Mixed Race Studies

For James McCune Smith, Racism Was All Over Anthropology

JSTOR Daily
2021-08-11

Livia Gershon
Nashua, New Hampshire

James McCune Smith via Wikimedia Commons/Jonathan Aprea

What if the creation story of anthropology isn’t exclusively about white men classifying people as primitive?

In the first half of the nineteenth century, intellectuals working in the nascent field of anthropology sought to divide humanity into more and less civilized races, debating whether these differences were due to biology or deep-seated cultural patterns. At least that’s what Americans today tend to remember about the early days of the discipline. But, anthropologist Thomas C. Patterson writes, that may be because historians studying anthropology have selectively ignored other viewpoints within the field. To counteract this tendency, Patterson invites us to learn about the Black anthropologist James McCune Smith.

McCune Smith was born enslaved in New York City. He became legally free as a teenager in 1827 under New York state’s Emancipation Act. He apprenticed as a blacksmith while studying Latin and Greek. Denied admission to Columbia University because of his race, he attended the University of Glasgow and went on to become a medical doctor…

Read the entire article here.

Black Puritan, Black Republican: The Life and Thought of Lemuel Haynes, 1753-1833

Oxford University Press
2002-12-12
248 pages
9.04 x 6.84 x 0.9 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0195157178
DOI: 10.1093/0195157176.001.0001

John Saillant, Professor of English and History
Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan

In the second half of the eighteenth century, British and American men and women began criticizing the slave trade and slavery as violations of the principles of Christianity, natural rights, and political security. A black spokesman for abolitionism was Lemuel Haynes (1753–1833), one of the first African Americans to publish. Haynes served as a minuteman in the American War of Independence and began writing against the slave trade and slavery in the 1770s. After ordination in a Congregational church, he assumed a pulpit in Rutland, Vermont, where he became a leading controversialist, defender of the theology of Jonathan Edwards, and interpreter of republican ideology. He was dismissed from his pulpit in 1818, because his affiliation to the Federalist Party and his opposition to the War of 1812 offended his congregation. The last 15 years of his life were characterized by pessimism about the ability of Americans of the early republic to defeat racism as well as by a defense of Puritanism, which he believed could guide the creation of a free, harmonious, and integrated society.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• 1. A Further Liberty in 1776
• 2. Republicanism Black and White
• 3. The Divine Providence of Slavery and Freedom
• 4. Making and Breaking the Revolutionary Covenant
• 5. American Genesis, American Captivity

Willa Brown: Pioneer for Female & African American Aviation

Civil Air Patrol
2020-03-30

Lt. Col. Carlos Montague, MDWG Diversity, Equality and Inclusion Officer
Maryland Wing

“Willa Beatrice Brown, a 31-year-old Negro American, serves her country by training pilots for the U.S. Army Air Forces.” – NARA – 535717 (circa 1941-1945)

CAP recognizes Women’s History Month with a profile of aviator and civil rights pioneer Willa Brown.

There are many pioneering names in African American aviation. Figures like Eugene Bullard, Bessie Coleman, Charles Alfred Anderson, John Forsythe, Thomas Allen, Janet Harmon Bragg and Herman Banning all set out against the odds of social and racial injustice, to achieve excellence.

And then there’s Willa Beatrice Brown Chappell, a pioneer for both women’s equality and civil rights.

Brown was born in Glasgow, Kentucky, in 1906 to a biracial family with a Native American mother and an African American father. Understanding that education was important, Brown graduated from the Indiana State Normal School, now Indiana State University, majoring in commerce and earning her bachelor’s degree in business.

Later she would receive a master’s degree in business administration from Northwestern University and became a teacher at Roosevelt High School in Gary, Indiana. Eventually she moved to Chicago and became a social worker.

“Any time you are a first in anything, that’s a challenge. Willa Brown was the first African American woman in the United States to get a private pilot license, get licensed and certified as a mechanic, and earn a commercial pilot’s license,” said the Rev. Sandra Campbell, a former manager with the Federal Aviation Administration…

Read the entire article here.

