Mixed Race Studies

The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White

The Penguin Press
2011-02-17
416 pages
6.14 x 9.25in
Hardcover ISBN: 9781594202827

Daniel J. Sharfstein, Professor of Law
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee

Winner of the 2012 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize

In America, race is a riddle. The stories we tell about our past have calcified into the fiction that we are neatly divided into black or white. It is only with the widespread availability of DNA testing and the boom in genealogical research that the frequency with which individuals and entire families crossed the color line has become clear.

In this sweeping history, Daniel J. Sharfstein unravels the stories of three families who represent the complexity of race in America and force us to rethink our basic assumptions about who we are. The Gibsons were wealthy landowners in the South Carolina backcountry who became white in the 1760s, ascending to the heights of the Southern elite and ultimately to the U.S. Senate. The Spencers were hardscrabble farmers in the hills of Eastern Kentucky, joining an isolated Appalachian community in the 1840s and for the better part of a century hovering on the line between white and black. The Walls were fixtures of the rising black middle class in post-Civil War Washington, D.C., only to give up everything they had fought for to become white at the dawn of the twentieth century. Together, their interwoven and intersecting stories uncover a forgotten America in which the rules of race were something to be believed but not necessarily obeyed.

Defining their identities first as people of color and later as whites, these families provide a lens for understanding how people thought about and experienced race and how these ideas and experiences evolved-how the very meaning of black and white changed-over time. Cutting through centuries of myth, amnesia, and poisonous racial politics, The Invisible Line will change the way we talk about race, racism, and civil rights.

Three American families’ stories…

The Gibsons
The Gibsons were among the first free people of color in seventeenth-century Virginia, most of whom were free because their mothers were English and by law slavery followed the status of the mother. In the early l700s, as Virginia’s laws made it increasingly difficult for free blacks to own property and earn a living, the Gibsons left the colony for the southern frontier. When the Gibsons reached South Carolina in the 1730s, the colonial assembly worried.that they had come to organize a slave revolt. But after personally interviewing the family, the colonial governor granted them hundreds of acres of land in a Welsh and Scots-Irish community. After one generation they were neither black nor white-they were planters. In the nineteenth century, they rose to the heights of the Southern aristocracy. They sent their sons to Yale and had vast holdings of land and slaves near Vicksburg, Mississippi, Lexington, Kentucky, and Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana. Gibsons were rebel officers, powerful opponents of Reconstruction, and leaders of the New South.’ One became a United States Senator from Louisiana.

The Spencers
The Spencers’ story begins in the Appalachian Mountains. In an area that had more slaves and more free blacks than anywhere else in eastern Kentucky-largely because of a bustling salt mining industry there in the early 1800s-two free men of color began having children with a pair of white sisters who had recently moved from South Carolina. Shortly before one man, George Freeman, was prosecuted for interracial sex, the other man, Jordan Spencer-possibly Freeman’s brother or son-moved with his family one hundred miles deeper into the mountains. Even though he was visibly dark-skinned, his new community in Johnson County, Kentucky, decided that he could be white. His family hovered on the line between black and white for the rest of the century, farming and logging in a mountain hollow before heading into the coal mines.

The Walls
The Walls trace their roots to a wealthy plantation owner in Rockingham, North Carolina. Stephen Wall never married, but he had children with three of his slaves, In the 1830s and 1 840s, he freed his children and sent them to Ohio to be raised by radical Quaker abolitionists. He bought land for them, generously supported their education at places like Oberlin College, and willed them a lot of money. No one knows why. He kept their mothers in bondage. The children became ardent abolitionists and served in the Union Army and Freedmen’s Bureau. After the War, several moved to Washington, D.C., where they fought for civil rights and women’s rights and raised their families to expect nothing less than equality. But as Reconstruction gave way to Jim Crow, their children disappeared into the white world.

