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.

I Color Myself Different

Scholastic
2022-04-05
40 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1338789621

Colin Kaepernick, Eric Wilkerson (Illustrator)

An inspiring story of identity and self-esteem from celebrated athlete and activist Colin Kaepernick.

When Colin Kaepernick was five years old, he was given a simple school assignment: draw a picture of yourself and your family. What young Colin does next with his brown crayon changes his whole world and worldview, providing a valuable lesson on embracing and celebrating his Black identity through the power of radical self-love and knowing your inherent worth.

I Color Myself Different is a joyful ode to Black and Brown lives based on real events in young Colin’s life that is perfect for every reader’s bookshelf. It’s a story of self-discovery, staying true to one’s self, and advocating for change… even when you’re very little!

The Journey to Separate but Equal: Madame Decuir’s Quest for Racial Justice in the Reconstruction Era

University Press of Kansas
April 2021
256 pages
Hardback ISBN: ISBN 978-0-7006-3183-4

Jack M. Beermann, Professor of Law and Harry Elwood Warren Scholar
Boston University School of Law

In The Journey to Separate but Equal: Madame Decuir’s Quest for Racial Justice in the Reconstruction Era, Jack Beermann tells the story of how, in Hall v. Decuir, the post–Civil War US Supreme Court took its first step toward perpetuating the subjugation of the non-White population of the United States by actively preventing a Southern state from prohibiting segregation on a riverboat in the coasting trade on the Mississippi River. The Journey to Separate but Equal offers the first complete exploration of Hall v. Decuir, with an in-depth look at the case’s record; the lives of the parties, lawyers, and judges; and the case’s social context in 1870s Louisiana. The book centers around the remarkable story of Madame Josephine Decuir and the lawsuit she pursued because she had been illegally barred from the cabin reserved for White women on the Governor Allen riverboat.

The drama of Madame Decuir’s fight against segregation’s denial of her dignity as a human and particularly as a woman enriches our understanding of the Reconstruction era, especially in Louisiana, including political and legal changes that occurred during that time and the plight of people of color who were freed from slavery but denied their dignity and rights as American citizens. Hall v. Decuir spanned the pivotal period of 1872–1878, during which White segregationist Democrats “redeemed” the South from Republican control. The Supreme Court’s ruling in Hall overturned the application of an 1869 Louisiana statute prohibiting racial segregation in Madame Decuirs case because of the status of the Mississippi River as a mode of interstate commerce. The decision represents a crucial precedent that established the legal groundwork for the entrenchment of Jim Crow in the law of the United States, leading directly to the Courts adoption of separate but equal in Plessy v. Ferguson.

Who’s Black and Why? A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race

Harvard University Press
2022-03-22
320 pages
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
21 photos, 1 table
Hardcover ISBN: 9780674244269

Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alfonse Fletcher Jr. University Professor; Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research
Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Andrew S. Curran, William Armstrong Professor of the Humanities
Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut

The first translation and publication of sixteen submissions to the notorious eighteenth-century Bordeaux essay contest on the cause of “black” skin—an indispensable chronicle of the rise of scientifically based, anti-Black racism.

In 1739 Bordeaux’s Royal Academy of Sciences announced a contest for the best essay on the sources of “blackness.” What is the physical cause of blackness and African hair, and what is the cause of Black degeneration, the contest announcement asked. Sixteen essays, written in French and Latin, were ultimately dispatched from all over Europe. The authors ranged from naturalists to physicians, theologians to amateur savants. Documented on each page are European ideas about who is Black and why.

Looming behind these essays is the fact that some four million Africans had been kidnapped and shipped across the Atlantic by the time the contest was announced. The essays themselves represent a broad range of opinions. Some affirm that Africans had fallen from God’s grace; others that blackness had resulted from a brutal climate; still others emphasized the anatomical specificity of Africans. All the submissions nonetheless circulate around a common theme: the search for a scientific understanding of the new concept of race. More important, they provide an indispensable record of the Enlightenment-era thinking that normalized the sale and enslavement of Black human beings.

These never previously published documents survived the centuries tucked away in Bordeaux’s municipal library. Translated into English and accompanied by a detailed introduction and headnotes written by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Andrew Curran, each essay included in this volume lays bare the origins of anti-Black racism and colorism in the West.

