Category: Media Archive

  • Historically, mixed couples and people of mixed descent have been seen as a problem, in popular culture as well as in academic literature. ‘Ethnically’ and ‘racially’ mixed relationships were described as dominated by power imbalances and as devoid of love. This perspective was brought to bear upon relationships and marriages in colonial times and in…

  • I always knew I was black. My childhood was the scent of coconut oil hair cream and the taste of bean pie after Friday prayers in a Bilalian mosque on Chicago’s south side. I knew the words to “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika” and called Harold Washington my mayor, even though I lived in the suburbs…

  • Among the events that helped to crystallize what would come to be known as the Harlem Renaissance was a dinner, in March, 1924, at the Civic Club, on West 12th Street. The idea for the dinner was initially hatched by Charles Spurgeon Johnson, the editor of Opportunity, a journal published by the National Urban League…

  • When Joseph Nathaniel Beckles registered for the draft in the 1942, he rejected the racial categories presented to him and persuaded the registrar to cross out the check mark she had placed next to Negro and substitute “Ethiopian Hebrew.” “God did not make us Negroes,” declared religious leaders in black communities of the early twentieth-century…

  • Not many private relationships in history have received as much press attention in recent years as that between Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings. First alleged in 1802 by the journalist James Callender, who based his account on stories that had been current in Virginia for some years, the affair has since then been…

  • The Hapa Japan Festival celebrates mixed-race and mixed roots Japanese people and culture. Come join us at the Japanese American National Museum and the USC campus for film screenings documenting the story of mixed race Japanese people, rich conversations with Hapa cultural icons, jam sessions, and a gastoronomic experience to remember.

  • A president’s past yields a modern parable The Berkshire Eagle Pittsfield, Massachusetts 2017-01-24 Jenn Smith A tree is planted and dedicated to the descendants of Thomas Jefferson and his slave, Sally Hemings, at Monticello’s Mulberry Row. Mulberry Row was the center of activity of Jefferson’s 5,000-acre agricultural enterprise. According to the Monticello website, it was…

  • Jefferson’s Children: The Story of One American Family Random House December 2002 160 pages Hardcover ISBN: 978-0195031720 Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-0-375-82168-4 Shannon Lanier and Jane Feldman Personal testimonies from descendants of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings pose important questions about equality, freedom, and family. On October 31, 1998, the Associated Press broke the news that…

  • How do you break a spell? How do you get over the grief of racial, gendered, and childhood injuries? Helen Oyeyemi’s novel Boy, Snow, Bird is not a black-and-white parable but a black-and-blue story. A bruising tale about miscegenation, passing, and beauty, this novel brings to life the idealization and wounding that haunt the American…

  • @X: Making America White 200 Years Ago Public Books 2017-02-17 Brandon R. Byrd, Assistant Professor of History Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee In the latest edition of our anniversaries series, Brandon Byrd examines resistance to the American Colonization Society’s attempts to remove free blacks from the US. In January 1817, more than three thousand African Americans…