Mixed Race Studies

William Wells Brown: A Reader

University of Georgia Press
2008-12-15
488 pages
6 b&w photos
Trim size: 6 x 9
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8203-3223-9
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8203-3224-6
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-8203-3634-3

William Wells Brown (1814–1884)

Edited by:

Ezra Greenspan, Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Professor of English
Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas

Born into slavery in Kentucky, William Wells Brown (1814–1884) was kept functionally illiterate until after his escape at the age of nineteen. Remarkably, he became the most widely published and versatile African American writer of the nineteenth century as well as an important leader in the abolitionist and temperance movements.

Brown wrote extensively as a journalist but was also a pioneer in other literary genres. His many groundbreaking works include Clotel, the first African American novel; The Escape: or, A Leap for Freedom, the first published African American play; Three Years in Europe, the first African American European travelogue; and The Negro in the American Rebellion, the first history of African American military service in the Civil War. Brown also wrote one of the most important fugitive slave narratives and a striking array of subsequent self-narratives so inventively shifting in content, form, and textual presentation as to place him second only to Frederick Douglass among nineteenth-century African American autobiographers.

Ezra Greenspan has selected the best of Brown’s work in a range of fields including fiction, drama, history, politics, autobiography, and travel. The volume opens with an introductory essay that places Brown and his work in a cultural and political context. Each chapter begins with a detailed introductory headnote, and the contents are closely annotated; there is also a selected bibliography. This reader offers an introduction to the work of a major African American writer who was engaged in many of the important debates of his time.

Almost Free: A Story about Family and Race in Antebellum Virginia

University of Georgia Press
June 2012
192 pages
6 b&w photos, 1 map
Trim size: 5.5 x 8.5
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8203-3229-1
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8203-3230-7
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-8203-4364-8

Eva Sheppard Wolf, Associate Professor of History
San Francisco State University

In Almost Free, Eva Sheppard Wolf uses the story of Samuel Johnson, a free black man from Virginia attempting to free his family, to add detail and depth to our understanding of the lives of free blacks in the South.

There were several paths to freedom for slaves, each of them difficult. After ten years of elaborate dealings and negotiations, Johnson earned manumission in August 1812. An illiterate “mulatto” who had worked at the tavern in Warrenton as a slave, Johnson as a freeman was an anomaly, since free blacks made up only 3 percent of Virginia’s population. Johnson stayed in Fauquier County and managed to buy his enslaved family, but the law of the time required that they leave Virginia if Johnson freed them. Johnson opted to stay. Because slaves’ marriages had no legal standing, Johnson was not legally married to his enslaved wife, and in the event of his death his family would be sold to new owners. Johnson’s story dramatically illustrates the many harsh realities and cruel ironies faced by blacks in a society hostile to their freedom.

Wolf argues that despite the many obstacles Johnson and others faced, race relations were more flexible during the early American republic than is commonly believed. It could actually be easier for a free black man to earn the favor of elite whites than it would be for blacks in general in the post-Reconstruction South. Wolf demonstrates the ways in which race was constructed by individuals in their day-to-day interactions, arguing that racial status was not simply a legal fact but a fluid and changeable condition. Almost Free looks beyond the majority experience, focusing on those at society’s edges to gain a deeper understanding of the meaning of freedom in the slaveholding South.

A Man Called White: The Autobiography of Walter White

University of Georgia Press
1994 (First published in 1948)
392 pages
5.5 x 8.5
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8203-1698-7

Walter White (1893-1955)

Foreword by Andrew Young

The life story of a man who crossed the color line to fight for civil rights

First published in 1948, A Man Called White is the autobiography of the famous civil rights activist Walter White during his first thirty years of service to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. White joined the NAACP in 1918 and served as its executive secretary from 1931 until his death in 1955. His recollections tell not only of his personal life, but amount to an insider’s history of the association’s first decades.

Although an African American, White was fair-skinned, blond-haired, and blue-eyed. His ability to pass as a white man allowed him—at great personal risk—to gather important information regarding lynchings, disfranchisement, and discrimination. Much of A Man Called White recounts his infiltration of the country’s white-racist power structure and the numerous legal battles fought by the NAACP that were aided by his daring efforts.

Penetrating and detailed, this autobiography provides an important account of crucial events in the development of race relations before 1950—from the trial of the “Scottsboro Boys” to an investigation of the treatment of African American servicemen in World War II, from the struggle against the all-white primaries in the South to court decisions–at all levels—on equal education.

