Mixed Race Studies

BUILDING A MIXED RACE COMMUNITY: The People, Building and Sites of the Winton Triangle

Chowan Discovery Group
2023-03-06

Marvin Tupper Jones

The history covered in this exhibit spans from 1851 to 1973 and takes the viewer from the antebellum time through the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow and the modern Civil Rights eras. It tells stories about over 30 people along with photographs and text. Four women are featured, as well as business people, farmers, carpenters, educators, church leaders, soldiers (Civil War and WWII), Civil Rights activists and organizations. One building included among the thirty 20”x30” panels is the exhibit’s first venue, the C.S. Brown Auditorium in Winton, NC…

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Thinking While Black: Translating the Politics and Popular Culture of a Rebel Generation

Rutgers University Press
2022-12-09
218 pages
7 b-w illustrations
6 x 9
Paperback ISBN: 9781978830875
Cloth ISBN: 9781978830882
EPUB ISBN: 9781978830899
PDF ISBN: 9781978830905

Daniel McNeil, Department of Gender Studies
Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario

Thinking While Black brings together the work and ideas of the most notorious film critic in America, one of the most influential intellectuals in the United Kingdom, and a political and cultural generation that consumed images of rebellion and revolution around the world as young Black teenagers in the late 1960s. Drawing on hidden and little known archives of resistance and resilience, it sheds new light on the politics and poetics of young people who came together, often outside of conventional politics, to rock against racism in the 1970s and early ‘80s. It re-examines debates in the 1980s and ‘90s about artists who “spread out” to mount aggressive challenges to a straight, white, middle-class world, and entertainers who “sold out” to build their global brands with performances that attacked the Black poor, rejected public displays of introspection, and expressed unambiguous misogyny and homophobia. Finally, it thinks with and through the work of writers who have been celebrated and condemned as eminent intellectuals and curmudgeonly contrarians in the twenty-first century. In doing so, it delivers the smartest and most nuanced investigation into thinkers such as Paul Gilroy and Armond White as they have evolved from “young soul rebels” to “middle-aged mavericks” and “grumpy old men,” lamented the debasement and deskilling of Black film and music in a digital age, railed against the discourteous discourse and groupthink of screenies and Internet Hordes, and sought to stimulate some deeper and fresher thinking about racism, nationalism, multiculturalism, political correctness and social media.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Chapter 1: Theories in Motion
• Chapter 2: Black and British
• Chapter 3: A Movie-Struck Kid from Detroit
• Chapter 4: Slave-Descendants, Diaspora Subjects, and World Citizens
• Chapter 5: Enlarging the American Cinema
• Chapter 6: Middle-Aged, Gifted, and Black
• Coda
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index

The “Miscegenation” Troll

JSTOR Daily
2019-02-20

Mark Sussman, Adjunct Professor of English
Hunter College, City University of New York

The term “miscegenation” was coined in an 1864 pamphlet by an anonymous author.

In 1864, a pamphlet entitled “Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro” began to circulate on the streets of New York. The title certainly would have given New Yorkers pause. No one had ever seen the word “miscegenation” before. In fact, the pamphlet’s anonymous author invented it, giving the reason that “amalgamation”—then the most common term used to describe “race mixing”—was a “poor word, since it properly refers to the union of metals with quicksilver.” The term “miscegenation”—from the Latin miscere (to mix) and genus (race)—had only one definition.

Besides introducing a new word into the English language, the pamphleteer was also responsible for what appeared to be one of the most fearless documents in the archive of nineteenth century abolitionist writing. Among many other claims and political recommendations, the pamphlet notes that, “the miscegenetic or mixed races are much superior, mentally, physically, and morally, to those pure or unmixed;” that “a continuance of progress can only be obtained through a judicious crossing of diverse elements;” that “the Caucasian, or white race… has never yet developed a religious faith on its own;” that “the true ideal man can only be reached by blending the type man and woman of all the races of the earth;” that “the most beautiful girl in form, feature, and every attribute of feminine loveliness [the pamphleteer] ever saw, was a mulatto.” Most provocatively, the writer claimed that “the Southern beauty… proclaims by every massive ornament in her shining hair, and by every yellow shade in the wavy folds of her dress, ‘I love the black man.’”…

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Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom

Simon & Schuster
2023-01-17
416 pages
Hardcover ISBN 13: 9781501191053

Ilyon Woo

The remarkable true story of Ellen and William Craft, who escaped slavery through daring, determination, and disguise, with Ellen passing as a wealthy, disabled White man and William posing as “his” slave.

