Mixed Race Studies

Frederick Douglass, A Life in American History

Bloomsbury
2025-02-06
320 pages
235 x 156 mm
Hardback ISBN: 9798216170464
Ebook (PDF) ISBN: 9798216170471
Ebook (ePub & Mobi) ISBN: 9798216170488

Mark Christian, Professor, Urban Education, Africana Studies
Lehman College, City University of New York

Meet one of the most influential men in the United States’ history of emancipation and Black rights.

Chronicling Frederick Douglass’s life in an accessible way, this biography engages with history and wrestles with biases, falsehoods, and unknown facts in order to tell Douglass’s story as accurately as possible. Taking a comprehensive look at Douglass’s life from birth to death, the book delves into Douglass’s time as an enslaved African American, his escape, his experiences as a prominent orator and champion of Black rights, his writings and publications, and the influence he had on shaping society of the time. A detailed timeline allows students to quickly reference and recall major points in Douglass’s history, and the book is further augmented by the inclusion of primary documents, which include samples of Douglass’s own copious works, as well as words written about Douglass by his contemporaries. Readers will walk away with not only a better understanding of American history but an appreciation for Frederick Douglass’s impact in his own time and his lasting relevance for all those who continue to fight for a more equal society today.

Table of Contents

• Series Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Historical Context
• 2. Born in Bondage with Dreams of Liberty
• 3. Finding Freedom and the Abolitionist Cause
• 4. No More Master and Mastering Self-Determination Abroad
• 5. A Man of Independence in Public and Private Life
• 6. The Erudite Douglass in Letters, Speech, and Prose
• 7. Why Frederick Douglass Matters
• Timeline
• Primary Documents
• Bibliography
• Index

Excerpts from The Space Between by Herb Harris

CRAFT: Exploring the Art of Prose
2024-06-07

These excerpts from Herb Harris’s memoir, The Space Between, form one of two pieces picked as an editors’ choice selection for the 2023 CRAFT Memoir Excerpt & Essay Contest. Our editors chose work that demonstrates the unlimited vibrancy and scope of creative nonfiction.

Mirrors and reflections appear throughout these outstanding memoir excerpts from Herb Harris. In a setting as innocuous as a local barbershop, Harris strikes out on a journey not only to assess his own identity, but also to examine how he is perceived by the world around him—no matter how disorienting that quest might prove. Harris opens the piece: “I must begin by telling you that I am Black.” He makes this declaration in the space between pride and confession. By focusing on hair and optical illusions, he affirms that identity is not a singular concept; it is many selves—mirrored individuals and slightly altered reflections—that compose a person and make them who they are and who they will become.

Recognizing simplicity as a tool to dissect multigenerational issues is one of the many strengths Harris displays in his writing. Innocent details such as ear wiggling, hair clippings scattered on the floor, and “bottles containing mysterious liquids and powders” open the essay to larger themes of racial identity, belonging, and the bleak injustices foundational to a country built upon slavery. A simple haircut or catching your own image in a mirror might be infinitely more complex than expected. Herb Harris discovers that a reflection takes many forms, including a tool to prosecute the long chronicle of cultural erasure pervasive in the United States. —CRAFT

Prologue

I must begin by telling you that I am Black. This is a very strange thing to have to say out loud. It is usually something self-evident that goes without saying. But my light skin and blur of African and European features are rarely recognized as Black.

This racial ambiguity reflects many generations of mixed heritage that go back to the beginning of the slave trade. My ancestors were both the enslaved and the enslavers who sexually exploited them. I have many white ancestors, but their identities are almost entirely unknown. These perpetrators and their victims still live inside me, where their violent entanglement continues. I am an outlier among people who identify as Black, but most of Black America has some degree of white ancestry. This painful heritage is an aspect of slavery that is seldom discussed, but the white man is among the foremost absent fathers of history.

My family has lived on the edge of the color line for more than three centuries. This dangerous neighborhood has always been my home. In my childhood, the color line was like a concrete wall topped with barbed wire and brutally policed on both sides. Still inviolable, it is now drawn in the shifting sands of culture, fashion, and opinion. The wind blows, and I cross it without moving. I am constantly guilty of these motionless transgressions.