Aaron’s Book

The Devil’s Tale: Dispatches from the Davin M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina
2021-07-27

Blake Hill-Saya

Above: Portrait in oils of Dr. Aaron McDuffie Moore painted by his daughter Lyda Moore Merrick. Located in the North Carolina Collection, Stanford L. Warren Branch of the Durham County Library, Durham, N.C.

Too often we relegate the lives of our ancestors to the basket of nostalgia. We think that because our modern times have dressed us up in different clothes and surrounded us with technology that the lives and struggles of our ancestors can’t speak with any real directness to ours. It is easy in the rush and rattle of the present to allow seasoned historians to define us in macrocosm while overlooking the importance of our own more granular history; a thread waiting to be pulled in the warp and woof of who we think we are. Libraries and historical archives exist to help us pull that thread and expand our understanding of history and our place in it.

Eight years ago, I was chosen by the Durham Colored Library board of directors, led by chairperson C. Eileen Watts Welch, to follow my own ancestral thread and write a biography of my great- great-grandfather, Dr. Aaron McDuffie Moore. The dream of this historical biography of Durham’s first Black physician far predates my involvement; it actually predates me. Dr. Moore’s daughter, my great-grandmother, Lyda Moore Merrick, dreamed of a book about her Papa. My grandfather, Dr. Charles DeWitt Watts, a legendary surgeon and healthcare activist in his own right, also dreamed of this book. His dream inspired his daughter, C. Eileen Watts Welch, to make this biography a reality. The Durham Colored Library, an organization founded by Dr. Moore himself in 1913 and now a non-profit focused on uplifting Black narratives, sponsored the project…

Read the entire article here.

The great scientific crusader who debunked the biological myths about race

AlterNet
2021-08-05

Prabir Purkayastha/Globetrotter

On July 4, Richard Lewontin, the dialectical biologist, Marxist and activist, died at the age of 92, just three days after the death of his wife of more than 70 years, Mary Jane. He was one of the founders of modern biology who brought together three different disciplines—statistics, molecular biology and evolutionary biology—that mark the discipline today. In doing so, he not only battled crude racism masquerading as science, but also helped shed light on what science really is. In this sense, he belongs to the rare group of scientists who are equally at home in the laboratory and while talking about science and ideology at a philosophical level. Lewontin is a popular exponent of what science is, and more pertinently, what it is not.

Lewontin always harked back to what being radical means: going back to fundamentals in deriving a viewpoint. This method is important, as it makes radical inquiry a powerful tool in science, compared to lazier ways of relating positions to certain class viewpoints. What is the relation between genes and race, class, or gender? Does social superiority spring from superior genes, or from biological differences between the sexes? As a Marxist and activist, Lewontin believed that we need to fight at both levels: to expose class, race and gender stereotypes as a reflection of power within society, and also at the level of radical science, meaning from the fundamentals of scientific theory and data…

Read the entire article here.

Lemuel Haynes

Vermont History
Vermont Historical Society
Barre, VT
2019-10-03

Steve Perkins, Executive Director

Lemuel Haynes of Rutland, Vermont was an incredible Vermonter. Haynes, an African-American man, was a great writer, thinker, and minister. In 1785, he was one of the first, if not the first, African-Americans to be ordained into the Congregational Church in the whole United States and led a mostly white congregation for over 30 years.

Watch the video here.

Historical Reformer – Lemuel Haynes

Nations
2021-12-20

Thaddeus Tague

The First Black Pastor in American History

On April 19th, 1775 – war was coming to Lexington, Massachusetts. The 77 hastily armed colonists arrived first. The sun began to rise, and with it came the sound of a marching war machine. The militaristically-naked colonists gaped at the more than 700 redcoats that faced them, weapons drawn. A sneering British major had approached within shouting distance and yelled, “Throw down your arms! Ye villains, ye rebels.” Within moments, firing started on both sides. Eight colonists lay dead. The British force advanced and set fire to the town. As soon as they advanced beyond the town however, they were met with the veritable thousands of “minutemen” who had assembled nearby. Quickly deployed and burning to protect their freedom, the minutemen overwhelmed the British force. In the days after, thousands more men were recruited in the local region. One of these men was a newly freed slave named Lemuel Haynes. A passionate Christian and Calvanist, Lemuel helped fight and tend to the wounded during the subsequent engagements. Seeing the blood and combat on the following few days – he vowed in his heart that he would fight to extend freedom and liberty to all men and women in the new colonies…

Read the entire article here.