An Odd Sense of Color

Toulouse Street: Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans
2012-03-24

Mark Folse

OK, I just have to say it: it was Odd that three of the four panelists on the Tennessee Williams Festival panel New Orleans Free People of Color were white. The garrulous playwright John Guare tried to steal the show and not in a good way, and managed to annoy mystery writer Barbara Hambly when she disagreed with him but wouldn’t stop talking long enough to let her say her piece. Guare put his hand on the back of her chair at some point and it was funny to see Hambly leaning away from him to the point of tipping over.

Guare is the author of a successful Broadway play A Free Man of Color, Hanbly has penned a dozen mysteries featuring the Creole private detective Benjamin January, and the panel was rounded out by Daniel Sharfstein, author of The Invisible Line: A Secret History of Race in America and Gregory Osborne, a child of the Creole diaspora to Los Angeles in the post-World War II period and an expert on the subject who manages the archives at the New Orleans public library.

Sharfstein and Osborne thankfully stole the show away from Guare. Sharfstein’s book drew out of a a stint of volunteer work in South Africa where he met a Black woman who had been registered as Colored (of mixed race) by a census taken who was a friend of the woman’s father. He recounted a fascinating tale of a couple prosecuted f under South Carolina’s miscegenation laws, a charge from which they were exonerated after the state’s Supreme Court ruled that it was impossible to determine if the woman’s grandfather had himself been pure Black, which would have made her an octaroon and invalidated the marriage…

Read the entire article here.

Fashioning and Refashioning Marie Laveau in American Memory and Imagination

Florida State University
2009
201 pages

Tatia Jacobson Jordan

A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Fashioning and Refashioning Marie Laveau in American Memory and Imagination follows the life and literary presence of the legendary figure, Marie Laveau. This female spiritualist lived in antebellum Louisiana from 1801-1881. After her death, her legend has continued to grow as evidenced by her presence in contemporary print and pop culture and the tens of thousands of visitors to her grave in New Orleans every year. Here, I contextualize Laveau in a pre-Civil war America by looking at the African American female in print and visual culture. I trace the beginnings of several tropes in literature that ultimately affect the relevancy of the Laveau figure as she appears and reappears in literature beginning with Zora Neale Hurston’s inclusion of Laveau in Mules and Men. I offer close readings of the appearance of these tropes in Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, interrogate her connection to Caribbean lore in Tell My Horse, and show the evolution of this figure in several of Hurston’s short stories. I then offer close readings of the refiguring of Laveau in Robert Tallant’s works, Ishmael Reed’s novel The Last Days of Louisiana Red, and Jewell Parker Rhodes’s Marie Laveau trilogy. I intervene with contemporary scholarship by suggesting that novels like Corregidora by Gayl Jones, Mama Day by Gloria Naylor, and The Salt Eaters by Toni Cade Bambara draw not on a general conjure figure, as previously thought, but instead implicitly refashion feminist heroines that resemble Marie Laveau, characters with a circum-Atlantic consciousness that arise from Hurston’s literary legacy.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• List of Figures
• Abstract
• INTRODUCTION: “Looking for the Join”: Positioning Laveau Lore in American Studies
• CHAPTER ONE: Historical Context: Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Print Culture and Literature
• CHAPTER TWO: “That’s what the old ones said in ancient times and we talk it again”: The Retelling of Laveau in Hurston’s Canon
• CHAPTER THREE: “Dismissing” Laveau: Male Authorship in the Laveau Canon
• CHAPTER FOUR: Glimpses of the Ghost: Hurston’s Legacy in Gloria Naylor, Toni Cade Barnbara, and Gayl Jones
• CHAPTER FIVE: Hearing Voodoo, Writing Voodoo: Cultural Memory in Jewell Parker Rhodes’s Marie Laveau Trilogy
• CHAPTER SIX: Coda
• Appendix
• References
• Biographical Sketch

