Mixed Race Studies

The Devil’s Half Acre: The Untold Story of How One Woman Liberated the South’s Most Notorious Slave Jail

Seal Press (an imprint of Basic Books)
2022-04-12
352 pages
Hardcover ISBN-13: 9781541675636
eBook ISBN-13: 9781541675629
Audiobook ISBN-13: 9781549193354

Kristen Green

The inspiring true story of an enslaved woman who liberated an infamous slave jail and transformed it into one of the nation’s first HBCUs

In The Devil’s Half Acre, New York Times bestselling author Kristen Green draws on years of research to tell the extraordinary and little-known story of young Mary Lumpkin, an enslaved woman who blazed a path of liberation for thousands. She was forced to have the children of a brutal slave trader and live on the premises of his slave jail, known as the “Devil’s Half Acre.” When she inherited the jail after the death of her slaveholder, she transformed it into “God’s Half Acre,” a school where Black men could fulfill their dreams. It still exists today as Virginia Union University, one of America’s first Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

A sweeping narrative of a life in the margins of the American slave trade, The Devil’s Half Acre brings Mary Lumpkin into the light. This is the story of the resilience of a woman on the path to freedom, her historic contributions, and her enduring legacy.

A vigorous examination of ‘Mr. NAACP,’ who passed as White

The Washington Post
2022-03-25

Kevin Boyle, William Smith Mason Professor of American History
Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois

When Walter White joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s New York staff in 1918, he had a thin record of civil rights activism. But he quickly made himself into the association’s indispensable man, particularly skilled at communicating the terror of racial violence to White audiences. It was a talent built partly on his limitless courage, partly on his incessant charm, and partly on a family inheritance that set him apart from most of Black America. “I am a Negro,” he wrote late in life. “My skin is white, my eyes are blue, my hair is blond. The traits of my race are nowhere visible upon me.”

But the marks of slavery were. The sexual exploitation that ran through the antebellum South coiled tightly round White’s maternal line: Both his great-grandfather and grandfather were prominent White men; his great-grandmother and grandmother, enslaved women powerless to resist them. His mother was born into bondage, too, just as the Civil War was about to bring the slave system down. Over the decades of freedom that followed, she and the light-skinned man she married pulled their family into the Black middle class, where their color carried a great deal of cachet. There White was born and raised, wrapped in the Victorian virtues of turn-of-the-century Atlanta’s most prestigious Black neighborhood as Jim Crow closed in around him.

A.J. Baime centers the first two thirds of his vigorous biography, “White Lies: The Double Life of Walter F. White and America’s Darkest Secret,” on the first 12 years of White’s confrontation with that brutal regime. His breakthrough came two weeks into his time as an NAACP staffer, when his boss, the incomparable James Weldon Johnson, sent him to investigate a lynching in tiny Estill Springs, Tenn. White arrived in town claiming to be a traveling salesman. In short order, he was sitting in the general store, chatting up the locals who assumed that he was as White as they were. By nightfall, he had gathered all the horrifying details that made his resulting exposé, published in the NAACP magazine, the Crisis, a sensation…

Read the entire review here.

Stateside Podcast: “Passing:” The Story of Elsie Roxborough

Stateside
Michigan Radio
2022-03-24

In 1914, Elsie Roxborough was born into a wealthy, Black family in Detroit. But when she died in 1939, her death certificate listed her as white. Her life was rich, curious and at times, troubled, all while attempting a sort of high-wire-act of living multiple lives, between cities and names and races. Today, we talk about her life, death, and everything in between.

Listen to the story (00:19:36) here. Download the story here.

A brush with… Ellen Gallagher

The Week in Art
2021-06-30

An in-depth conversation on the artist’s big influences, from Keith Haring to Moby Dick

In this episode of A brush with…, Ben Luke talks to the American artist Ellen Gallagher about her life and work by exploring her greatest cultural influences. Born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1965, Gallagher studied at Oberlin College in Ohio, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. She now lives in Rotterdam in the Netherlands. Much of Gallagher’s parents’ ancestry—in particular her Black father who is from the Cape Verde archipelago off the west coast of Africa—defines the territory of her practice, which relates to the culture and language of the Black diaspora.

