Mixed Race Studies

“Of Portuguese Origin”: Litigating Identity and Citizenship among the “Little Races” in Nineteenth-Century America

Law and History Review
2007
Volume 25, Number 3

Ariela J. Gross, John B. and Alice R. Sharp Professor of Law and History
University of Southern California

The history of race in the nineteenth-century United States is often told as a story of black and white in the South, and white and Indian in the West, with little attention to the intersection between black and Indian. This article explores the history of nineteenth-century America’s “little races”—racially ambiguous communities of African, Indian, and European origin up and down the eastern seaboard. These communities came under increasing pressure in the years leading up to the Civil War and in its aftermath to fall on one side or the other of a black-white color line. Drawing on trial records of cases litigating the racial identity of the Melungeons of Tennessee, the Croatans/Lumbee of North Carolina, and the Narragansett of Rhode Island, this article looks at the differing paths these three groups took in the face of Jim Crow: the Melungeons claiming whiteness; the Croatans/Lumbee asserting Indian identity and rejecting association with blacks; the Narragansett asserting Indian identity without rejecting their African origins. Members of these communities found that they could achieve full citizenship in the U.S. polity only to the extent that they abandoned their self-governance and distanced themselves from people of African descent.

Historians have only begun to tell the histories of “red and black” peoples in the United States, and much of their attention has focused on the “Black Indians” of the Five Civilized Tribes of the Southeastern United States. Yet up and down the eastern seaboard, there were clusters of people who shared African, European, and Indian ancestry, many of whom lived as distinct and separate communities into the nineteenth and even the mid-twentieth centuries, some retaining or struggling to retain Indian identities, others becoming known as “free people of color,” and still others claiming whiteness.

These “little races,” as they were sometimes known, in many ways gave the lie to the binary statutory regimes of nineteenth-century America. They came under growing pressure from local officials and neighbors as communities became increasingly preoccupied with racial line drawing. But they followed very different paths. By studying these racially ambiguous communities, it is possible to learn more about the relationship among whiteness, blackness, and citizenship in the United States…

Read the entire article here.

What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America

Harvard University Press
October 2008
384 Pages
Hardcover ISBN 13: 978-0-674-03130-2; ISBN 10: 0-674-03130-X
Paperback ISBN 13: 978-0-674-04798-3; ISBN 10: 0-674-04798-2

Ariela J. Gross, John B. and Alice R. Sharp Professor of Law and History
University of Southern California

• Co-Winner 2009 James Willard Hurst Prize, Law and Society Association
• Co-Winner 2009 Lillian Smith Book Awards, the Southern Regional Council and the University of Georgia
• Winner of the 2009 American Political Science Association Award for the Best Book on Race, Ethnicity and Politics

Is race something we know when we see it? In 1857, Alexina Morrison, a slave in Louisiana, ran away from her master and surrendered herself to the parish jail for protection. Blue-eyed and blond, Morrison successfully convinced white society that she was one of them. When she sued for her freedom, witnesses assured the jury that she was white, and that they would have known if she had a drop of African blood. Morrison’s court trial—and many others over the last 150 years—involved high stakes: freedom, property, and civil rights. And they all turned on the question of racial identity.

Over the past two centuries, individuals and groups (among them Mexican Americans, Indians, Asian immigrants, and Melungeons) have fought to establish their whiteness in order to lay claim to full citizenship in local courtrooms, administrative and legislative hearings, and the U.S. Supreme Court. Like Morrison’s case, these trials have often turned less on legal definitions of race as percentages of blood or ancestry than on the way people presented themselves to society and demonstrated their moral and civic character.

Unearthing the legal history of racial identity, Ariela Gross’s book examines the paradoxical and often circular relationship of race and the perceived capacity for citizenship in American society. This book reminds us that the imaginary connection between racial identity and fitness for citizenship remains potent today and continues to impede racial justice and equality.