Charles W. Chesnutt and the Fictions of Race

University of Georgia Press
2002-12-02
280 pages
6 x 9
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8203-2435-7
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-8203-2724-2

Dean McWilliams (1939-2006), J. Richard Hamilton/Baker and Hostetler Professor of Humanities and professor of English
Ohio University

The first extended exploration of the construction of racial identity in Chesnutt’s writings

Charles Chesnutt (1858-1932) was the first African American writer of fiction to win the attention and approval of America’s literary establishment. Looking anew at Chesnutt’s public and private writings, his fiction and nonfiction, and his well-known and recently rediscovered works, Dean McWilliams explores Chesnutt’s distinctive contribution to American culture: how his stories and novels challenge our dominant cultural narratives—particularly their underlying assumptions about race.

 The published canon of Chesnutt’s work has doubled in the last decade: three novels completed but unpublished in Chesnutt’s life have appeared, as have scholarly editions of Chesnutt’s journals, his letters, and his essays. This book is the first to offer chapter-length analyses of each of Chesnutt’s six novels. It also devotes three chapters to his short fiction. Previous critics have read Chesnutt’s nonfiction as biographical background for his fiction. McWilliams is the first to analyze these nonfiction texts as complex verbal artifacts embodying many of the same tensions and ambiguities found in Chesnutt’s stories and novels. The book includes separate chapters on Chesnutt’s journal and on his important essay “The Future American.” Moreover, Charles W. Chesnutt and the Fictions of Race approaches Chesnutt’s writings from the perspective of recent literary theory. To a greater extent than any previous study of Chesnutt, it explores the way his texts interrogate and deconstruct the language and the intellectual constructs we use to organize reality.
 
The full effect of this new study is to show us how much more of a twentieth-century writer Chesnutt is than has been previously acknowledged. This accomplishment can only hasten his reemergence as one of our most important observers of race in American culture.

Contents

• Preface
• 1. Chesnutt’s Language / Language’s Chesnutt
• 2. Chesnutt in His Journals: “Nigger” under Erasure
• 3. The Future American” and “Chas. Chesnutt”
• 4. Black Vernacular in Chesnutt’s Short Fiction: “A New School of literature”
• 5. The Julius and John Stories: “Hie Luscious Scuppernong”
• 6. Race in Chesnutt’s Short Fiction: The “Lino” and the “Web”
• 7. Mandy Oxendine: “Is You a Rale Black Man?”
• 8. The House behind the Cedars: “Creatures of Our Creation”
• 9. The Marrow of Tradition: The Very Breath of His Nostrils”
• 10. The Colonel’s Dream: “Sho Would ‘a’ Be’n a ‘Ristocrat”
• 11. Paul Marchand, F.M.C.: “F.M.C.” and “C.W.C.”
• 12. The Quarry: “And Not the Hawk”
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Latining America: Black-Brown Passages and the Coloring of Latino/a Studies

University of Georgia Press
2013-02-01
288 pages
5 b&w photos
Trim size: 6 x 9
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8203-4435-5
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8203-4436-2
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-8203-4479-9

Claudia Milian, Associate Professor of Spanish & Latin American Studies
Duke University

With Latining America, Claudia Milian proposes that the economies of blackness, brownness, and dark brownness summon a new grammar for Latino/a studies that she names “Latinities.” Milian’s innovative study argues that this ensnared economy of meaning startles the typical reading practices deployed for brown Latino/a embodiment.

Latining America keeps company with and challenges existent models of Latinidad, demanding a distinct paradigm that puts into question what is understood as Latino and Latina today. Milian conceptually considers how underexplored “Latin” participants—the southern, the black, the dark brown, the Central American—have ushered in a new world of “Latined” signification from the 1920s to the present.

Examining not who but what constitutes the Latino and Latina, Milian’s new critical Latinities disentangle the brown logic that marks “Latino/a” subjects. She expands on and deepens insights in transamerican discourses, narratives of passing, popular culture, and contemporary art. This daring and original project uncovers previously ignored and unremarked upon cultural connections and global crossings whereby African Americans and Latinos traverse and reconfigure their racialized classifications.

Writing the South through the Self: Explorations in Southern Autobiography

University of Georgia Press
2011-05-01
246 pages
6 x 9
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8203-3767-8
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8203-3767-8
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-8203-3968-9

John C. Inscoe, Albert B. Saye Professor and University Professor of History
University of Georgia

Using autobiography as an invaluable means for understanding southern history

Drawing on two decades of teaching a college-level course on southern history as viewed through autobiography and memoir, John C. Inscoe has crafted a series of essays exploring the southern experience as reflected in the life stories of those who lived it. Constantly attuned to the pedagogical value of these narratives, Inscoe argues that they offer exceptional means of teaching young people because the authors focus so fully on their confrontations—as children, adolescents, and young adults—with aspects of southern life that they found to be troublesome, perplexing, or challenging.
 