How do I know who I am? Almost everything we know about ourselves comes to us through the eyes of others. Throughout our lives, other people are the psychological mirrors that inform us as we work to figure out who we are. Our identities are manifested in the gazes of others. We are revealed in their attitudes and actions. Unfortunately, what they show us is always distorted and fragmented. We must build a collage of ourselves from the reflections we see in our families and communities. Too soon, we enter a society afflicted by the pathology of race. We are no longer seen as individuals but as racist projections, delusions, and hallucinations. We become objects in the white gaze and begin a lifelong battle to defend our identities from its withering effects.

I had to search for clues about who I am among looks of confusion, perplexity, and skepticism. I learned to read the most subtle signs to know how others identified me. My racial camouflage often makes me invisible, but race keeps finding new ways to blindside me with contradictory messages. My first consciousness of race began in a Black preschool in the early 1960s. My best friend, David, compared my light brown skin to his dark brown skin and proudly announced that he was Black and I was white. Suddenly, I felt like an outsider, different from all my classmates. Living in a segregated community, I had never seen a white child before, and I had no idea what David meant. But later, in a predominantly white elementary school, a classmate called me a nigger. I don’t know how I knew the meaning of this word, but it triggered an anger I had never felt before.

W. E. B. Du Bois called it “double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.” Who do I see reflected in the warped and broken mirrors of our race-obsessed culture? What do I mean when I say that I am Black?…

Read the entire excerpt here.

André Watts, Pioneering Piano Virtuoso, Dies at 77

The New York Times
2023-07-14

Javier C. Hernández

One of the first Black superstars in classical music, he awed audiences with his charisma and his technical powers.

André Watts, a pianist whose mighty technique and magnetic charm awed audiences and made him one of the first Black superstars in classical music, died on Wednesday at his home in Bloomington, Ind. He was 77.

The cause was prostate cancer, said his wife, Joan Brand Watts.

Mr. Watts was an old-world virtuoso — his idol was the composer and showman Franz Liszt — with a knack for electricity and emotion. He sometimes hummed, stomped his feet and bobbed his head while he played, and some critics faulted him for excess. But his charisma and his technical powers were unquestioned, which helped fuel his rise to the world’s top concert halls.

“My greatest satisfaction is performing,” Mr. Watts told The New York Times in 1971, when he was 25. “The ego is a big part of it, but far from all. Performing is my way of being part of humanity — of sharing.”

“There’s something beautiful,” he added, “about having an entire audience hanging on a single note.”.

Mr. Watts, whose father was Black and whose mother was white, was a rarity in a field where musicians of color have long been underrepresented. While he preferred not to speak about race, he was celebrated as a pioneer who defied stereotypes about classical music and helped open doors for aspiring artists of color…

Read the entire obituary here.

Belonging: A Daughter’s Search for Identity Through Loss and Love

HarperCollins
2023-03-14
320 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9780063220430

Michelle Miller

The award-winning journalist and co-host of CBS Saturday Morning tells the candid, and deeply personal story of her mother’s abandonment and how the search for answers forced her to reckon with her own identity and the secrets that shaped her family for five decades.

Though Michelle Miller was an award-winning broadcast journalist for CBS News, few people in her life knew the painful secret she carried: her mother had abandoned her at birth. Los Angeles in 1967 was deeply segregated, and her mother—a Chicana hospital administrator who presented as white, had kept her affair with Michelle’s father, Dr. Ross Miller, a married trauma surgeon and Compton’s first Black city councilman—hidden, along with the unplanned pregnancy. Raised largely by her father and her paternal grandmother, Michelle had no knowledge of the woman whose genes she shared. Then, fate intervened when Michelle was twenty-two. As her father lay stricken with cancer, he told her, “Go and find your mother.”

Belonging is the chronicle of Michelle’s decades-long quest to connect with the woman who gave her life, to confront her past, and ultimately, to find her voice as a journalist, a wife, and a mother. Michelle traces the years spent trying to make sense of her mixed-race heritage and her place in white-dominated world. From the wealthy white schools where she was bussed to integrate, to the newsrooms filled with white, largely male faces, she revisits the emotional turmoil of her formative years and how the enigma of her mother and her rejection shaped Michelle’s understanding of herself and her own Blackness.

