Mixed Race Studies

Miscegenation, Eugenics, and Racism: Historical Footnotes to Loving v. Virginia

University of California, Davis Law Review
Volume 21, Number 2 (1988)
pages 421-452

Paul A. Lombardo, Bobby Lee Cook Professor of Law
Georgia State University

This Essay explores private correspondence contained in a restricted manuscript collection along with contemporary news accounts and government documents to explain how eugenics—a popular “scientific” movement during the 1920’s—was used to bolster the arguments in favor of the Virginia Racial Integrity Act of 1924 that was struck down in Loving v. Virginia.  The genesis of the Act is described with reference to the private correspondence of the two Virginians [Walter Plecker and John Powell] who lobbied for its passage.  Their involvement with the white supremacist Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America is revealed as an aid to understanding the true motives behind the anti-miscegenation law.

Read the entire article here.

Dangerous Woman: Elizabeth Key’s Freedom Suit – Subjecthood and Racialized Identity in Seventeenth Century Colonial Virginia

Akron Law Review
University of Akron
Volume 41, Number 3 (2007-2008)
pages 799-837

Taunya Lovell Banks, Jacob A. France Professor of Equality Jurisprudence and Francis & Harriet Iglehart Research Professor of Law
University of Maryland School of Law

Elizabeth Key, an African-Anglo woman living in seventeenth century colonial Virginia sued for her freedom after being classified as a negro by the overseers of her late master’s estate. Her lawsuit is one of the earliest freedom suits in the English colonies filed by a person with some African ancestry. Elizabeth’s case also highlights those factors that distinguished indenture from life servitude – slavery in the mid seventeenth century. She succeeds in securing her freedom by crafting three interlinking legal arguments to demonstrate that she was a member of the colonial society in which she lived. Her evidence was her asserted ancestry – English; her religion, Christian; and the inability to be enslaved for life that stems from the first two statuses. These factors, I argue, determined who was the equivalent of white in seventeenth century Virginia.

I. Introduction

Elizabeth Key, an Afro-Anglo woman, was born around 1630 in the Virginia Colony. Twenty-five years later she sued for her freedom after the overseers of her late master’s estate classified her and her infant son as negroes (Africans or descendants of Africans) rather than as an indentured servant with a free-born child.  Unwilling to accept permanent servitude, Elizabeth sued for their freedom, and after protracted litigation she and her son were set free.

A few historians and legal scholars mention her case in passing as proof that by the mid seventeenth century people of African ancestry were held as slaves in Virginia.  Only feminist historian Kathleen Brown even mentions that Elizabeth’s lawsuit involved not only her freedom, but that of her son. To the rest of the historians she was simply a slave, her gender, son and mixed ancestry were irrelevant. None looked closely at the significance of her three interlinking legal arguments: (1) that she was a practicing Christian; (2) who was the daughter of a free Englishman; (3) who bound her out as an indentured servant for nine years which period had expired.

Arguably Elizabeth’s pleadings might be an early example of what Kenji Yoshino characterizes as “covering,” downplaying aspects of one’s identity. In crafting her legal argument around her father’s ancestry and subjecthood Elizabeth downplayed the African ancestry of her enslaved mother. Her argument also might be an example of “racial performance” where the extent one does things that English women and men did during the period becomes an important determinant of one’s legal status.  But as I explain in this article other cases decided during this period suggest otherwise…

Read the entire article here or here.

The Virginia Racial Integrity Act Revisited: The Plecker-Laughlin correspondence: 1928-1930

American Journal of Medical Genetics
Volume 16, Issue 4
Pages 483 – 492
December 1983
DOI: 10.1002/ajmg.1320160407

Philip Reilly
University of Houston Law Center, Houston, Texas
 
Margery Shaw
University of Houston Law Center, Houston, Texas

Correspondence between Walter Ashby Plecker, Virginia State Registrar of Vital Statistics between 1912 and 1938, and Harry Hamilton Laughlin, Superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor between 1910 and 1939, provides evidence of efforts to enforce the Virginia Racial Integrity Act of 1924. After antimiscegenation policy is placed in a historical context, excerpts from the letters are offered to demonstrate the zeal with which one state official pursued this eugenic policy.

Read or purchase the article here.