Table of Contents

• Preface: Who’s Black and Why?
• Note on the Translations
• I
  • Introduction: The 1741 Contest on the “Degeneration” of Black Skin and Hair
  • 1. Blackness through the Power of God
  • 2. Blackness through the Soul of the Father
  • 3. Blackness through the Maternal Imagination
  • 4. Blackness as a Moral Defect
  • 5. Blackness as a Result of the Torrid Zone
  • 6. Blackness as a Result of Divine Providence
  • 7. Blackness as a Result of Heat and Humidity
  • 8. Blackness as a Reversible Accident
  • 9. Blackness as a Result of Hot Air and Darkened Blood
  • 10. Blackness as a Result of a Darkened Humor
  • 11. Blackness as a Result of Blood Flow
  • 12. Blackness as an Extension of Optical Theory
  • 13. Blackness as a Result of an Original Sickness
  • 14. Blackness Degenerated
  • 15. Blackness Classified
  • 16. Blackness Dissected
• II
  • Introduction: The 1772 Contest on “Preserving” Negroes
  • 1. A Slave Ship Surgeon on the Crossing
  • 2. A Parisian Humanitarian on the Slave Trade
  • 3. Louis Alphonse, Bordeaux Apothecary, on the Crossing
• Select Chronology of the Representation of Africans and Race
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Credits
• Index

The Half-Blood: A Cultural Symbol in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction

University Press of Kentucky
1979-12-31
128 pages
5.50 x 8.50 in
Hardcover ISBN: 9780813113906

William J. Scheick, J.R. Millikan Centennial Professor Emeritus of English
University of Texas, Austin

The half-blood—half Indian, half white—is a frequent figure in the popular fiction of nineteenth-century America, for he (or sometimes she) served to symbolize many of the conflicting cultural values with which American society was then wrestling. In literature, as in real life the half-blood was a product of the frontier, embodying the conflict between wilderness and civilization that haunted and stirred the American imagination. What was his identity? Was he indeed “half Indian, half white, and half devil”—or a bright link between the races from which would emerge a new American prototype?

In this important first study of the fictional half-blood, William J. Scheick examines works ranging from the enormously popular “dime novels” and the short fiction of such writers as Bret Harte to the more sophisticated works of Irving, Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, and others. He discovers that ambivalence characterized nearly all who wrote of the half-blood. Some writers found racial mixing abhorrent, while others saw more benign possibilities. The use of a “half-blood in spirit”—a character of untainted blood who joined the virtues of the two races in his manner of life—was one ingenious literary strategy adopted by a number of writers, Scheick also compares the literary portrayal of the half-blood with the nineteenth-century view of the mulatto.

This pioneering examination of an important symbol in popular literature of the last century opens up a previously unexplored repository of attitudes toward American civilization. An important book for all those concerned with the course of American culture and literature.

Blood and Boundaries: The Limits of Religious and Racial Exclusion in Early Modern Latin America

Brandeis University Press
2020-11-01
212 pages
5.5 x 8.5 in.
Cloth ISBN: 9781684580194

Stuart B. Schwartz, George Burton Adams Professor of History
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut

In Blood and Boundaries, Stuart B. Schwartz takes us to late medieval Latin America to show how Spain and Portugal’s policies of exclusion and discrimination based on religious origins and genealogy were transferred to their colonies in Latin America. Rather than concentrating on the three principal divisions of colonial society—Indians, Europeans, and people of African origins—as is common in studies of these colonial societies, Schwartz examines the three minority groups of moriscos, conversos, and mestizos. Muslim and Jewish converts and their descendants, he shows, posed a special problem for colonial society: they were feared and distrusted as peoples considered ethnically distinct, but at the same time their conversion to Christianity seemed to violate stable social categories and identities. This led to the creation of “cleanliness of blood” regulations that explicitly discriminated against converts. Eventually, Schwartz shows, those regulations were extended to control the subject indigenous and enslaved African populations, and over time, applied to the growing numbers of mestizos, peoples of mixed ethnic origins. Despite the efforts of civil and church and state institutions to regulate, denigrate, and exclude, members of these affected groups often found legal and practical means to ignore, circumvent, or challenge the efforts to categorize and exclude them, creating in the process the dynamic societies of Latin America that emerged in the nineteenth century.