As she charts her personal journey, Michelle looks back on her decades on the ground reporting painful events, from the beating of Rodney King to the death of George Floyd, revealing how her struggle to understand her racial identity coincides with the nation’s own ongoing and imperfect racial reckoning. What emerges is an intimate family story about secrets—secrets we keep, secrets we share, and the secrets that make us who we are.

More Than I Imagined: What a Black Man Discovered About the White Mother He Never Knew

Convergent Books (an imprint of Penguin Random House)
2023-05-02
240 Pages
5-1/2 x 8-1/4
Hardcover ISBN: 9780593443040

John Blake, Award-Winning CNN Journalist

An award-winning journalist tells the story of his quest to reconcile with his white mother and the family he’d never met—and how faith brought them all together.

John Blake grew up in a notorious Black neighborhood in inner-city Baltimore that became the setting for the HBO series The Wire. There he became a self-described “closeted biracial person,” hostile toward white people while hiding the truth of his mother’s race. The son of a Black man and a white woman who met when interracial marriage was still illegal, Blake knew this much about his mother: She vanished from his life not long after his birth, and her family rejected him because of his race.

But at the age of seventeen, Blake had a surprise encounter that uncovered a disturbing family secret. This launched him on a quest to reconcile with his white family. His search centered on two questions: “Where is my mother?” and “Where do I belong?” More Than I Imagined is Blake’s propulsive true story about how he answered those questions with the help of an interracial church, a loving caregiver’s sacrifice, and an inexplicable childhood encounter that taught him the importance of forgiveness.

Blake covered some of the biggest stories about race in America for twenty-five years before realizing that “facts don’t change people, relationships do.” He owes this discovery to “radical integration,” which was the only way forward for him and his family—and is the only way forward for America as a multiracial democracy. More Than I Imagined is a hopeful story for our difficult times.

Not White But Not (Entirely) Black: On the Complex History of “Passing” in America

Literary Hub
2023-05-03

Herb Harris

Herb Harris Explores How His Grandparents’ Defied Racial Categorization

Via New England Review

Read the entire article here.

Topsy-Turvy

New England Review
Volume 44, Number 1 (2023)

Herb Harris

“It’s funny about ‘passing.’ We disapprove of it and at the same time condone it. It excites our contempt and yet we rather admire it. We shy away from it with an odd kind of revulsion, but we protect it.”
—Nella Larsen, Passing

I started with a group of boxes that looked like the oldest ones in the attic. The packing tape easily lifted away, no longer sticking to the cardboard, and wine glasses and dishes emerged from pages of the Washington Post from the 1970s. Several heavy boxes contained papers and photographs belonging to my grandparents, but there was one surprisingly light box. I opened it to find a collection of hand-sewn dolls and animal puppets, just a dozen or so of the thousands I knew my grandmother had made when she was a volunteer at Children’s Hospital over the years.

Among the clowns, frogs, and bunnies was one doll that had clearly been sewn with greater care and detail than the others. I recognized it as Grandma’s work, but it had a design I’d never seen before. It was a girl with light pink skin, blue eyes, and blond hair, wearing a long floral dress with a lace collar and a pink bow. I flipped it over to reveal another girl, this one with very dark brown skin, black hair, and brown eyes. The two figures were joined at the torso, and the exaggerated contrast between their features gave the second doll a blackface quality. I remembered that toys like these were called Topsy-Turvy dolls and vaguely associated them with offensive Jim Crow cartoons and minstrel shows. Why would my grandmother, a Black woman, make such a thing? Grandma had died more than twenty years before, and, holding this strange doll in my hands, I had the sense that this was her last word on race.

