Minnie said William should show more respect for his race and reminded him that his mother was a black woman. His response was to punch her. Judge Berka sentenced him to 30 days in jail.

Posted in Excerpts/Quotes on 2017-07-24 00:38Z by Steven

Minnie [Bradley] returned to Omaha in 1904 and made two more appearances in police court before Judge Berka. The first, in March 1904, was as witness against a man named William Warwick, who was accused of assaulting her. The two had gotten into a heated argument when he bragged to her that, due to his light complexion, he often passed as a white man during his travels out west. He also mentioned that he had been in the company of two white women the previous evening. Minnie said William should show more respect for his race and reminded him that his mother was a black woman. His response was to punch her. Judge Berka sentenced him to 30 days in jail.

Shayne Davidson, “Angry in Omaha,” Captured and Exposed: Vintage Photography & True Crime Stories, June 8, 2017. https://capturedandexposed.com/2017/06/08/angry-in-omaha/.

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Angry in Omaha

Posted in Arts, History, Law, Media Archive, Passing, United States on 2017-06-28 00:47Z by Steven

Angry in Omaha

Captured and Exposed: Vintage Photography & True Crime Stories
2017-06-08

Shayne Davidson


Minnie Bradley’s 1902 mugshot. Collection of the Nebraska State Historical Society.

Minnie Bradley was arrested on the evening of December 11, 1902, and charged with “larceny from the person” or pickpocketing. Someone from the Midway Saloon, a well-known dance hall and whorehouse owned by several notorious Omaha crime bosses, offered to pay her $25 bond. Before she was released, W. H. Breiter showed up at the police station and identified Minnie as the person who had robbed him earlier that evening. Minnie offered Breiter $5 to drop the charge, but he refused, so she spent the night in jail…

…Minnie returned to Omaha in 1904 and made two more appearances in police court before Judge Berka. The first, in March 1904, was as witness against a man named William Warwick, who was accused of assaulting her. The two had gotten into a heated argument when he bragged to her that, due to his light complexion, he often passed as a white man during his travels out west. He also mentioned that he had been in the company of two white women the previous evening. Minnie said William should show more respect for his race and reminded him that his mother was a black woman. His response was to punch her. Judge Berka sentenced him to 30 days in jail…

Read the entire article here.

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The Perils of Passing: The McCarys of Omaha

Posted in Articles, History, Law, Media Archive, Passing, United States on 2013-04-03 21:53Z by Steven

The Perils of Passing: The McCarys of Omaha

Nebraska History
Volume 71, Number 2 (Summer 1990)
pages 64-70

Willard B. Gatewood, Jr. (1931-2011), Former Chancellor and Emeritus Alumni Distinguished Professor of History (1931-2011)
University of Arkansas, Fayetteville

This article presents various aspects of light-skinned black people “passing” for whites by examining the 1919 case of Francis Patrick Dwyer’s suit to annul his marriage to Clara McCary Dwyer after becoming suspicious that their new baby boy had Negro blood. While Dwyer was correct, he failed to win his suit, and his wife was able to divorce him and receive child support in 1923.

A strikingly handsome young woman and her three-year-old son, both fairhaired and blue-eyed, were the star attractions in a sensational court case in Omaha, Nebraska, in the summer of 1919. Her name was Clara McCary Dwyer, whose husband, Francis Patrick Dwyer, had filed suit to have their marriage annulled on the grounds that she had “negro blood in her veins.”· Until 1913 Nebraska law prohibited marriage between whites and persons possessing one-fourth or more Negro blood. In that year the legislature changed the law to ban marriages between white persons and those having “one-eighth or more negro, Japanese or Chinese blood.”

The courtroom drama, which occurred during the Red summer of 1919 when twenty-five race riots occurred in the United States, epitomized the prevailing white attitudes toward race and color. Throughout the spring and summer of that year, the denunciation of blacks as criminals, especially rapists, by the press and trade unions in Omaha undoubtedly had heightened racial tension in the city that ultimately erupted in a riot there late in September 1919. A complicating factor in the Dwyer case was that it involved the phenomenon of “passing,” a process by which fair-complexioned people of Negro ancestry “crossed over the color line” into the white world.

Several forms of “passing” existed among blacks in the United States. One was temporary or convenience passing by which fair-complexioned Negroes occasionally crossed the color line in order to secure decent hotel, travel, and restaurant accommodations or to attend the theater without having to sit in the Jim Crow balcony. Another form was known as “professional passing,” where by a person passed for white in order to hold jobs open only to whites but continued to maintain “a Negro social life.” The third form was passing permanently for white, which involved blotting out the past and severing all contacts with the black community. Among other risks was that of exposure. Because of the secretive nature of permanent passing, it is impossible to ascertain how many black Americans actually passed. Estimates ranged from a few hundred to many thousands annually.

Francis Dwyer, a clerk in a jewelry and leather goods store owned by his brother-in-law, assumed his wife was white until the birth of their son in 1916, when the attending physician, for reasons that are unclear, raised the possibility of Negro ancestry. Once Dwyer became suspicious of his wife’s racial heritage, he apparently refused to live with her and their son. He joined the army in 1917 and upon being mustered out of military service, decided to end the marriage legally on the grounds that he had been deceived by his wife. Because he was Catholic and had been married in the Catholic church, he insisted upon an annulment rather than a divorce…

Read the entire article here.

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