Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.
Mulattoes, octoroons and quadroons are much more susceptible to the ravages of syphilis and gonorrhea than are their more deeply tinted brethren. Negroes of all shades are extremely susceptible to tuberculosis, and also to measles. In my experience extending over a period of nearly twenty years, I do not recall having seen a case of scarlet fever, diphtheria, mumps or tonsillitis in black negroes, and since beginning this paper I have made inquiries of all the physicians with whom I have come in contact and have received practically the same answer as to the immunity of the pure-blooded negro from these diseases.
H. M. Folkes, M.D., “The Negro as a Health Problem,” The Journal of the American Medical Association, Volume 55, Number 11 (1910): 1246-1247.
The house at 1515-17 Pauger St. in New Orleans sold in 2016 for $600,000. (Photo by David Grunfeld, NOLA.com |The Times-Picayune)
The little Creole cottage at 1515-17 Pauger St. in the Marigny Triangle is a humble one. Small and tidy, there would have been little to distinguish it from the countless other homes like it in New Orleans when it was built 200 years ago.
But sometimes a house is more than a house. Sometimes, the story it has to tell adds a little flavor to what it has to offer.
That’s precisely the case with the Pauger Street house, which stands out today as a beautifully preserved example of the bricks-between-posts construction — or briquette-entre-poteaux — so common during the city’s French colonial era.
Much more than that, although, the little home represents the indomitable spirit of the lady of shade who, in opposition to all odds, constructed it — presumably as a rental property, no much less — at a time wherein being White and male had been two of an important {qualifications} for such endeavors…
The first colonizers to arrive in what is now the United States were not the pilgrims in 1620. It was the Spanish, who came to New Mexico in 1598. The oldest capital in the country, Santa Fe, was founded in 1610 by a Spaniard who was born in Mexico. This is not a point of pride but a part of our complicated story. Along with Spanish colonizers looking for riches, priests looking for souls to save, many Indigenous people came as well — some as servants, others forcibly to quench the lust of men, some as wives, and many more for endless other reasons.
After gaining its independence from Spain, Mexican authorities attempted to increase the population in its northern territory — a land that stretched all the way up the west coast of California and across to the Rocky Mountains — and so welcomed Anglo immigrants. By 1834, more than 30,000 of them lived in Texas, heavily outnumbering the Mexican population of 7,800.*
Mexico abolished African slavery in 1829, before the U.S. Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, but those Anglo immigrants had brought with them more than 5,000 enslaved people in violation of Mexican law. This is where the story needs some revision. Texas’ independence from Mexico and eventual annexation into the United States is often told as a freedom fight. But Anglo Texans wanted to be “free” in order to keep Black people enslaved. They became legends while stealing Black bodies, stealing Mexican land, and terrorizing native Tejanos. The Mexicans who stayed in Texas were treated as second-class citizens, an attitude that still pollinates along with the bluebonnets, their stories lost to white historians. The horrors that Mexicans suffered in Texas at the hands of Anglos have been buried in forgotten graves, in cemeteries that no longer exist. However, in Texas history classes, Davy Crockett, William B. Travis, and Jim Bowie die heroes at the Alamo, killed by the vicious Mexican army — a story still retold in museums and textbooks. They were visitors, undocumented immigrants even, and by proclaiming self-rule, they forced Mexico into war….
Métis Rising draws on a remarkable cross-section of perspectives to tell the histories, stories, and dreams of people from varied backgrounds, demonstrating that there is no single Métis experience – only a common sense of belonging and a commitment to justice.
The contributors to this unique collection, most of whom are Métis themselves, examine often-neglected aspects of Métis existence in Canada. They trace a turbulent course, illustrating how Métis leaders were born out of the need to address abhorrent social and economic disparities following the Métis–Canadian war of 1885. They talk about the long and arduous journey to rebuild the Métis nation from a once marginalized and defeated people; their accounts ranging from personal reflections on identity to tales of advocacy against poverty and poor housing. And they address the indictment of the jurisdictional gap whereby neither federal nor provincial governments would accept governance responsibility towards Métis people.