In 1848, a year of international democratic revolt, a young, enslaved couple, Ellen and William Craft, achieved one of the boldest feats of self-emancipation in American history. Posing as master and slave, while sustained by their love as husband and wife, they made their escape together across more than 1,000 miles, riding out in the open on steamboats, carriages, and trains that took them from bondage in Georgia to the free states of the North.

Along the way, they dodged slave traders, military officers, and even friends of their enslavers, who might have revealed their true identities. The tale of their adventure soon made them celebrities, and generated headlines around the country. Americans could not get enough of this charismatic young couple, who traveled another 1,000 miles criss-crossing New England, drawing thunderous applause as they spoke alongside some of the greatest abolitionist luminaries of the day—among them Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown.

But even then, they were not out of danger. With the passage of an infamous new Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, all Americans became accountable for returning refugees like the Crafts to slavery. Then yet another adventure began, as slave hunters came up from Georgia, forcing the Crafts to flee once again—this time from the United States, their lives and thousands more on the line and the stakes never higher.

With three epic journeys compressed into one monumental bid for freedom, Master Slave Husband Wife is an American love story—one that would challenge the nation’s core precepts of life, liberty, and justice for all—one that challenges us even now.

This Other Eden, A Novel

W. W. Norton & Company
2023-01-24
224 pages
6.3 x 9.4 in
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-324-03629-6

Paul Harding, Director of the MFA in Creative Writing & Literature
State University of New York at Stony Brook

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Tinkers, a novel inspired by the true story of Malaga Island, an isolated island off the coast of Maine that became one of the first racially integrated towns in the Northeast.

In 1792, formerly enslaved Benjamin Honey and his Irish wife, Patience, discover an island where they can make a life together. Over a century later, the Honeys’ descendants and a diverse group of neighbors are desperately poor, isolated, and often hungry, but nevertheless protected from the hostility awaiting them on the mainland.

During the tumultuous summer of 1912, Matthew Diamond, a retired, idealistic but prejudiced schoolteacher-turned-missionary, disrupts the community’s fragile balance through his efforts to educate its children. His presence attracts the attention of authorities on the mainland who, under the influence of the eugenics-thinking popular among progressives of the day, decide to forcibly evacuate the island, institutionalize its residents, and develop the island as a vacation destination. Beginning with a hurricane flood reminiscent of the story of Noah’s Ark, the novel ends with yet another Ark.

In prose of breathtaking beauty and power, Paul Harding brings to life an unforgettable cast of characters: Iris and Violet McDermott, sisters raising three orphaned Penobscot children; Theophilus and Candace Larks and their brood of vagabond children; the prophetic Zachary Hand to God Proverbs, a Civil War veteran who lives in a hollow tree; and more. A spellbinding story of resistance and survival, This Other Eden is an enduring testament to the struggle to preserve human dignity in the face of intolerance and injustice.

Jazz à la Creole: French Creole Music and the Birth of Jazz

University Press of Mississippi
November 2022
248 pages
1 table; 29 b&w figures; 20 musical examples
Hardcover ISBN: 9781496842404
Paperback ISBN: 9781496842428

Caroline Vézina
Montréal, Quebec, Canada

The first scholarly volume dedicated to French Creole music and its contribution to the development of jazz in New Orleans

During the formative years of jazz (1890–1917), the Creoles of Color—as they were then called—played a significant role in the development of jazz as teachers, bandleaders, instrumentalists, singers, and composers. Indeed, music penetrated all aspects of the life of this tight-knit community, proud of its French heritage and language. They played and/or sang classical, military, and dance music as well as popular songs and cantiques that incorporated African, European, and Caribbean elements decades before early jazz appeared. In Jazz à la Creole: French Creole Music and the Birth of Jazz, the author describes the music played by the Afro-Creole community since the arrival of enslaved Africans in La Louisiane, then a French colony, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, emphasizing the many cultural exchanges that led to the development of jazz.