Maya Angelou, Rick Bragg, Jimmy Carter, Bessie and Sadie Delany, Willie Morris, Pauli Murray, Lillian Smith, and Thomas Wolfe are among the more prominent of the many writers, both famous and obscure, upon whom Inscoe draws to construct a composite portrait of the South at its most complex and diverse. The power of place; struggles with racial, ethnic, and class identities; the strength and strains of family; educational opportunities both embraced and thwarted—all are themes that infuse the works in this most intimate and humanistic of historical genres.
 
Full of powerful and poignant stories, anecdotes, and testimonials, Writing the South through the Self explores the emotional and psychological dimensions of what it has meant to be southern and offers us new ways of understanding the forces that have shaped southern identity in such multifaceted ways.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Lessons from Southern Lives: Teaching Race through Autobiography
• Chapter 2: I Learn What I Am”: Adolescent Struggles with Mixed-Race Identities
• Chapter 3: “All Manner of Defeated, Shiftless, Shifty, Pathetic and Interesting Good People”: Autobiographical Encounters with Southern White Poverty
• Chapter 4: Railroads, Race, and Remembrance: The Traumas of Train Travel in the Jim Crow South
• Chapter 5: “I’m Better Than This Sorry Place”: Coming to Terms with Self and the South in College
• Chapter 6: Sense of Place, Sense of Being: Appalachian Struggles with Identity, Belonging, and Escape
• Afterword: “Getting Pretty Fed Up with This Two-Tone South”: Moving toward Multiculturalism
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index

Blue Coat or Powdered Wig: Free People of Color in Pre-Revolutionary Saint Domingue

University of Georgia Press
March 2001
344 pages
6.125 x 9.25
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8203-3029-7

Stewart R. King, Associate Professor of History
Mount Angel Seminary, St. Benedict, Oregon

By the late 1700s, half the free population of Saint Domingue was black. The French Caribbean colony offered a high degree of social, economic, and physical mobility to free people of color. Covering the period 1776-1791, this study offers the most comprehensive portrait to date of Saint Domingue’s free black elites on the eve of the colony’s transformation into the republic of Haiti.

Stewart R. King identifies two distinctive groups that shared Saint Domingue’s free black upper stratum, one consisting of planters and merchants and the other of members of the army and police forces. With the aid of individual and family case studies, King documents how the two groups used different strategies to pursue the common goal of economic and social advancement. Among other aspects, King looks at the rural or urban bases of these groups’ networks, their relationships with whites and free blacks of lesser means, and their attitudes toward the acquisition, use, and sale of land, slaves, and other property.

King’s main source is the notarial archives of Saint Domingue, whose holdings offer an especially rich glimpse of free black elite life. Because elites were keenly aware of how a bureaucratic paper trail could help cement their status, the archives divulge a wealth of details on personal and public matters.

Blue Coat or Powdered Wig is a vivid portrayal of race relations far from the European centers of colonial power, where the interactions of free blacks and whites were governed as much by practicalities and shared concerns as by the law.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One. The Colony and Its People
  • Chapter One. The Notarial Record and Free Coloreds
  • Chapter Two. The Land
  • Chapter Three. The People
  • Chapter Four. Free Colored in the Colonial Armed Forces
• Part Two. The Free Colored in Society and the Economy
  • Chapter Five. Slaveholding Practices
  • Chapter Six. Landholding Practices
  • Chapter Seven. Entrepreneurship
  • Chapter Eight. Non-Economic Components of Social Status
  • Chapter Nine. Family Relationships and Social Advancement
• Part Three. Group Strategies for Economic and Social Advancement
  • Chapter Ten. Planter Elites
  • Chapter Eleven. The Military Leadership Group
  • Chapter Twelve. Conclusion
• Appendix One. Family Tree of the Laportes of Limonade
• Appendix Two. Surnames
• Appendix Three. Incorporation Papers of the Grasserie Marie Josephe
• Appendix Four. Notarized Sale Contract for a House
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index

The Herndons: An Atlanta Family

University of Georgia Press
2002-06-21
272 pages
8 x 10
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8203-2309-1

Carole Merritt, Director
The Herndon Home, Atlanta, Georgia

A compelling portrait of one of Atlanta’s most prominent African American families

Born a slave and reared a sharecropper, Alonzo Herndon (1858-1927) was destined to drudgery in the red clay fields of Georgia. Within forty years of Emancipation, however, he had amassed a fortune that far surpassed that of his White slave-master father.

Through his barbering, real estate, and life insurance ventures, Herndon would become one of the wealthiest and most respected African American business figures of his era. This richly illustrated book chronicles Alonzo Herndon’s ascent and his remarkable family’s achievements in Jim Crow Atlanta.