Métis Rising is an extraordinary work that exemplifies how contemporary Métis identity has been forged by social, economic, and political concerns into a force to be reckoned with.
A must-read not only for scholars and students of Métis and Indigenous studies but for lawyers, policymakers, and all Canadians who wish a broader understanding of this country’s colonial past.
In Blurring the Lines of Race & Freedom, A.B. Wilkinson adds to a growing field of scholarship questioning the genesis of ideas and production of race and social differences in the trans-Atlantic world. Wilkinson’s detailed examination looks at the ways mixed-heritage people—or individuals with at least two ancestors from predominantly African, European, and Indigenous backgrounds—shaped legal and cultural understandings of interracial mixture in British North America. He focuses on the meeting of communities around the Tidewater Chesapeake, the Carolina Lowcountry, and the English sugar and coffee plantations in the Caribbean. Despite legislators in these regions governing monoracial categories of colonial subjects as “white,” “Indian,” or “Negro,” Wilkinson convincingly argues that people from these blended ancestries and their families complicated racially bound labor systems of enslavement and indentured servitude. In so doing, they slowed down elites’ establishment of a solid racial hierarchy from the seventeenth century until the eve of the American Revolution.
Wilkinson’s sources range across multiple genres that reveal Anglo-Americans’ increasing hostility towards people of blended ancestries and interracial relationships. His interrogation of hundreds of fugitive slave and servant advertisements shows some of mixed-heritage people’s strategies for performing freedom and racial passing. Wilkinson uses many court cases showing that mixed-heritage people could successfully challenge the conditions of their labor arrangements through freedom petitions, particularly when Anglo-Americans’ racial thought was in its infancy and when colonial authorities held more lenient notions of hypodescent, a concept that served as a forerunner for the United States’sone-drop rule and miscegenation laws. Whether someone achieved manumission or lessened indentured service contracts was often based on perceptions about an individual’s proximity to European heritage, and most likely passed on through their mother’s lineage…
A Johnston family portrait. From left to right, standing: Albert Sr. and Albert Jr. From left to right, seated: Thyra, Paul, Ann and Donald.
How a UNH student inspired one of America’s first “race films” and why we’re still talking about it
Albert Johnston Jr. was 16 when he found out he was Black. His fair-skinned African American parents had been “passing” as white, they told him, since moving from Chicago to rural Gorham, New Hampshire, and later to Keene. His father had been the town’s country doctor with 2,500 white patients. He was an active member of the school board, the Masons and the Rotary. His mother Thyra was a two-time president of the Gorham Women’s Club and active in the Congregational Church.
Born in 1925, growing up skiing the White Mountains, Albert had only a single Black acquaintance in high school. In an era of widespread racial segregation and discrimination, he felt a seismic shift as he adapted from a dark-skinned Caucasian to a light-skinned Negro. Formerly gregarious, he drew inward. He attended and then dropped out of Dartmouth College. He enlisted and left the Navy, talked of suicide, battled with his parents, and spent time in a psychiatric ward.
Then Albert took a road trip. Decades before Ken Kesey and “Easy Rider,” with only a few dollars in their pockets, Albert and an old school chum named Walt hitch-hiked and hopped freight trains from New Hampshire to California. For Albert, it was a spiritual journey into the homes of his long-lost African American relatives and into the roots of Black culture. For Walt, who was white, it was a great adventure with a good friend. After odd jobs, a love affair and a stint at the University of California in Los Angeles, Albert found his way home. Renewed and focused, he enrolled in the well-regarded music program at the University of New Hampshire in Durham. And there in a UNH college lounge in front of 20 fellow students, Albert (Class of ’49) finally laid his burden down. During a seminar on the “race problem” in America, the topic turned to “cross-bred” people. He could offer some insight on that topic, Albert told his classmates, because he, himself, was a Negro. The room got very still, he later recalled, like the sudden silence after the climax of a concerto.