Caroline Vézina has compiled and analyzed a broad scope of primary sources found in diverse locations from New Orleans to Quebec City, Washington, DC, New York City, and Chicago. Two previously unpublished interviews add valuable insider knowledge about the music on French plantations and the danses Créoles held in Congo Square after the Civil War. Musical and textual analyses of cantiques provide new information about the process of their appropriation by the Creole Catholics as the French counterpart of the Negro spirituals. Finally, a closer look at their musical practices indicates that the Creoles sang and improvised music and/or lyrics of Creole songs, and that some were part of their professional repertoire. As such, they belong to the Black American and the Franco-American folk music traditions that reflect the rich cultural heritage of Louisiana.

Transatlantic Liverpool: Shades of the Black Atlantic

Lexington Books (an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield)
October 2022
342 pages
Trim: 6 x 9
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-7936-5263-8
eBook ISBN: 978-1-7936-5264-5

Mark Christian, Professor of Africana Studies
City University of New York, New York, New York

In Transatlantic Liverpool: Shades of the Black Atlantic, Mark Christian presents a Black British study within the context of the transatlantic and Liverpool, England. Taking a semi-autoethnographic approach based on the author’s Black Liverpool heritage, Christian interacts with Paul Gilroy’s notion of the Black Atlantic. Yet, provides a fresh perspective that takes into account a famous British slave port’s history that has been overlooked or under-utilized. The longevity of Black presence in the city involves a history of discrimination, stigma, and a population group known colloquially as Liverpool Born Blacks (LBBs). Crucially, this book provides the reader with a deeper insight of the transatlantic in regard to the movement of Black souls and their struggle for acceptance in a hostile environment. This book is an evocative, passionate, and revealing read.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
  1. Theorizing Transatlantic Liverpool and the Black Atlantic Paradigm
  2. Life and Times in a Liverpool Black Family – The Christians
  3. Schooling, L8 Community Football, Grassroots Education, and Mainstream Miseducation
  4. Anti-Black Riots, Resistance & Black Organization Demise: 1919-2000s
  5. A Tale of Two Freedoms: Contemporary Self-Reflexivity and the Memory of Frederick Douglass
• Appendices
  1. Liverpool City Council Slave Apology Minutes – from December 9, 1999
  2. The Age of Slave Apologies: The Case of Liverpool, England – transcript of public lecture presented by Dr. Mark Christian, November 14, 2007
  3. Front cover: CWCN Reports on Historic Slave Apology (Issue 26: December 1999)
  4. Consortium of Black Organisations – Liverpool- Response to LCC Slave Apology
  5. Front cover: CWCN Celebration of College Status (Issue 12: December 1992)
  6. CWCN Editorial denounces drastic cuts to funding by LCC (Issue 21: June 1997)
  7. Liverpool Echo (August 27, 1997) – Report praised CWC teaching
  8. Front cover: CWCN (Issue 1: June 1987) – Evidence of LCC fight to close CWC in 1987
  9. Front cover: CWCN (Issue 25: June 1999) – Reports on Lawrence Inquiry and Racism
  10. CWCN (Issue 12: December 1992, p.13) – Proof of Jacqueline N. Brown visiting CWC.
  11. Front cover: CWCN (Issue 8: December 1990) – Dr. William E. Nelson Jr at CWC
  12. Dr Mark Christian Community Education Award from The Voice 1999
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author

The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family

Liveright (an imprint of W. W. Norton)
2022-11-08
432 pages
6.3 x 9.4 in
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-324-09084-7

Kerri K. Greenidge, Mellon Assistant Professor
Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora
Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts

A stunning counternarrative of the legendary abolitionist Grimke sisters that finally reclaims the forgotten Black members of their family.