In this first biography of the Herndons, Carole Merritt narrates how Herndon nurtured the Atlanta Life Insurance Company from a faltering enterprise he bought for $140 into one of the largest Black financial institutions in America; how he acquired the most substantial Black property holdings in Atlanta; and how he developed his barbering business from a one-chair shop into the nation’s largest and most elegant parlor, the resplendent, twenty-three chair “Crystal Palace” in the heart of White Atlanta.

The Herndons’ world was the educational and business elite of Atlanta. But as Blacks, they were intimately bound to the course of Black life. The Atlanta Race Riot of 1906 and its impact on the Herndons demonstrated that all Blacks, regardless of class, were the victims of racial terrorism.

Through the Herndons, issues of race, class, and color in turn-of-the-century Atlanta come into sharp focus. Their story is one of by-the-bootstraps resolve, tough compromises in the face of racism, and lasting contributions to their city and nation.

Spit Back a Boy: Poems by Iain Haley Pollock

The University of Georgia Press
2011-06-15
72 pages
Trim size: 5.5 x 8.5
ISBN: 978-0-8203-3908-5

Iain Haley Pollock, English Teacher
Springside-Chestnut Hill Academy, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Winner of the 2010 The Cave Canem Poetry Prize

Iain Haley Pollock’s poems cover the ground from a woman late to catfish supper to an ancient queen who howls, “Sea, you is ugly,” from the creaking of slave ships launched from Lancaster to gunfire on a contemporary Philadelphia street. Such lyric moments find grounding in stories woven through this book—in one story line, a boy with a black mother and white father wishes he could shed his white skin or carve into what lies beneath: “I flung my almost white self / into my mother’s embrace—that brown / embrace I hoped would swallow me whole / and spit back a boy four shades darker.” Another thread follows a marriage and a woman intertwined with hunger and the blues, a woman who hears a whale song in a refrigerator’s hum, who cries hard like the lonely barking of a fox.

Even when these poems soften, they can’t be complacent about good fortune: for all the maple seedpods and snow fluttering down here, the poems are always aware of wreckage and car bombs there, and they keep conscious of the mustard gas of old wars and the losses of recent ones. Punctuated with lives that end early, such as those of Hart Crane and Mikey Clark, a high-school classmate who once swiped the Communion wine, Pollock’s collection earns its vitality and romance without closing its eyes to violence and sorrow.

from “Rattla cain’t hold me”

. . . And all our sadness will be old Arkansas,
rural and misspoken, its roads smudged
by the fog’s blue prints, its pine board shacks

daubed with mud to keep out mosquitoes
and the cold. The kitchens and porches
where we aren’t will cease to exist. We’ll miss

rain in autumn dousing the fire of the leaves.
Wind writhing like a water moccasin.
Like convicts we’ll sing, Rattla cain’t hold me

Rattla cain’t hold me, while outside the fence,
poplars, stripped by gypsy moths, stand bare.

Robert Stafford of Cumberland Island: Growth of a Planter

University of Georgia Press
1995
376 pages
Illustrated
Trim size: 6 x 9
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8203-1738-0

Mary R. Bullard

Society, politics, agriculture, and mixed-race unions in a coastal Georgia planter community

Robert Stafford of Cumberland Island offers a rare glimpse into the life and times of a nineteenth-century planter on one of Georgia’s Sea Islands. Born poor, Robert Stafford (1790-1877) became the leading planter on his native Cumberland Island. Specializing in the highly valued long staple variety of cotton, he claimed among his assets more than 8,000 acres and 350 slaves.

Mary R. Bullard recounts Stafford’s life in the context of how events from the Federalist period to the Civil War to Reconstruction affected Sea Island planters. As she discusses Stafford’s associations with other planters, his business dealings (which included banking and railroad investments), and the day-to-day operation of his plantation, Bullard also imparts a wealth of information about cotton farming methods, plantation life and material culture, and the geography and natural history of Cumberland Island.

Stafford’s career was fairly typical for his time and place; his personal life was not. He never married, but fathered six children by Elizabeth Bernardey, a mulatto slave nurse. Bullard’s discussion of Stafford’s decision to move his family to Groton, Connecticut—and freedom—before the Civil War illuminates the complex interplay between southern notions of personal honor, the staunch independent-mindedness of Sea Island planters, and the practice and theory of racial separation.

In her afterword to the Brown Thrasher edition, Bullard presents recently uncovered information about a second extralegal family of Robert Stafford as well as additional information about Elizabeth Bernardey’s children and the trust funds Stafford provided for them.