Though primarily working in painting and drawing, Gallagher has also worked in sculpture, film and animation. Her early style appears Minimalist and spare from a distance but, up close, one observes intricate drawings of eyes, lips and wigs, which Gallagher has described as “the disembodied ephemera of minstrelsy”—the racist blackface entertainment common in the US from the C19th onwards. In the early 2000s, she used cut-out advertisements from Black culture magazines and transformed them with plasticine, making sculptural reliefs that were often imprinted with witty or incisive symbols and imagery. Many of her paintings refer to the sea and allude to the Afrofuturist myth of Drexciya: a Black Atlantis at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, supposedly populated with the children of the mothers of enslaved African women who were thrown—or threw themselves—overboard during their forced journey across the Middle Passage…

Read and/or listen to the interview here.

René Jones, one of 4 Black CEOs in the Fortune 500, on his ‘secret’ for success: ‘You have to tell your story’

CNBC
2022-02-27

Jade Scipioni, Senior Reporter, Make It

This story is part of the Behind the Desk series, where CNBC Make It gets personal with successful business executives to find out everything from how they got to where they are to what makes them get out of bed in the morning to their daily routines.

René Jones says banking executives have a “bad rap.” His reason might surprise you.

“I think it’s because we’re not really good storytellers,” Jones, 56, tells CNBC Make It.

Jones, who has served as the chairman and CEO of Buffalo, New York-based regional bank M&T since 2017, is currently one of only four Black CEOs in the Fortune 500. He started there as an executive associate in 1992, and today oversees its 17,000-plus employees and market valuation of $23 billion.

Over time, he says, he’s learned to lean into his own personal story as his “secret weapon” — sharing it with employees has helped him form deeper and more meaningful workplace relationships. Growing up with five siblings in a biracial family, for example — especially as the lightest-skinned of his siblings — taught him early on not to form stereotypes about people…

Read the entire article here.

Marie Thérèse Coincoin

64 Parishes
2011-03-14

Elizabeth Shown Mills

Marie Thérèse Coincoin was born into slavery in French Colonial Louisiana then gained her own freedom and the freedom of many of her children.

Marie Thérèse, called Coincoin, a freed slave in colonial Natchitoches, is an icon of American slavery and Louisiana’s Creole culture. As a bondswoman who became a free planter and entrepreneur, she symbolizes female self-determination in a world that imposed economic, legal, and sexual subservience on all women. As the mother of two diverse sets of children born between 1759 and 1785, she personifies the way slavery undermined the stability of slave families. Her successes and those of her offspring reflect the critical skills needed by free people of color to navigate political and racial currents in antebellum Louisiana. Two of their institutions—Melrose Plantation and St. Augustine’s Church on Isle Brevelle, founded by her sons Louis Metoyer and Nicolas Augustin Metoyer—are historical landmarks that preserve Cane River’s Creole culture…

Read the entire article here.

Growing up, as a mixed race child, with survivor grandparents

Forward
2022-03-08

Kyla Kupferstein
Oakland, California

As a child growing up in the 1970s and 80s, my younger brother David and I did everything in Manhattan: it was where we lived, went to school and played with our friends.

Except for the weekends when my parents would take us to visit my grandparents in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx. Buba Fela and Zayda Hershl lived in the Amalgamated Houses on Sedgwick Avenue – a cooperative apartment complex that functioned like a reassembled shtetl, a Yiddish-speaking community of Jews from Eastern Europe who had somehow escaped or survived the Nazi genocide and lived to tell the tale.

As my brother and I (known at our grandparents’ home as Kylashi and Davittle) sat at our grandparents’ kitchen table, we were fed a steady diet of Holocaust talk. “The war,” they called it, when they spoke English, which they did only for us. Hitler, Stalin, the camps – all these were a part of their normal vocabulary. And their neighbors, some who had been my grandparents’ friends back in Warsaw, most of them Bundists ranging from agnostic to atheist, were the closest thing to an extended family that we had.