LIST OF FIGURES

• Figure 1: “Marie Laveau,” 1920s; Franck Schneider after George Catlin Courtesy of the Louisiana State Museum
• Figure 2: The Original Cover of Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman, 1899
• Figure 3: “This is a white man’s government,”from Harper’s Weekly, 1868; Library of Congress
• Figure 4: “‘Well, Missy! Heah we is!'”1913; Library of Congress
• Figure 5: “Jinnoowine Johnson ticket. ‘Carrying the war into Africa,”‘ 1836; Library of Congress
• Figure 6: “An Affecting Scene in Kentucky,” 1836; Library of Congress
• Figure 7: “Children on the Lawn at Brookhill (Nanny Hiding Behind the Children) Courtesy of the Valentine Richmond Historical Center
• Figure 8: Racist Mammy Postcard 1, 1900; Library of Congress
• Figure 9: Racist Mammy Postcard 2, 1900; Library of Congress
• Figure 10: “Mr. T. Rice as the original Jim Crow,” 1832; Sheet Music Cover Illustration
• Figure 11: Zora Neale Hurston in the Caribbean; Library of Congress
• Figure 12: Hurston’s Ft. Pierce Chronicle Column circa 1958
• Figure 13: Cover of Fire!! Literary Magazine, 1926
• Figure 14: “Voodoo Painting/’ Courtesy of the Robert Tallant Photograph Collection, Louisiana Division, New Orleans Public Library
• Figure 15: “Marie Laveau,”2007, Courtesy of Artist Holly Sarre

Read the entire dissertation here.

Catholic records of slave baptisms in colonial New Orleans go online

New Orleans Times-Picayune
2011-02-01

Bruce Nolan, Beat Reporter

On Sunday, the 6th of May, 1798, an enslaved New Orleans woman named only Manon, owned by Mr. LeBlanc, presented her 2-year-old child, Antoine Joseph, at St. Louis Cathedral on the Plaza de Armas to be baptized at the hands of Father Luis Quintanilla, a Capuchin friar there.

Manon was probably accompanied by her owner, as was the custom of the day, according to Emilie Leumas, an expert on the era and the keeper of the Archdiocese of New Orleans’ sacramental records.

In racially complex, laissez-faire New Orleans, where categories of race were faithfully noted then sometimes dismissed, Quintanilla noted the pertinent details. Manon was a mulatto, or mixed-race woman, and the baby’s father was officially unrecognized but apparently white, as the baby is described with the Spanish term “quarteroon,” which means three-fourths white.

The record of that event has always been preserved in the rich archives of the Archdiocese of New Orleans. But it has never been easily accessible.

But Tuesday, the 1798 baptism of Antoine Joseph, with thousands of similar baptismal records from colonial New Orleans, were posted on the Internet as a new tool for genealogists everywhere.

“Now people can sit in their slippers at 11 o’clock at night and read away,” said Leumas, the archdiocese’s archivist…

..In Antoine Joseph’s case, the godparents were there: Marie Joseph and Antonio, neither with a family name. Still attentive to the complex categories of race and color, Quintanilla noted that the baby’s godfather was “metis”—another mixed-race classification, perhaps suggesting American Indian blood, according to Leumas.

By the end of 2012, the archdiocese hopes to go both forward and backward in time, posting all of its sacramental records—baptisms, marriages, funerals and other life cycle events—from the founding of the city in 1718 to the date of Louisiana’s admittance to the union in 1812, Leumas said…

Read the entire article here.

Re-Writing Race in Early American New Orleans

Miranda
n°5 (December 2011)

Nathalie Dessens, Professor of American History and Civilization
Université Toulouse 2, Le Mirail

This article examines the representation of the racial pattern and pattern of race relations in early American New Orleans. Starting with a historical and historiographical contextualization, the article shows that race relations were more complex than is usually depicted, partly because considerations based on other criteria than race were superimposed on the traditional categories. It concludes that there was not one way of representing races and race relations in the first decades of the postcolonial era, and suggests that these representations greatly varied from one group to another and did not necessarily correspond to the current representation based on the American/Creole dichotomy.

