Mixed Race Studies

Ralston, Elreta Melton Alexander

NCPedia
State Library of North Carolina
Raleigh, North Carolina
2013

Virginia L. Summey, Historian, Author, and Faculty Fellow
Lloyd International Honors College, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Elreta Melton Alexander was a pioneering African-American attorney from Greensboro, North Carolina. Born in Smithfield, North Carolina, she was the daughter of a Baptist minister and a teacher, and grew up comfortably as a part of the black middle class. Coming of age during the Jim Crow period of the South, she was raised by her educated, middle-class parents to be a leader in the community. The descendant of two white grandparents, her bi-racialism formed her early awareness of colorism within the African-American community…

Read the entire article here.

‘How is Pauli Murray not a household name?’ The extraordinary life of the US’s most radical activist

The Guardian
2021-09-17

Steve Rose

‘I lived to see my lost causes found’ … Pauli Murray. Photograph: Everett Collection Historical/Alamy

She explored her gender and sexuality in the 20s, defied segregation in the 40s and inspired Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Now, a film is bringing her trailblazing achievements to light

It seems inconceivable that someone like Pauli Murray could have slipped through the cracks of US history. A lawyer, activist, scholar, poet and priest, Murray led a trailblazing life that altered the course of history. She was at the forefront of the battles for racial and gender equality, but often so far out in front that her contributions went unrecognised.

In 1940, 15 years before Rosa Parks, Murray was jailed for refusing to move to the back of a bus in the Jim Crow south. In 1943, she campaigned successfully to desegregate her local diner, 17 years before the Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins of 1960. Her work paved the way for the landmark supreme court ruling Brown v Board of Education in 1954 – which de-segregated US schools – to the extent that Thurgood Marshall, a lawyer for the NAACP civil rights group, called Murray’s book States’ Laws on Race and Color “the bible for civil rights lawyers”.

Murray also co-founded the National Organization for Women (NOW), in 1966, alongside Betty Friedan. When Ruth Bader Ginsburg won the Reed v Reed case in 1971, which ruled that discrimination “on the basis of sex” was unconstitutional, her arguments were built on Murray’s work. Ginsburg named Murray as co-author of the brief. “We knew when we wrote that brief that we were standing on her shoulders,” Ginsburg later said.

Murray ought to be celebrated as an American hero, commemorated in stamps, statuary and street names, not to mention biopics, so why is her name relatively unknown?…

Read the entire article here.

Adele Logan Alexander

Charlie Rose
1999-10-26

Charlie Rose, Host

Adele Logan Alexander discusses the history of identity, race, and class in the United States through her own family story, as she does in her book “Homelands and Waterways: The American Journey of the Bond Family, 1846-1926.”

Watch the entire interview (00:17:52) here.

She became a park ranger at 85 to tell her story of segregation. Now 100, she’s the oldest active ranger.

The Washington Post
2021-09-24

Sydney Page

Betty Reid Soskin at the Rosie the Riveter World War II Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, Calif. Soskin is the oldest active ranger in the National Park Service. (Luther Bailey/NPS photo)

When asked how it feels to be 100 years old, Betty Reid Soskin gave a subtle shrug, smiled and said: “The same way I felt at 99.”

But she’s not just any centenarian: Soskin is the oldest active ranger in the National Park Service, and after celebrating her birthday on Sept. 22, she’s still going strong.

Seated in the study of her apartment in Richmond, Calif., dressed proudly in her park ranger uniform, Soskin reflected on her life.

When it comes to sharing her story, Soskin is not shy. As a park ranger at the Rosie the Riveter World War II Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, she spends her days recounting her rich and complicated history, in the hope that her firsthand account will resonate with people, and encourage them to share their own stories.

“I think everyone’s story is very important. There is so much diversity,” Soskin said. “It’s in that mix that the great secret of a democracy exists.”…

Read the entire article here.

Retrospection: Agassiz’s Expeditions in Brazil

The Harvard Crimson
2016-04-21

Michelle Y. Raji

Louis Rodolphe Agassiz

But for Agassiz, the trip to Brazil was about more than science. Not only was evolution—a process not immediately observable to the human eye—deeply antithetical to Agassiz’s staunch empiricism, evolution was profoundly at odds with his perceived world order.

Three decades after the then-obscure scientist Charles Darwin quietly sketched his now-famous finches aboard the HMS Beagle in the Galapagos, influential Harvard professor Louis Rodolphe Agassiz set out with much greater fanfare on a lesser-known expedition. In 1865, Agassiz and his wife, accompanied by a small group of Harvard scientists and students, set sail from New York to Rio de Janeiro on The Colorado.