A little research reveals that Topsy-Turvy dolls originated during the time of slavery. No one can ascribe a single meaning or purpose to them, but their dual identity suggests a connection to the mixed-race children who were a part of the plantation world. These children were enslaved people who could be bought or sold by law. They were also relatives of their owners: cousins, half-siblings, sons, and daughters. These relationships were usually denied, but they were often open secrets. The children might be symbols of the master’s potency or shameful reminders of his transgressions, or they might be objects of love or victims of abuse, but their existence was always charged with hidden meanings and deep conflicts. They could only be talked about with code words filled with ambiguity, like the language my grandparents used when they talked about race. Topsy-Turvy dolls were part of this language. They embodied many things that could never be said…

Read the entire article here.

Georgia Louise Harris Brown (June 12, 1918 – September 21, 1999)

Pioneering Women of American Architecture
October 2017

Anat Falbel
University of Campinas, Brazil

Roberta Washington, Principal
Roberta Washington Architects, New York, New York

Georgia Louise Harris Brown (1918–1999), a pioneering African American architect practicing in Chicago and Brazil from the 1940s to the 1990s, is recognized as the second African American woman licensed as an architect in the United States.¹ She forged an impressive career in industrial architecture in Brazil, where she may have immigrated in the hope of escaping racial prejudice, though she was rarely credited as the designer in publications about these works. (Generally, it was the engineering firms that received the credit.)

EARLY LIFE AND EDUCATION
Georgia Louise Harris Brown was born in Topeka, Kansas, on June 12, 1918, only six years after the extension of equal voting rights to women in the state.² Her family’s genealogy of strong women of mixed ancestry included former enslaved African Americans who arrived from the South to the Union’s slavery-free state after 1861, Native Americans, and German settlers…

Read the entire article here.

Brutal Nazi Torture of Black German Boy Gert Schramm in Nazi Germany – Buchenwald – World War 2

World History
2023-03-21

Despite the Nuremberg Laws, some Black people and so called German “Aryans” still became romantically involved with one another. These relationships were dangerous for both partners, especially if they chose to try to legally marry. In Nazi Germany, everyone was required to apply for permission to marry. When interracial couples applied, their applications were consistently denied for racial reasons. These applications brought their interracial relationships to the attention of government authorities. This often had dire consequences for the couple. In multiple cases, marriage applications resulted in harassment, sterilization and the breaking up of partnerships.

Legal couples whose marriages pre-dated the Nuremberg Laws were harassed by the Nazi regime. The regime pressured white German women to divorce their Black husbands. Interracial couples and their children were often humiliated and even assaulted when they appeared together in public.

Like their parents, many Black children in Germany experienced the Nazi era as a time of increased loneliness, isolation, and exclusion. Some Black children felt German and wanted to be a part of the excitement. But Nazi racial ideology had no place for Black-German children. For Black children in Nazi Germany, schools became sites of humiliation. Black children were often degraded in racial science classes and ridiculed by teachers who supported the Nazis…

Just as the Nazification of the education system greatly restricted the rights of Jewish children to attend public schools, it also impacted Black children over the course of the 1930s. Some Black students were expelled and unable to complete their education. Few private schools would accept Black students and finding apprenticeships, which in Germany was crucial to find employment, became increasingly difficult.

Such was a case of Gert Schramm…

Watch the video here.

‘Moral electricity’: Melvil-Bloncourt and the trans-Atlantic struggle for abolition and equal rights

Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies
Volume 40, 2019 – Issue 3
pages 543-562
DOI: 10.1080/0144039X.2018.1539459

Bryan LaPointe, Ph.D. Candidate in History
Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey

Little known to historians, the Guadeloupean-born antislavery and equal rights activist Sainte-Suzanne Melvil-Bloncourt exemplified the complex trans-Atlantic networks forged for the abolitionist cause across the nineteenth century. As a contributing journalist for a Parisian political and literary publication, Melvil-Bloncourt produced numerous pieces on the history and politics of slavery and emancipation around the Atlantic world. The American Civil War especially galvanized Melvil-Bloncourt into more fervent antislavery action, prompting him not only to connect with activists based in New Orleans and the famous abolitionist Frederick Douglass, but also to raise money in France for former American slaves. This project explores the depth of Melvil-Bloncourt’s emancipationist sensibilities and activism, guided by what he deemed ‘moral electricity,’ highlighting the influence of the otherwise overlooked Francophone world in the age of emancipation.

Read or purchase the article here.