Category: History

  • 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…

  • A troubled experiment’s forgotten lesson in racial integration Point Reyes Light Point Reyes Station, California 2012-03-15 Carina Ray, Associate Professor of African and Afro- American Studies Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts The year 2012 marks the fortieth anniversary of my Puerto Rican mother and Irish-Italian father’s unusual wedding. They met and married in an experimental community…

  • 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…

  • Mixed Race Jamaicans in England A Parcel of Ribbons: Eighteenth century Jamaica viewed throught family stories and documents 2012-01-28 Ann Powers The status of  mixed race Jamaicans in eighteenth century Jamaica was always going to be less than than of white colonists, but it was possible for them to become established and successful in England.…

  • Family Tree’s Startling Roots The New York Times 2012-03-19 Felicia Lee Thirty-nine lashes “well laid” on her bare back and an extension of her indentured servitude was Elizabeth Banks’s punishment for “fornication & Bastardy with a negroe slave,” according to a stark June 20, 1683, court document from York County, Va. Through the alchemy of…

  • For A Century, The First Underground Railroad Ran Slaves South To Florida (PHOTOS) The Huffington Post 2012-03-18 Bruce Smith, Associated Press CHARLESTON, S.C. — While most Americans are familiar with the Underground Railroad that helped Southern slaves escape north before the Civil War, the first clandestine path to freedom ran for more than a century…

  • Spotlight on Jon Veilie: A Man on a Thirteen Year Mission The Modern American Volume 1, Issue 1 (Spring 2005) Article 8 pages 22-23 Lydia Edwards It all started one month after he passed the bar. Sylvia Davis, a black Seminole, came to Jon for help. She had been to many lawyers already. She told…

  • Coloring: An Investigation of Racial Identity Politics within the Black Indian Community Georgia State University 2007 106 pages Charlene Jeanette Graham A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts In the College of Arts and Sciences Historical interconnections between Native Americans and many people of African descent in…

  • Anthropology 324L/American Studies 321: The Black Indian Experience in the United States University of Texas, Austin Fall 2011 Circe Dawn Sturm, Associate Professor of Anthropology University of Texas, Austin This course explores the entwined histories, cultures and identities of African American and Native American people in the United States. Long neglected in popular and scholarly…

  • Caroline Bond Day (1889–1948): A Black Woman Outsider Within Physical Anthropology Transforming Anthropology Volume 20, Issue 1, April 2012 pages 79–89 DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-7466.2011.01145.x Anastasia C. Curwood, Visiting Fellow James Weldon Johnson Institute for Race and Difference Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia This article examines the significance of Caroline Bond Day’s vindicationist anthropological work on mixed-race families…