“Why not tell everybody?” Albert said. “Why carry a lie around all your life?”…
Charmaine A. Nelson, Professor of Art History and a Tier I Canada Research Chair in Transatlantic Black Diasporic Art and Community Engagement Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD University), Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
Canada’s history of slavery has had a profound impact on how we view cross-racial couples
ON A SATURDAY MORNING in April 2018, Tayana Jacques, a Black woman, and Brian Mann, her white boyfriend, were walking together in Montreal’s trendy Plateau-Mont-Royal neighbourhood when police stopped and questioned them over what the two officers called “making excessive noise.” Jacques and Mann were later fined $444 each. The charges were particularly suspicious since this was not a Saturday-night encounter—not a time when people would have been carousing drunkenly home from a nightclub. In fact, the couple had been on their way to get coffee. According to media reports, Jacques says she was restrained and handcuffed after she turned to walk away from the confrontation. She was also questioned without cause about drug use while Mann, who protested, was allegedly kicked in the knee, punched in the face, and pepper-sprayed. By the end of the encounter, two more police cruisers had arrived.
Mann and Jacques have said in media interviews that they were violently mistreated by Montreal police not because of what they were doing but because of who they were: a white man and a Black woman in an obviously romantic relationship. (The Montreal Police Service has declined to comment on the case.) The couple’s story may seem unimportant—an outlier in an otherwise racially harmonious society—but the apparent overreach of the Montreal Police Service, particularly within our current context of global Black Lives Matter protests, is cause for grave concern.
Following the incident, Fo Niemi, executive director of the Center for Research-Action on Race Relations (CRAAR), issued a statement saying the alleged police mistreatment of Jacques and Mann is part of a pattern of police misbehaviour, especially involving Black citizens. (The City of Montreal is now facing a class-action lawsuit for racial profiling brought by the Black Coalition of Quebec on behalf of people who were unjustly arrested by police.) Last October, a report commissioned by the Montreal Police Service confirmed that its officers are far more likely to stop Black, Indigenous, or Arab people than they are white people. This past July, the police service introduced a policy meant to reduce the risk of profiling; among other provisions, the new policy requires officers to complete paperwork clearly stating their reasons for conducting street checks.
But Jacques and Mann’s violent encounter caught my attention because their experience points to an unsettling reality that extends beyond police discrimination: Canadians have a bigger problem with race, and specifically with cross-racial couples, than many would like to admit. As a professor of art history specializing in transatlantic slavery, I find our society’s unspoken discomfort painfully ironic. I study a period when the nonconsensual sexual pairing of white men and Black women, and the sight of their mixed-race children, was entrenched across the Americas; when Black women were routinely dehumanized; and when consensual cross-racial couples—like Jacques and Mann—were considered threatening to colonial hierarchies. That history has been all but erased from our national memory. And it’s had a chronic, undeniable influence on how we perceive cross-racial relationships today.
Relationships between people of different races, ethnic origins, religions, languages, and birthplaces are still relatively rare. In the 2011 national household census, 360,045 couples, or about 5 percent of all unions, identified as being mixed. When the figure was first released, in 2014, media coverage framed it as a sign of social progress: the percentage was double that of twenty years prior. Yet, for a nation that claims to celebrate its racial diversity and inclusiveness, living together in a multicultural society seems not to have resulted in the deepest levels of profound social connection signalled by intimate unions…
While W. E. B. Du Bois praised an expanding penitentiary system, T. Thomas Fortune called for investment in education and a multiracial, working-class movement.
Nearly every activist I encounter these days identifies as an abolitionist. To be sure, movements to abolish prisons and police have been around for decades, popularizing the idea that caging and terrorizing people makes us unsafe. However, the Black Spring rebellions revealed that the obscene costs of state violence can and should be reallocated for things that do keep us safe: housing, universal healthcare, living wage jobs, universal basic income, green energy, and a system of restorative justice. As abolition recently became the new watchword, everyone scrambled to understand its historical roots. Reading groups popped up everywhere to discuss W. E. B. Du Bois’s classic, Black Reconstruction in America (1935), since he was the one to coin the phrase “abolition democracy,” which Angela Y. Davis revived for her indispensable book of the same title.