Louisiana’s first century of history accounts both for its inclusion in the antebellum American South and for the specificities it displayed in the young American republic. After six decades of French rule, it became a Spanish colony at the end of the Seven Years’ War, before briefly—and secretly—returning to French rule, in 1800, and being eventually sold, in 1803, to the United States by France. Its colonial past made it a slave colony, like the rest of the Anglo-American South, but it also made its social order slightly different from the rest of the South. Its three-tiered order, although it was by no means an exception in the plantation societies of the North-American continent, contradicted the biracial order that prevailed in most of the South and in the psyche of the new American rulers of Louisiana in the early 19th century.

When Louisiana was turned over to the United States, many historians contend, the old Creole population and the new rulers of Louisiana started conflicting over how to legislate on the racial order and how to deal with race relations in this new territory (then state) of the Union. Until relatively recently, the Creole/American opposition has been set forth by historians of Louisiana as the backbone of racial representations in early American Louisiana.

Recent historiography, however, has tended to show that, if this binary opposition is often a correct representation of the debates over racial questions in early American Louisiana, it is most certainly an oversimplification and cannot account for all the representations of race relations in Louisiana in the first four decades of American rule. This article is a contribution to these new historiographical trends.

Relying on a specific testimony, that of Jean Boze, a Frenchman arrived in New Orleans with the large wave of refugees from the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue at the time of the Haitian Revolution, this article contends that the pattern of race interactions and race relations was much more complex than that defined by the Creole/American opposition. It will first examine the history and historiography of race relations in colonial and early American Louisiana, before examining the way in which testimonies of residents of Louisiana in the early national period may help revisiting the writing of race in the early postcolonial Crescent City…

Read the entire article here.

The ‘white’ slave children of New Orleans: Images of pale mixed-race slaves used to drum up sympathy among wealthy donors in 1860s

Daily Mail
2012-02-28

When eight former slaves aimed to drum up support for struggling African-American schools in the 1860s, they believed they had just the thing.

In order to garner sympathy – and funds – from rich northerners as they toured the country, organisers from New Orleans portrayed the slaves as white for a propaganda campaign, using four children with mixed-race ancestry and pale complexions.

They believed the white faces of Charles Taylor, Rebecca Huger, Rosina Downs and Augusta Broujey would encourage donors to sympathise with the plight of recently-emancipated slaves and give more generously…

…They soon discovered it was near-impossible to find sympathy and support in a war-torn and racially-prejudiced county…

Read the entire article and view 11 other photographs here.

We as Freemen: Plessy v. Ferguson

Pelican Publishing Company
2003
176 pages
5½ x 8½
20 photos – Notes – Index
ISBN: 1-58980-120-2
EAN: 978-1-58980-120-2 hc

Keith Weldon Medley

In June 1892, a thirty-year-old shoemaker named Homer Plessy bought a first-class railway ticket from his native New Orleans to Covington, north of Lake Pontchartrain. The two-hour trip had hardly begun when Plessy was arrested and removed from the train. Though Homer Plessy was born a free man of color and enjoyed relative equality while growing up in Reconstruction-era New Orleans, by 1890 he could no longer ride in the same carriage with white passengers. Plessy’s act of civil disobedience was designed to test the constitutionality of the Separate Car Act, one of the many Jim Crow laws that threatened the freedoms gained by blacks after the Civil War. This largely forgotten case mandated separate-but-equal treatment and established segregation as the law of the land. It would be fifty-eight years before this ruling was reversed by Brown v. Board of Education.

Keith Weldon Medley brings to life the players in this landmark trial, from the crusading black columnist Rodolphe Desdunes and the other members of the Comité des Citoyens to Albion W. Tourgee, the outspoken writer who represented Plessy, to John Ferguson, a reformist carpetbagger who nonetheless felt that he had to judge Plessy guilty.

Assessing the Identity of Black Indians in Louisiana: A Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis

Louisiana State University
May 2004
193 pages

Francis J. Powell

A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the Doctor of Philosophy In The School of Social Work

This study shows the existence of Black Indians in Louisiana and investigates whether differences exist between Black Indians who are members of officially recognized tribes and those who do not have any type of recognition. The study examined if a relationship exist between tribal recognition and ethnic identity, subjective well-being, and social support. A cross-sectional survey design was used. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to obtain qualitative data. The sample consisted of 60 participants. 30 were from recognized tribal groups and 30 were from non-recognized tribal communities.