The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family

W. W. Norton & Company
September 2008
800 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-393-06477-3
6.5 × 9.6 in
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-393-33776-1
816 pages
6.1 × 9.2 in

Annette Gordon-Reed, Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History; Professor of History, Faculty of Arts & Sciences
Harvard University

Winner of the National Book Award and the 2009 Pulitzer Prize

In the mid-1700s the English captain of a trading ship that made runs between England and the Virginia colony fathered a child by an enslaved woman living near Williamsburg. The woman, whose name is unknown and who is believed to have been born in Africa, was owned by the Eppeses, a prominent Virginia family. The captain, whose surname was Hemings, and the woman had a daughter. They named her Elizabeth.

So begins this epic work—named a best book of the year by the Washington Post, Time, the Los Angeles Times, Amazon.com, the San Francisco Chronicle, and a notable book by the New York Times—Annette Gordon-Reed’s “riveting history” of the Hemings family, whose story comes to vivid life in this brilliantly researched and deeply moving work. Gordon-Reed, author of the highly acclaimed historiography Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, unearths startling new information about the Hemingses, Jefferson, and his white family. Although the book presents the most detailed and richly drawn portrait ever written of Sarah Hemings, better known by her nickname Sally, who bore seven children by Jefferson over the course of their thirty-eight-year liaison, The Hemingses of Monticello tells more than the story of her life with Jefferson and their children. The Hemingses as a whole take their rightful place in the narrative of the family’s extraordinary engagement with one of history’s most important figures.

Not only do we meet Elizabeth Hemings—the family matriarch and mother to twelve children, six by John Wayles, a poor English immigrant who rose to great wealth in the Virginia colony—but we follow the Hemings family as they become the property of Jefferson through his marriage to Martha Wayles. The Hemings-Wayles children, siblings to Martha, played pivotal roles in the life at Jefferson’s estate.

We follow the Hemingses to Paris, where James Hemings trained as a chef in one of the most prestigious kitchens in France and where Sally arrived as a fourteen-year-old chaperone for Jefferson’s daughter Polly; to Philadelphia, where James Hemings acted as the major domo to the newly appointed secretary of state; to Charlottesville, where Mary Hemings lived with her partner, a prosperous white merchant who left her and their children a home and property; to Richmond, where Robert Hemings engineered a plan for his freedom; and finally to Monticello, that iconic home on the mountain, from where most of Jefferson’s slaves, many of them Hemings family members, were sold at auction six months after his death in 1826.

As The Hemingses of Monticello makes vividly clear, Monticello can no longer be known only as the home of a remarkable American leader, the author of the Declaration of Independence; nor can the story of the Hemingses, whose close blood ties to our third president have been expunged from history until very recently, be left out of the telling of America’s story. With its empathetic and insightful consideration of human beings acting in almost unimaginably difficult and complicated family circumstances, The Hemingses of Monticello is history as great literature. It is a remarkable achievement.

We Were Always Free: The Maddens of Culpeper County, Virginia, A 200-Year Family History

University of Virginia Press
1992
304 pages
6 1/8 x 9 1/4
52 b&w illustrations
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8139-2371-0

T. O. Madden, Jr. (1903-2000)

with

Ann L. Miller, Historian
Virginia Transportation Research Council

Foreword by Nell Irvin Painter

In August of 1758, in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, a poor Irish immigrant named Mary Madden bore a child, Sarah Madden, whose father was said to be a slave and the property of Colonel James Madison, father of the future president of the United States. This daughter, though born to a free mulatto, became indentured to the Madisons. There she worked as a seamstress to pay off the fine of her birth until she was thirty-one years old.

Sarah Madden bore ten children; when the term of her indenture was over, she and her youngest son, Willis, struck out for themselves—Sarah as a seamstress, laundress, and later, with Willis, a dairy farmer and tavern keeper.

Spanning two hundred years of American history, We Were Always Free tells its story with remarkable completeness. we can thank Sarah Madden and her descendants for keeping their family narrative alive—and for saving hundreds of important documents detailing their freedom, hardship, and daily work.

These documents came to light in 1949 when T. O. Madden Jr. discovered a hidebound trunk originally belonging to his great-grandfather Willis. Stored in the trunk were papers dating back to the mid-eighteenth century, freedom papers, papers of indenture, deeds of land, Sarah Madden’s laundry and seamstress record books, letters, traveling passes. The trunk even held a full set of business records from the nineteenth century when Madden’s Tavern flourished as a center of activity in Orange County and as a rest stop on the road to Fredericksburg.

From that day forward, T. O. Madden deeply researched his family, using census reports, other official sources, family, and friends. All have led to his ably reconstructed family history, and to his own remarkable story.

We Were Always Free is a unique and very American family saga.

Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture

University of Virginia Press
1999
325 pages
6 x 9
ISBN: 0-8139-1919-3

Edited by

Jan Ellen Lewis
Rutgers University

Peter S. Onuf
University of Virginia

The publication of DNA test results showing that Thomas Jefferson was probably the father of one of his slave Sally Hemings‘s children has sparked a broad but often superficial debate. The editors of this volume have assembled some of the most distinguished American historians, including three Pulitzer Prize winners, and other experts on Jefferson, his times, race, and slavery. Their essays reflect the deeper questions the relationship between Hemings and Jefferson has raised about American history and national culture.

The DNA tests would not have been conducted had there not already been strong historical evidence for the possibility of a relationship. As historians from Winthrop D. Jordan to Annette Gordon-Reed have argued, much more is at stake in this liaison than the mere question of paternity: historians must ask themselves if they are prepared to accept the full implications of our complicated racial history, a history powerfully shaped by the institution of slavery and by sex across the color line.

How, for example, does it change our understanding of American history to place Thomas Jefferson in his social context as a plantation owner who fathered white and black families both? What happens when we shift our focus from Jefferson and his white family to Sally Hemings and her children? How do we understand interracial sexual relationships in the early republic and in our own time? Can a renewed exploration of the contradiction between Jefferson’s life as a slaveholder and his libertarian views yield a clearer understanding of the great political principles he articulated so eloquently and that Americans cherish? Are there moral or political lessons to be learned from the lives of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings and the way that historians and the public have attempted to explain their liaison?

Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture promises an open-ended discussion on the living legacy of slavery and race relations in our national culture.

Contributors:

Annette Gordon-Reed, New York Law School
Rhys Isaac, College of William and Mary
Winthrop D. Jordan, University of Mississippi
Jan Ellen Lewis, Rutgers University, Newark
Philip D. Morgan, Institute of Early American History and Culture
Peter S. Onuf, University of Virginia
Jack N. Rakove, Stanford University
Joshua Rothman, University of Virginia
Werner Sollors, Harvard University
Lucia Stanton, Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation
Dianne Swann-Wright, Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation
Clarence Walker, University of California at Davis
Gordon S. Wood, Brown University

The Mulatto Advantage: The Biological Consequences of Complexion in Rural Antebellum Virginia

Journal of Interdisciplinary History
Volume 33, Number 1 (Summer 2002)
pp. 21-46
E-ISSN: 1530-9169; Print ISSN: 0022-1953
DOI: 10.1162/00221950260029002

Howard Bodenhorn, Professor of Economics
Clemson University

Although historians have long noted that African-Americans of mixed-race in the antebellum Lower South were given economic and social preference over those with darker skin, they have denied that people of mixed race received special treatment in the antebellum Upper South as well. Examination of data on the registrations of free African-Americans in antebellum Virginia, however, reveals that adolescents and adults with lighter complexions tended to have a height advantage, which suggests that they enjoyed better nutrition.

From Jamestown 1607 to 2007, the American Mosaic: A Multicultural Society

National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS)
People of Color Conference 2006

Christine Madsen
Rocky Mount Academy (North Carolina)

Some of the original settlers in colonial Virginia formed self-sustaining mixed race communities. The history of these communities will be used as an entrance point to discuss the invention of racial identities as social constructs.

View the Powerpoint presentation here.

From Wikipedia: Loving v. (versus) [Commonwealth of] Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967), was a landmark civil rights case in which the United States Supreme Court by a [unanimous] 9-0 vote declared [on 1967-06-12] Virginia’s anti-miscegenation statute, the “Racial Integrity Act of 1924“, unconstitutional, thereby overturning Pace v. Alabama (1883) and ending all race-based legal restrictions on marriage in the United States.

Source: Talking Points Memo

The plaintiffs, Mildred Loving (nee Mildred Delores Jeter, a woman of African and Rappahannock Native American descent, July 22, 1939 – May 2, 2008) and Richard Perry Loving (a white man, October 29, 1933 – June 1975), were residents of the Commonwealth of Virginia who had been married in June 1958 in the District of Columbia, having left Virginia to evade the Racial Integrity Act, a state law banning marriages between any white person and any non-white person. Upon their return to Caroline County, Virginia, they were charged with violation of the ban.

Comments by Steven F. Riley:

Read the entire decision here.

It should be noted that the Loving v. Virginia ruling in 1967 applied to the 16 remaining states that had enacted anti-miscegenation statutes.  Thus it is a fallacy to state that ‘interracial marriage was illegal in the United States until Loving v. Virginia. Most states had in fact, repealed their anti-miscegenation laws and a few never enacted any such laws at all (New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Wisconsin, District of Columbia, Hawaii and Alaska).