all they receive.- There is now no “loan office or bank” among the Cherokees.  When there was one, every person; “mixed’ or “pure blood” if he was able to pay, had the liberty of borrowing.  It is therefore false, positively false, when they say that “those who control the new institutions appropriate the whole resources of the tribe to themselves.”  It is a little surprising that the Indian committee in congress should indirectly advocate cold ignorant customs of the Cherokees; such as the custom of dividing among the individuals of the nation, the annuities, a dollar’s worth or so of goods to each, which could not possibly benefit them.  It is civilization which has changed the custom, and however the Hon. Committee may be disposed to impugn the motives of those who have been instrumental in bringing about the change, it is a triumphant instance of the civil improvement of the Cherokees.

But the most remarkable reasoning of the Committee is where they say that the number of those who control the Cherokee government does not exceed twenty-five or thirty.  What of that?  How many control the government of the United States of 12,000,000 inhabitants?  One Chief for 40,000 souls, while the avaricious, the despotic and wealthy “mixed” Cherokee is a representative of only a few hundred.  What did the committee mean?  Did they intend this as an objection to the new institution?

If the committee are not aware whether a single unmixed Cherokee belongs to either of the higher classes, it is because they did not seek testimony from a proper source, or they did not wish to believe existing facts. The speaker of the council of last year was of “pure blood.”-the Clerk of the Council was of “pure blood.”…

Read the entire article here or here.

Anti-Miscegenation Movement

Columbus Enquirer-Sun
Columbus, Georgia
1886-09-24
page 5, column 3

Source: Digital Library of Georgia

Organization In Louisiana to Prevent the Intermarriage of Whites and Blacks

New Orleans. September 20.—A practical movement has been inaugurated in Bossier parish, in this state, for the abolition of miscegenation. There have been during the past year or so several spasmodic efforts in this direction, both in Louisiana and Mississippi. Self-constituted vigilance committees have warned white men with negro wives and mistresses to leave them and lead a regular life, and when this failed have ridden through the parish, severely whipping both men and women who disobeyed this order.  In Mississippi there were several arrests, convictions and sentences for violation of the law prohibiting intermarriages between the races, and in Louisiana one man was severely cut in a scrimmage arising from this movement. But these anti-miscegenation raids were spasmodic, the freaks of a few wild young men. The present movement is more serious and more general, and is a thorough and practical organization, like that of the prohibitionist, to break up miscegenation.

The first meeting was held in Bossier parish in July, whore the subject was generally discussed, and adjourned over to this month to find the drift of public opinion. It was found that public sentiment among the whites was well nigh unanimous on the subject. The recent meeting held at Cottage Grove, in the upper portion of Bossier parish, was the result. There was no secrecy or mystery about it. It was an open mass meeting, in which all the people of the neighborhood—farmers, clergymen and others—assembled. The meeting was opened with prayer and presided over by a clergyman. The resolutions were of the strongest character. Those guilty of miscegenation were threatened with social boycott, and warned that they were insulting the race feelings and moral principles of the community. But the gist of the meeting was the appointment of a vigilance committee of nineteen to serve notices on these white men living with negro women—the vigilants were not instructed as to what they should if this warning is unheeded—and the appointment of another committee to assist in the organization of anti-miscegenation societies in other parishes in the state.

This plan of operation is warmly supported by the press. The Bossier Banner declares that race purity must be preserved at all hazards, the line must be sharply and distinctly drawn, and those who cross it must pay the penalty. The Robeline Reporter of Natchitoches, edited by the father of the present attorney-general of the state, approves the idea.

As this sentiment prevails in most of the neighboring parishes, it is thought that the present organization, by giving a start to the anti-miscegenation sentiment, which in this part of the state is now stronger than the anti-liquor sentiment, it will spread through north Louisiana if not into the neighboring states of Mississippi, Texas and Arkansas. There is no law in Louisiana against the intermarriage or cohabitation of f[r]aces, this prohibition, which was strongly urged by many persons, being voted down in the late constitutional convention, but miscegenation is growing rarer every day, in deference to the strong public sentiment on this point.

A Race Question: A Negro Man With a White Wife—Some Nice Points of Law—Indians Have Greater Nuptial Privileges.

Columbus Enquirer-Sun
Columbus, Georgia
Saturday, 1886-11-20
page 8, columns 3-4

Source: Digital Library of Georgia

A very interesting case, both as to the facts and the nice legal points involved, was tried this week at the circuit court in Seale [Alabama].  A negro man was on trial, charged with living in adultery with an alleged white woman.  The prisoner had been living with the woman as his wife for quite a number of years, and had begotten by her a family of children.  As the parties were seated within the bar of the court, they formed an interesting group. The man was as black as midnight, and in appearance, showed prominently every characteristic of the African make up. The woman, on the other hand, was white of skin and had in every liniament of her features the Caucassian cast of countenance. Their two boys, aged respectively about 8 and 10, sat between the black father on the one side and the white mother on the the other, and were of a yellow or copper color.

The defense was based on the position that the woman, although white to all appearances, was yet of mixed blood. The state conceded that if the woman was of such mixed blood, as in contemplation of law, she would be deemed a negro; that then the man could not be found guilty. But the state insisted that if the woman was in fact, or in law, a white woman, that then her marriage with the defendant was unlawful and invalid, and the living together being admitted, the man would be guilty as charged.  So the case tuned on the point whether the woman was of white or mixed blood.

On this point the woman herself testified that as far back as could remember she was living with negroes; that she had never seen either of her parents, but that her mother was a white woman, and she had been told that her father was a bright mulatto or part Indian.

No other positive testimony was introduced. The state asked the court to charge the jury that if they believed the woman’s testimony that then they must find the prisoner guilty, and argued in support of the request that the woman having been shown to be of white maternity, that by legal presumption she herself ws white until the contrary was shown, or until she was shown to be of negro paternity; that this legal presumption put the burden of proof upon the defendant, which burden was not lifted by her vague and hearsay testimony as to the mixed blood of her father. The court charged as requested.

The defense insisted that testimony about one’s own nativity, such as age, place of birth, parentage, etc., was, in the absence of better testimony, a matter of common report, and as the woman had testified that she had been told that her father was of mixed blood or part Indian, that her testimony on that point should have its due weight, and ashed the court to charge that, looking at the whole testimony, if the jury had a reasonable doubt us to whether the woman was of white or mixed blood, that then they must acquit.

The court again charged as requested.

It cropped out incidentally in the discussion that although it is unlawful for whites and negroes to intermarry, yet one of aboriginal blood may marry either white or black according to his own supreme election and not be subject to any legal penalty. So that, if one is arraigned on a charge of miscegenation, they have only to induce the belief that they are of Indian origin and thereby escape the clutches of the law. There are some curious things in municipal as well as natural law. In this case the verdict was not guilty.