Unlike many other survivors who kept silent because they couldn’t bear to revisit the atrocities, everyone in this community told their stories openly; we waited for those stories, just as we waited for Buba’s misshapen cookies and trips to the sprinklers in Van Cortlandt Park. Countless times we heard the story of how they left: when young men were urged to leave Warsaw because of Hitler’s imminent arrival, my Zayda, Herschel, decided he couldn’t leave without his love, Fela. Her grandfather quickly married them, and they fled to Russia, innocently believing it would be safe for them as socialists. But they were arrested at the Russian border, and then jailed separately in Stalin’s prisons in Siberia…

Read the entire article here.

Barack Obama: Conservative, Pragmatist, Progressive

Cornell University Press
2022-03-15
392 pages
Hardcover ISBN13: 9781501761973

Burton I. Kaufman, Dean Emeritus, School of Interdisciplinary Studies; Professor Emeritus, Department of History
Miami University, Oxford, Ohio

In this insightful biography, Burton I. Kaufman explores how the political career of Barack Obama was marked by conservative tendencies that frustrated his progressive supporters and gave the lie to socialist fearmongering on the right. Obama’s was a landmark presidency that paradoxically, Kaufman shows, resulted in few, if any, radical shifts in policy.

Following his election, President Obama’s supporters and detractors anticipated radical reform. As the first African American to serve as president, he reached the White House on a campaign promise of change. But Kaufman finds in Obama clear patterns of classical conservativism of an ideological sort and basic policy-making pragmatism. His commitment to usher in a multiracial, multiethnic, and multicultural society was fundamentally connected to opening up, but not radically altering, the existing free enterprise system.

The Affordable Care Act, arguably President Obama’s greatest policy achievement, was a distillation of his complex motivations for policy. More conservative than radical, the ACA fitted the expansion of health insurance into the existing system. Similarly, in foreign policy, Obama eschewed the use of force to affect regime change. Yet he kept boots on the ground in the Middle East and supported ballot-box revolts geared toward achieving in foreign countries the same principles of liberalism, free enterprise, and competition that existed in the United States.

In estimating the course and impact of Obama’s full political life, Kaufman makes clear that both the desire for and fear of change in the American polity affected the popular perception but not the course of action of the forty-fourth US president.

A Drop of Midnight: A Memoir

Amazon Crossing
2020-03-01
304 pages
5.5 x 1 x 8.25 inches
Hardcover ISBN-13: 978-1542017077
Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1542016704
Audio CD ISBN: 978-1799726296

Jason Diakité

Rachel Willson-Broyles (Translator)

World-renowned hip-hop artist Jason “Timbuktu” Diakité’s vivid and intimate journey through his own and his family’s history―from South Carolina slavery to twenty-first-century Sweden.

Born to interracial American parents in Sweden, Jason Diakité grew up between worlds―part Swedish, American, black, white, Cherokee, Slovak, and German, riding a delicate cultural and racial divide. It was a no-man’s-land that left him in constant search of self. Even after his hip-hop career took off, Jason fought to unify a complex system of family roots that branched across continents, ethnicities, classes, colors, and eras to find a sense of belonging.

In A Drop of Midnight, Jason draws on conversations with his parents, personal experiences, long-lost letters, and pilgrimages to South Carolina and New York to paint a vivid picture of race, discrimination, family, and ambition. His ancestors’ origins as slaves in the antebellum South, his parents’ struggles as an interracial couple, and his own world-expanding connection to hip-hop helped him fashion a strong black identity in Sweden.

What unfolds in Jason’s remarkable voyage of discovery is a complex and unflinching look at not only his own history but also that of generations affected by the trauma of the African diaspora, then and now.

Georgia Douglas Johnson, Harlem Renaissance Poet & Playwright

Literary Ladies Guide: Inspiration for Readers and Writers from Classic Women Authors
2018-03-29

Nava Atlas

Georgia Douglas Johnson (September 10, 1880 – May 14, 1966) was an American poet and playwright associated with the Harlem Renaissance.

Born Georgia Douglas Camp in Atlanta, Georgia, she grew up in a mixed-race family with African American, Native American, and English roots.

Her poetry addressed issues of race as well as intensely personal yet ultimately universal themes including love, motherhood, and being a woman in a male-dominated world.

Four collections of her poetry were published: The Heart of a Woman (1918), Bronze (1922), An Autumn Love Cycle (1928), and Share My World (1962). She wrote nearly thirty plays and numerous other works, some of which have been lost…

Read the entire article here.