Contents

• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Moriscos: Real, Occasional, and Imaginary Muslims
• Conversos: The Mestizos of Faith
• Mestizos: “A Monster of . . . Many Species”
• Notes
• Index

Interwoven Lives: Indigenous Mothers of Salish Coast Communities

Washington State University Press
2019
310 pages
Illustrations / maps / notes / bibliography / index
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-87422-364-4
eBook ISBN: 978-0-87422-389-7

Candace Wellman

In this companion work to Peace Weavers, her previous book on Puget Sound’s cross-cultural marriages, award-winning author Candace Wellman depicts the lives of four additional intermarried indigenous women who influenced mid-1800s settlement in the Bellingham Bay area. She describes each wife’s native culture, details ancestral history and traits for both spouses, and traces descendants’ destinies, highlighting the families’ contributions to new communities.

• Finalist, 2020 Willa Literary Award, scholarly nonfiction
• 2020 Washington State Historical Society WOW selection

Generations of Freedom: Gender, Movement, and Violence in Natchez, 1779-1865

University of Georgia Press
2021-03-31
Illustrations: 13 b&w images
Trim size: 6.000in x 9.000in
Hardcover ISBN: 9-780-8203-6012-6

Nik Ribianszky, Lecturer in History
Queen’s University, Belfast, United Kingdom

In Generations of Freedom Nik Ribianszky employs the lenses of gender and violence to examine family, community, and the tenacious struggles by which free blacks claimed and maintained their freedom under shifting international governance from Spanish colonial rule (1779-95), through American acquisition (1795) and eventual statehood (established in 1817), and finally to slavery’s legal demise in 1865.

Freedom was not necessarily a permanent condition, but one separated from racial slavery by a permeable and highly unstable boundary. This book explicates how the interlocking categories of race, class, and gender shaped Natchez, Mississippi’s free community of color and how implicit and explicit violence carried down from one generation to another. To demonstrate this, Ribianszky introduces the concept of generational freedom. Inspired by the work of Ira Berlin, who focused on the complex process through which free Africans and their descendants came to experience enslavement, generational freedom is an analytical tool that employs this same idea in reverse to trace how various generations of free people of color embraced, navigated, and protected their tenuous freedom. This approach allows for the identification of a foundational generation of free people of color, those who were born into slavery but later freed. The generations that followed, the conditional generations, were those who were born free and without the experience of and socialization into North America’s system of chattel, racial slavery. Notwithstanding one’s status at birth as legally free or unfree, though, each individual’s continued freedom was based on compliance with a demanding and often unfair system.

Generations of Freedom tells the stories of people who collectively inhabited an uncertain world of qualified freedom. Taken together-by exploring the themes of movement, gendered violence, and threats to their property and, indeed, their very bodies-these accounts argue that free blacks were active in shaping their own freedom and that of generations thereafter. Their successful navigation of the shifting ground of freedom was dependent on their utilization of all available tools at their disposal: securing reliable and influential allies, maintaining their independence, and using the legal system to protect their property-including that most precious, themselves.

A War Born Family: African American Adoption in the Wake of the Korean War

New York University Press
January 2020
328 Pages
6.00 x 9.00 in
Hardcover ISBN: 9781479872329
Ebook ISBN: 9781479815869

Kori A. Graves, Associate Professor of History
University at Albany, State University of New York

The origins of a transnational adoption strategy that secured the future for Korean-black children

The Korean War left hundreds of thousands of children in dire circumstances, but the first large-scale transnational adoption efforts involved the children of American soldiers and Korean women. Korean laws and traditions stipulated that citizenship and status passed from father to child, which made the children of US soldiers legally stateless. Korean-black children faced additional hardships because of Korean beliefs about racial purity, and the segregation that structured African American soldiers’ lives in the military and throughout US society. The African American families who tried to adopt Korean-black children also faced and challenged discrimination in the child welfare agencies that arranged adoptions.

Drawing on extensive research in black newspapers and magazines, interviews with African American soldiers, and case notes about African American adoptive families, A War Born Family demonstrates how the Cold War and the struggle for civil rights led child welfare agencies to reevaluate African American men and women as suitable adoptive parents, advancing the cause of Korean transnational adoption.

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.