In a lecture en route to Brazil, Agassiz challenged Darwin’s revolutionary theory of evolution on the grounds that the theory relied too much on argument and too little on fact. Agassiz posited that evolution was not plausible according to the geologic record. The trip to Brazil was an attempt to disprove Darwin once and for all. Agassiz saw in the unique biodiversity of Brazil a perfect laboratory to test his counter-theories of phylogenetic embryology and glacial catastrophe in the tropics.

But for Agassiz, the trip to Brazil was about more than science. Not only was evolution—a process not immediately observable to the human eye—deeply antithetical to Agassiz’s staunch empiricism, evolution was profoundly at odds with his perceived world order. Though only moderately religious, Agassiz believed in the existence of a creator in all his work. Fortunately for Agassiz, this belief fit well with comparative zoology, which at the time focused heavily on hierarchal classification…

Read the entire article here.

Genevieve Gaignard’s Timely Work Documents Racial Injustice and Calls for Change

Artsy
2020-10-13

Dominique Clayton

Genevieve Gaignard, ​Trailblazer (A Dream Deferred)​, 2017. ©Genevieve Gaignard. Courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles.

In a period when many are glued to their devices, waiting for the latest updates on the upcoming election or ongoing pandemic, it’s hard for creatives to focus on new projects and work. Yet for artists like Genevieve Gaignard, who retreated to an artist residency shortly after the onset of the pandemic, this time has served as the catalyst for continuing to create groundbreaking work that speaks to our past, present, and future.

Gaignard recently returned to Los Angeles, where she is based, after spending roughly five months at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in North Adams, Massachusetts. There, she completed the inaugural Artist’s Laboratory residency program and opened a new exhibition at MCLA Gallery 51, titled “A Long Way From Home.” Both initiatives are led by the director of the Berkshire Cultural Resource Center Erica Wall, a Black gallerist and curator who previously ran her own space in Santa Ana, California. “Genevieve is such a deep and amazingly prolific artist, whose work reflects her laser focus and commitment to documenting and illuminating racial injustice in the U.S. over time, in real time,” Wall said. “Social media can hardly keep up with her!”

While the effects of COVID-19 caused all of the programming around the residency and the exhibition to move online, Gaignard and Wall made virtual magic happen by pivoting to a series of workshops, sessions, and a lovely exhibition opening via Zoom. There, alongside other artists and supporters, I witnessed the big reveal of Gaignard’s latest work, which brought on a combination of laughter and tears…

Read the entire article here.

‘America’s Oldest Park Ranger’ Is Only Her Latest Chapter

The New York Times
2021-09-20

Jennifer Schuessler

Chanell Stone for The New York Times

Betty Reid Soskin has fought to ensure that American history includes the stories that get overlooked. As she turns 100, few stories have been more remarkable than hers.

The Rosie the Riveter / World War II Home Front National Historical Park, which sprawls across the former shipyards in Richmond, Calif., on the northeast edge of San Francisco Bay, tells the enormous story of the largest wartime mobilization in American history and the sweeping social changes it sparked.

Visitors can climb aboard an enormous Victory ship, one of more than 700 vessels produced in Richmond — and, in the gift shop, pick up swag emblazoned with the iconic image of the red-kerchiefed Rosie herself, arm flexed up with “We Can Do It!” bravado.

But for many, the park is synonymous with another woman: Betty.

Betty Reid Soskin, who turns 100 on Sept. 22, is the oldest active ranger in the National Park Service. Over the past decade and a half, she has become both an icon of the service and an unlikely celebrity, drawing overflow crowds to talks and a steady stream of media interviewers eager for the eloquent words of an indomitable 5 feet 3 inch great-grandmother once described by a colleague as “sort of like Bette Davis, Angela Davis and Yoda all rolled into one.”…

Read the entire article here.