The study specifically examined variables related to the perceptions of Black Indians in Louisiana to see if this group perceives themselves to be Black, Indian, or both. The independent variable included demographic characteristics and tribal designation. The dependent variables were ethnic identity, subjective well-being and social support.
 
Results showed that Black Indians in recognized groups had higher levels of Native American identity when compared to their levels of African American identity (p< .01). There were no significant differences in the levels of Native American identity when compared with the African American identity among the non-recognized samples (p< .342). Differences did emerge with respect to income, age, and tribal designation. Results indicated that those Black Indians in recognized tribes were significantly more likely to be younger with higher annual incomes than those Black Indians in non-recognized groups (p < .01).
 
There were no significant differences between the two groups for the variables social support and subjective well-being. Findings imply that “race”, as a social construct, is designed by arbitrary categories that are inconsistent with ethnic heritage or cultural identity development.

Table of Contents

• ACKOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABSTRACT
• 1 INTRODUCTION
  • Mixture of African and Native Americans
  • Historical Indian Tribes in Louisiana
  • Purpose of the Study
  • Importance of the Study
  • Operational Definition of Key Concepts
  • Legal Definitions and Racially Mixed People
• 2 REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE
  • Empowerment Approach Theory
  • African American Perspective
    • The Black Experience
    • Church and Family
  • Racial Identity Theories
  • Native Americans
    • Precontact
    • Postcontact
    • Cultural Beliefs
    • Indian Identity
    • Who is an Indian?
  • Historiography of Southern Race Relations
  • Theoretical Perspectives on Biracial Individuals
  • Theoretical Perspectives on Ethnicity and Culture
  • Measuring Ethnic Identity
  • Life Satisfaction and Subjective Well-Being
    • Well-Being and Social Support among African Americans
    • Well-Being and Social Support among Native Americans
  • Social Support Theory
  • Literature Review Summary
• 3 METHODOLOGY
  • Conceptual Framework
  • Combining Quantitative and Qualitative Methods
  • Research Design
  • Population and Samples
  • Instrumentation
  • Data Collection Procedure
  • Data Analysis
    • Research Hypothesis
  • Definition of Key Concepts
  • Protection of Human Subjects
  • Purpose of the Research Study
  • Major Research Questions
  • Qualitative Research Process
    • Research Design
    • Instrument
    • Data Collection
• 4 DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS OF QUANTITATIVE SAMPLE
  • Sample Characteristics
  • Univariate Analysis
    • Objective One
      • Recognition
      • Gender
      • Income
      • Age
      • Education
    • Objective Two
    • MEIM (Ethnic Identity and Affirmation, Belonging, Commitment – African American)
    • MEIM (Ethnic Identity and Affirmation, Belonging, Commitment – Indian)
    • Well-Being (Life Satisfaction and Social Status)
    • Social Support
    • Emotional Support (family)
    • Socializing (family)
    • Practical Assistance (family)
    • Financial Assistance (family)
    • Advice/Guidance (family)
    • Emotional Support (friends)
    • Socializing (friends)
    • Practical Assistance (friends)
    • Financial Assistance (friends)
    • Advice/Guidance (friends)
  • Bivariate Analysis
    • Objective Three
• 5 DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS OF QUALITATIVE SAMPLES
  • Sample Characteristics
  • Dual Cultural Identity
  • Racial Dissonance
  • Racism
  • Marginalization
  • Chapter Summary
• 6 QUANITATIVE AND QUALITATIVE FINDINGS: SUMMARY, DISCUSSION, IMPLICATIONS, LIMITATIONS
  • Demographic Variables
  • Ethnic Identity
  • Well-Being (Life Satisfaction and Social Status)
  • Qualitative Findings
  • Implication of Social Work Practice
  • Implication of Social Work Education
  • Limitation of the Study
  • Direction for Future Research
• REFERENCES
• APPENDIX
  • A. MANDATORY CRITERIA FOR FEDERAL ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
  • B. RESEARCH STUDY PROJECT INSTRUMENTS
  • C. QUALITATIVE INTERVIEW GUIDE
• Qualitative Interview Guide
• VITA

Read the entire dissertation here.