I happily participated in Black Reconstruction study groups and public forums meant to divine wisdom for our current movements. But I often wondered why no one was scrambling to resurrect T. Thomas Fortune’sBlack and White: Land, Labor, and Politics in the South, published in 1884. After all, it was Fortune who wrote: “The South must spend less money on penitentiaries and more money on schools; she must use less powder and buckshot and more law and equity; she must pay less attention to politics and more attention to the development of her magnificent resources.” Du Bois, on the other hand, praised Reconstruction efforts to establish and improve the penitentiary system in what proved to be a futile effort to eliminate the convict lease. Much shorter but no less powerful, Fortune’s Black and White anticipates Du Bois’s critique of federal complicity in undermining Black freedom, but sharply diverges by declaring Reconstruction a miserable failure. He argues that the South’s problems can be traced to the federal government allowing the slaveholding rebels to return to power and hold the monopoly of land, stripping Black people of their short-lived citizenship rights, and refusing to compensate freed people for generations of unpaid labor. The result was a new kind of slavery: “the United States took the slave and left the thing which gave birth to chattel slavery and which is now fast giving birth to industrial slavery.” Du Bois echoes Fortune, but adds that white labor’s investment in white supremacy ensured “a system of industry which ruined democracy.”…
University of Georgia Press
2022-05-01
224 pages
Illustrations: 11 b&w
Trim size: 6.000in x 9.000in
Hardcover ISBN: 9-780-8203-6192-5
Paperback ISBN: 9-780-8203-6193-2
Virginia L. Summey, Historian, Author, and Faculty Fellow Lloyd International Honors College, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
This book explores the life and contributions of groundbreaking attorney, Elreta Melton Alexander Ralston (1919-98). In 1945 Alexander became the first African American woman to graduate from Columbia Law School. In 1947 she was the first African American woman to practice law in the state of North Carolina, and in 1968 she became the first African American woman to become an elected district court judge. Despite her accomplishments, Alexander is little known to scholars outside of her hometown of Greensboro, North Carolina. Her life and career deserve recognition, however, not just because of her impressive lists of “firsts,” but also owing to her accomplishments during the civil rights movement in the U.S. South.
While Alexander did not actively participate in civil rights marches and demonstrations, she used her professional achievements and middle-class status to advocate for individuals who lacked a voice in the southern legal system. Virginia L. Summey argues that Alexander was integral to the civil rights movement in North Carolina as she, and women like her, worked to change discriminatory laws while opening professional doors for other minority women. Using her professional status, Alexander combatted segregation by demonstrating that Black women were worthy and capable of achieving careers alongside white men, thereby creating environments in which other African Americans could succeed. Her legal expertise and ability to reach across racial boundaries made her an important figure in Greensboro history.
Betty Soskin in her living room. Photo: Daphne White
In this 2018 interview with Soskin who retired Thursday at the age of 100, the nation’s oldest park ranger said she considers herself “an absolutely ordinary extraordinary person.”
Editor’s note: This story was originally published in February 2018. We’re resharing it because Betty Reid Soskin, the nation’s oldest active park ranger, retired Thursday at the age of 100.
Soskin has dated Jackie Robinson, co-founded Reid’s Records in Berkeley with her first husband, served as a “bag lady” (delivering cash) for the Black Panthers, and hobnobbed with the leaders of the human potential movement as a faculty wife with her second husband.
James Monroe Trotter was an educator, Civil War veteran, musical historian and Recorder of Deeds. A man of many talents, Trotter was patriotic and believed in ending racism in American society. Described as a “genteel militant,” Trotter promoted and encouraged other African Americans to work hard regardless of racism…
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