Sarah and Angelina Grimke—the Grimke sisters—are revered figures in American history, famous for rejecting their privileged lives on a plantation in South Carolina to become firebrand activists in the North. Their antislavery pamphlets, among the most influential of the antebellum era, are still read today. Yet retellings of their epic story have long obscured their Black relatives. In The Grimkes, award-winning historian Kerri Greenidge presents a parallel narrative, indeed a long-overdue corrective, shifting the focus from the white abolitionist sisters to the Black Grimkes and deepening our understanding of the long struggle for racial and gender equality.

That the Grimke sisters had Black relatives in the first place was a consequence of slavery’s most horrific reality. Sarah and Angelina’s older brother, Henry, was notoriously violent and sadistic, and one of the women he owned, Nancy Weston, bore him three sons: Archibald, Francis, and John. While Greenidge follows the brothers’ trials and exploits in the North, where Archibald and Francis became prominent members of the post–Civil War Black elite, her narrative centers on the Black women of the family, from Weston to Francis’s wife, the brilliant intellectual and reformer Charlotte Forten, to Archibald’s daughter, Angelina Weld Grimke, who channeled the family’s past into pathbreaking modernist literature during the Harlem Renaissance.

In a grand saga that spans the eighteenth century to the twentieth and stretches from Charleston to Philadelphia, Boston, and beyond, Greenidge reclaims the Black Grimkes as complex, often conflicted individuals shadowed by their origins. Most strikingly, she indicts the white Grimke sisters for their racial paternalism. They could envision the end of slavery, but they could not imagine Black equality: when their Black nephews did not adhere to the image of the kneeling and eternally grateful slave, they were cruel and relentlessly judgmental—an emblem of the limits of progressive white racial politics.

A landmark biography of the most important multiracial American family of the nineteenth century, The Grimkes suggests that just as the Hemingses and Jeffersons personified the racial myths of the founding generation, the Grimkes embodied the legacy—both traumatic and generative—of those myths, which reverberate to this day.

‘Just a little more free’

Harvard Law Today
2022-11-22

Jeff Neal, Senior Director of Communications and Media Relations
Harvard Law School

At the inaugural Belinda Sutton Distinguished Lecture, Johns Hopkins Professor Martha Jones chronicles her journey into her family’s ties to slavery and to Harvard

At the inaugural Belinda Sutton Distinguished Lecture, Johns Hopkins University Professor Martha S. Jones recounted her family’s historic and ongoing connections both to the institution of slavery and to several academic institutions, including Harvard. Jones, whose work examines how Black Americans have shaped the story of American democracy, leads her university’s Hard Histories at Hopkins Project, which works to uncover the role that racism and discrimination have played at the Baltimore-based institution.

The event at which Jones spoke honors Belinda Sutton, a woman who had been enslaved by Isaac Royall Jr., whose 1781 bequest to Harvard College funded a professorship that helped to establish Harvard Law in 1817. The annual lecture and conference series was established earlier this year at Harvard Law School and is organized by Guy-Uriel E. Charles, the Charles J. Ogletree Jr. Professor of Law and faculty director of the Charles Hamilton Institute for Race and Justice…

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Mexico’s new racial reckoning: A movement protests colorism and white privilege

The Los Angeles Times
2022-10-20

Kate Linthicum, Staff Writer

MEXICO CITY — A few months ago, several employees of an upscale Mexico City steakhouse came forward with a damning allegation: The restaurant had a policy of segregation in which the best tables were reserved for the customers with the lightest skin.

The notion of whiter Mexicans getting preferential treatment was not surprising in a country where darker-skinned people have long earned less money, received less schooling and been all but invisible in the media. But the ensuing public outrage was.

Within days, activists mounted a boycott and the city launched an investigation into the restaurant, Sonora Grill Prime, which denied the accusations. Multiple public figures highlighted the scandal as evidence of pervasive bigotry. “Racism is real,” Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum told reporters, using a word long regarded as taboo. “We have to accept that it exists and fight it.”.

For the vast stretch of Mexico’s modern history, many denied that racism existed here at all.

They embraced the nation’s foundational myth that its people are mestizos, a single blended race of indigenous and Spanish blood, insisting that there could be no prejudice if all Mexicans were the same.

But a growing social movement is challenging that thinking, thrusting discussions of discrimination based on skin color to the fore…

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