Free Soldiers of Color

The New York Times
2012-02-17

Donald R. Shaffer, Lecturer in History
Upper Iowa University
and blogger at Civil War Emancipation

On Feb. 15, 1862, Louisiana dissolved all its militia units as part of a military reorganization law. Among the organizations disbanded was a militia unique in the Confederacy, the 1st Louisiana Native Guards. What made the New Orleans unit special was that it was composed of African-Americans.

It was natural that the only black militia regiment in the Confederacy would be found in Louisiana, and more specifically in New Orleans, which boasted French, Spanish and African roots. The Crescent City was a cosmopolitan metropolis, by far the largest in the antebellum South, with an 1860 population of over 168,000 people (in contrast, the runner-up, Charleston, S.C., had just 40,000).

A distinctive group in the diverse city was the French-speaking gens de couleur libre, or “free people of color.” The progeny of European men and women of African descent, this group carved out a place in Louisiana society somewhere between the white population and the more purely African-descended slaves. Their position largely was as an inheritance of French and Spanish rule in Louisiana, which exhibited greater toleration for mixed-raced persons. Indeed, many gens de couleur libre owned property (some even owned slaves), worked at skilled or professional occupations, and embraced the cultural trappings of respectable society. Yet as hard as they tried to gain acceptance as a third caste, the gens de couleur libre still found many whites hostile on account of their obvious if muted African ancestry. If their position was better than that of most Southern blacks, it was by no means equal to that of Louisiana whites…

Read the entire essay here.

Opinion: What does Blackness look like?

Cable News Network (CNN)
In America: You define America. What defines you?
2012-01-21

Yaba Blay, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies
Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Editor’s note: Yaba Blay, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of Africana studies who teaches courses at Lafayette College. Her research focuses on black identity, with specific attention to skin color and hair politics. She is the recipient of a 2010 Leeway Foundation Art and Change Grant through which she embarked upon the book project, (1)ne Drop: Conversations on Skin Color, Race, and Identity.

I always thought I could spot a Black person anywhere. My eyes were trained in New Orleans—home to a historically preeminent group of folks who self-identify as “Creoles.”   Many of them would make it a point to announce that they are different—not White, not Black, but “Creole.”  A mix of African, Native American, French, and sometimes Spanish heritage, some Creoles are light-skinned enough to be mistaken for—or “pass”—for White people. We call them “passé blanc.”

One of my favorite pastimes as a youth in New Orleans was “picking out Black people” – people whom everyone else might have thought were White or “something else,” but whom I knew for a fact were Black. Somehow. Without even knowing it at the time, I had blindly accepted the “one-drop rule,” the early 1900’s law turned social rule that held that anyone with 1/32 of “African Black blood” was Black. And somehow I made it my mission to identify that “one-drop” any chance I could get. Maybe it was my way of retaliating against those who didn’t want to be associated with my kind – those whom I felt were somehow rejecting their own kind.

In my limited experiences, it seemed that people whose physical appearance gave them the “option” to be something else, chose to be something else.  So in my adult life, when I left New Orleans and began to meet people who were very adamant about their black identity, even though they could have easily identified as “mixed” or “Latino” or “Creole” or could have even “passed” for white, I found myself intrigued. On one particular occasion, I was on a panel hosted by the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI); and for as “learned” and as well-versed as (I thought) I was in global skin color politics, I found myself somehow taken aback each time either of my co-panelists, whom I would have identified as “Latino/a,” self-identified as “Black” and “African.”  In that moment, I felt ashamed of myself for questioning their identities based upon the stereotypical visions of “Blackness” that lived in my head. Afterwards, as I continued to struggle with myself, I knew that I wanted to do something with my feelings that could be useful to others like myself. I wanted to explore the “other” sides of Blackness.

So began my journey into the (1)ne Drop project…

Read the entire opinion piece here.