Sexuality and Slavery: Reclaiming Intimate Histories in the Americas

University of Georgia Press
2018-10-01
240 pages
5 b&w images
6.000in x 9.000in
Hardcover ISBN: 9-780-8203-5403-3
Paperback ISBN: 9-780-8203-5404-0

Edited by:

Daina Ramey Berry, Oliver H. Radkey Regents Professor of History
University of Texas, Austin

Leslie M. Harris, Professor of History
Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois

Foreword by:

Catherine Clinton, Denman Endowed Professor in American History
University of Texas, San Antonio

An examination of the many facets of sexuality within slave communities

In this groundbreaking collection, editors Daina Ramey Berry and Leslie M. Harris place sexuality at the center of slavery studies in the Americas (the United States, the Caribbean, and South America). While scholars have marginalized or simply overlooked the importance of sexual practices in most mainstream studies of slavery, Berry and Harris argue here that sexual intimacy constituted a core terrain of struggle between slaveholders and the enslaved. These essays explore consensual sexual intimacy and expression within slave communities, as well as sexual relationships across lines of race, status, and power. Contributors explore sexuality as a tool of control, exploitation, and repression and as an expression of autonomy, resistance, and defiance.

Table of Contents

• Foreword / Catherine Clinton
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction / Daina Ramey Berry and Leslie M. Harris
• Chapter 1 : Early European Views of African Bodies: Beauty / Stephanie M. H. Camp
• Chapter 2: Toiling in the Fields: Valuing Female Slaves in Jamaica, 1674-1788 / Trevor Barnard
• Chapter 3: Reading the Specter of Racialized Gender in Eighteenth-Century Bridgetown, Barbados / Marisa J. Fuentes
• Chapter 4: As if She Were My Own: Love and Law in the Slave Society of Eighteenth-Century Peru /Bianca Premo
• Chapter 5: Wombs of Liberation: Petitions, Law, and the Black Woman’s Body in Maryland, 1780-1858 / Jessica Millward
• Chapter 6: Rethinking Sexual Violence and the Marketplace of Slavery: White Women, the Slave Market, and Enslaved Peoples Sexualized Bodies in the Nineteenth-Century South / Stephanie Jones-Rogers
• Chapter 7: The Sexual Abuse of Black Men under American Slavery Thomas A. Foster
• Chapter 8: Manhood, Sex, and Power in Antebellum Slave Communities / David Doddington
• Chapter 9: What’s Love Got to Do with It? Concubinage and Enslaved Women and Girls in the Antebellum South / Brenda E. Stevenson
• Chapter 10: When the Present Is Past: Writing the History of Sexuality and Slavery / Jim Downs
• Contributors
• Index

Historian of Race in America Gets an Unusual Four-Book Deal

The New York Times
2021-09-16

Jennifer Schuessler

Martha S. Jones said she was already working on the first book, which she said will have an element of family history as well. Johns Hopkins University

Martha S. Jones, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, will write four books for Basic Books, starting with an exploration of the history and legacy of slavery’s sexual violence.

The historian Martha S. Jones has a nose for writing deeply researched histories that land in the middle of the rough and tumble of our national politics — sometimes deliberately, sometimes not.

“Birthright Citizens,” her 2018 scholarly study of the history of 19th-century debates about Black citizenship in America, arrived at a moment when some conservatives had floated the idea of ending the 14th Amendment’s guarantee that all people born in America are automatically citizens.

“Vanguard,” a political history of Black women that challenged popular narratives of the suffrage movement, was timed to coincide with the centennial of the 19th Amendment last August — but also happened to coincide with the election of Kamala Harris as America’s first female vice president.

Now, Jones, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, has signed an unusual four-book deal with Basic Books for a series of works that will address the tangled history of race, slavery and identity. And among them will be a “manifesto” on the role of history in the current racial reckoning…

Read the entire article here.

A family story as complex as American history, tracing to 1820s Berlin Crossroads in Ohio: Michael A. Chaney

Cleveland.com: Covering Northeast Ohio
2020-07-03

Michael A. Chaney, Professor of English
Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire

Michael A. Chaney, an author and professor of English at Dartmouth, traces some of his roots to a storied African American community in Berlin Crossroads in Ohio’s Appalachia.

HANOVER, New Hampshire — As the celebration of this country’s revolutionary independence looms, I cannot help but reflect on my own ancestry and what it says about place and race, politics and perspective. A mixed-race Ohioan, I was born in Cuyahoga Falls and raised in the Akron/Cleveland area. Like most Ohioans, I am proud of our wooded forests, our first-rate colleges, our winning sports teams. I want to believe that if more people knew about Ohio’s Black and mixed-race histories, we would be cautiously optimistic to note those times when Black lives have mattered in Ohio — in the solemn presence of mourning those times when Black lives should have mattered more.

This won’t be a linear story. As with all history, including complicated family histories, and, particularly, family trees made more complicated by the intersection of different races, it moves from Akron to Germany and back to Ohio, with some side branches that go back 200 years to a once-storied and now largely forgotten African American community in Ohio’s Appalachia…

Read the entire article here.