J.P. Morgan’s personal librarian had two identities. It took two authors to tell her story.

The Washington Post
2021-06-28

Natachi Onwuamaegbu

“The Personal Librarian” co-authors Heather Terrell, writing as Marie Benedict, and Victoria Christopher Murray. (Phil Atkins)

Historical fiction writer Heather Terrell (who also writes under the name Marie Benedict) was introduced to Belle da Costa Greene between bookshelves at New York’s Morgan Library over 20 years ago. The docent — whom she has tried to find since — told her about a Black woman who passed as White and worked as J.P. Morgan’s personal librarian in the early 1900s. Terrell wasn’t yet writing historical fiction about women — she was a lawyer — but the story lingered in the back of her head.

Once she read Black author Victoria Christopher Murray’s work two years ago, she knew she found the partner she was waiting for to tackle da Costa Greene’s story. To write about a Black woman who passed as non-Black with an author she had never met was a process, especially when the editing coincided with the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer and a pandemic.

The Washington Post talked to Terrell and Murray about what it was like to work on “The Personal Librarian” when so much of the world was falling apart…

Read the entire interview here.

J.P. Morgan’s librarian hid her race. A novel imagines the toll on her.

The Christian Science Monitor
2021-06-29

Heller McAlpin, Correspondent

Library of Congress Belle da Costa Greene, shown in 1929, curated rare books for mogul J.P. Morgan. She was the first director of the Morgan Library.

Some books leave you wondering why the author has chosen to tell this particular story, and why now. This is emphatically not the case with “The Personal Librarian,” a novel about the woman who helped shape the Morgan Library’s spectacular collection of rare books and art more than a century ago. It quickly becomes clear why two popular authors, Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray, have teamed up to tell this important, inspirational story.

Belle da Costa Greene’s success in the almost exclusively male world of art and rare book dealers was an unusual feat for a woman in the early 20th century. But what makes it even more extraordinary – and such rich material for historical fiction – is the secret she harbored throughout her long career: She hailed from a prominent, light-skinned Black family, many of whose members had chosen to pass as white.

“The Personal Librarian” reminds readers that this decision was not made lightly. After the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Civil Rights Act in 1883 – a ruling that ushered in Jim Crow segregation and gave white supremacy and racial discrimination legal cover, the ramifications of which are felt to this day – few opportunities were open to anyone classified as nonwhite…

Read the entire book review here.

The Personal Librarian, A Novel

Berkley (an imprint of Penguin Randomhouse)
2021-06-29
Hardcover ISBN: 9780593101537
Paperback ISBN: 9780593414248
Eboock ISBN: 9780593101551

Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray

A remarkable novel about J. P. Morgan’s personal librarian, Belle da Costa Greene, the Black American woman who was forced to hide her true identity and pass as white in order to leave a lasting legacy that enriched our nation, from New York Times bestselling author Marie Benedict, and acclaimed author Victoria Christopher Murray.

In her twenties, Belle da Costa Greene is hired by J. P. Morgan to curate a collection of rare manuscripts, books, and artwork for his newly built Pierpont Morgan Library. Belle becomes a fixture in New York City society and one of the most powerful people in the art and book world, known for her impeccable taste and shrewd negotiating for critical works as she helps create a world-class collection.

But Belle has a secret, one she must protect at all costs. She was born not Belle da Costa Greene but Belle Marion Greener. She is the daughter of Richard Greener, the first Black graduate of Harvard and a well-known advocate for equality. Belle’s complexion isn’t dark because of her alleged Portuguese heritage that lets her pass as white—her complexion is dark because she is African American.

The Personal Librarian tells the story of an extraordinary woman, famous for her intellect, style, and wit, and shares the lengths she must go to—for the protection of her family and her legacy—to preserve her carefully crafted white identity in the racist world in which she lives.