Mixed Race Studies

Behind the Lines—Marquerite Davis

Louisville Magazine
November 2006

Bruce M. Tyler, Associate Professor of History
University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky

The writer, an associate professor of history at the University of Louisville and author of Louisville in World War II (Arcadia Publishing, 2005), became intrigued by the role African-Americans played during the transformation of Bowman Field from a civilian airport to an Army Air Forces airfield after Pearl Harbor. In the course of his research, he met an elderly Marguerite Davis, who lived alone in Louisville with her memories — and photographs and documents — from her years working with members of the armed services as they evolved from segregation toward integration during those war years. Here, based on interviews with Davis and those who knew her, as well as research into the documents of the day, is the story of a woman who moved between black and white as the military geared up for World War II.

The first question I ask during an interview is, “When were you born and where?” I asked Marguerite Davis Stewart and she replied that her name was Marguerite Nelsenia Davis and she was born in Louisville, Ky., on Sept. 1, 1911. She was from a mixed-race parentage — her father was African-American and her mother was from a German family in Munfordville, Ky. Her parents were Preston Davis, a black commissioned lieutenant during World War I, and Luverta Davis. The two did not stay together long because, my interviewee said, “My father and mother were incompatible.” Her father nevertheless stayed in contact and helped support mother and daughter in Louisville.

Apparently, Luverta Davis did not approve of Preston Davis’ lifestyle. Marguerite Davis said that her father smuggled Canadian whiskey in through Chicago and brought it to Louisville and sold it to the white-owned hotels during Prohibition. He did not do this work himself, according to his daughter, but paid others to do it. He had several white partners. He also had business involvements with several nightclubs that catered to blacks, although some whites patronized his clubs. Davis did not link her father’s underworld and nightclub lifestyle to the breakup of her parents, but this seems a strong possibility to me. I learned to not say or ask something that might get me tossed out of her home and end my interviews or frequent telephone conversations with her in her declining years. She made it clear to me on several occasions that she sought to have her professional life recorded for posterity, not her personal life, though she often turned our conversations to the latter.

Although Davis held strong views about race relations, she repeatedly told me that she wanted to downplay race as much as possible. She thought racial distinctions were silly and highly destructive to her and the human rights of people. Davis was light-skinned and could have passed for white, but she completely rejected any such notion. She admired her father and said nothing to disparage him. “My identity was irrelevant to me,” she said in one of our interviews. “The places I went and the work I did (in the Red Cross) were important to me. If you want to know the truth about it, I have no racial identity. I liked my black college. I enjoyed Fisk University (a historic black school located in Nashville, Tenn.).

“I liked black people; I liked some white people; I liked some Japanese; I liked some of everybody, and some I didn’t like. Race has no meaning to me and never did in my family.”…

Read the entire article here.

Michelle Cliff and the Authority of Identity

The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association
Volume 28, Number 1, Identities (Spring, 1995)
pages 56-70

Sally O’Driscoll, Associate Professor of English
Fairfield University, Fairfield, Connecticut

Michelle Cliff has gained critical acclaim as a novelist in the United States and England; her position as an expatriate Jamaican writer is not called into question. Yet when she is read against the background of Caribbean literary criticism, her authorial identity moves into the foreground. In this perspective, Cliff, as author, becomes problematic as soon as we try to define what she “is” as a Caribbean writer: a very light-skinned woman who identifies herself as black, a product of the Jamaican upper class (she came from a family of landowners with slave owners in their past), an expatriate (who has lived in Europe and the United States since 1975), a lesbian, a feminist, and an academic. The reception of her work indicates that Cliff herself-her embodiment as an author-has been an important factor in the evaluation and classification of her writing. As author, Cliff stands at the point of connection-or rupture-between two major non-congruent constructions of identity: third-world postcolonialist and first-world postmodern. Also relevant are debates about “race” as social construction (and its different operations in an American or a Jamaican context), and about gender and sexuality as constituent components of identity.

It is not only Cliff’s authorial embodiment, of course, that raises these questions. Her work has always been overtly concerned with questions of identity, from the 1980 Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise, through essays, short stories, poetry, and criticism, and three novels: the partly autobiographical Abeng (1984); No Telephone to Heaven (1987); and Free Enterprise (1993). In this essay I shall focus on No Telephone to Heaven as a site where familiar notions of identity based in race, class, gender, and sexuality are questoined; it is in critiques of this novel that we can examine how Cliff’s authorial self is implicated in evaluations of her work.

The authority of identity is a central issue for a writer who straddles first world and third world, colonizer and colonized, the postmodern and the postcolonial—the word “postcoloniai” itself being a symbol of disagreement between the two worlds. The tension arises because western post-…

A More Noble Cause: A. P. Tureaud and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Louisiana

Louisiana State University Press
April 2011
328 pages
6 x 9 inches, 21 halftones
Hardcover ISBN: 9780807137932

Alexander P. Tureaud, Jr.

Rachel L. Emanuel

Throughout the decades-long legal battle to end segregation, discrimination, and disfranchisement, attorney Alexander Pierre Tureaud was one of the most influential figures in Louisiana’s courts. A More Noble Cause presents both the powerful story of one man’s lifelong battle for racial justice and the very personal biography of a black professional and his family in the Jim Crow-era Louisiana.

During a career that spanned more than forty years, A. P. Tureaud was at times the only regularly practicing black attorney in Louisiana. From his base in New Orleans, the civil rights pioneer fought successfully to obtain equal pay for Louisiana’s black teachers, to desegregate public accommodations, schools, and buses, and for voting rights of qualified black residents.

Tureaud’s work, along with that of dozens of other African American lawyers, formed part of a larger legal battle that eventually overturned Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized racial segregation. This intimate account, based on more than twenty years of research into the attorney’s astounding legal and civil rights career as well as his community work, offers the first full-length study of Tureaud. An active organizer of civic and voting leagues, a leader in the NAACP, a national advocate of the Knights of Peter Claver—a fraternal order of black Catholics—and a respected political power broker and social force as a Democrat and member of the Autocrat Club and Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, Tureaud worked tirelessly within the state and for all those without equal rights.

Both an engrossing story of a key legal, political, and community figure during Jim Crow-era Louisiana and a revealing look at his personal life during a tumultuous time in American history, A More Noble Cause provides insight into Tureaud’s public struggles and personal triumphs, offering readers a candid account of a remarkable champion of racial equality.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Underestimated and Misperceived
• 2. Of Creole Heritage
• 3. Educating Alex
• 4. Southern Exodus
• 5. Preparing for a Legal Career
• 6. Return to New Orleans
• 7. Meeting Lucille
• 8. Growing Community Involvement
• 9. The War Years
• 10. NAACP Lawyer
• 11. Law and Fatherhood
• 12. “Separate but Equal” Strengthened in the Face of Desegregation
• 13. Desegregation of Primary and Secondary Schools
• 14. The Politician
• 15. Desegregation Battles after Brown
• 16. Enforcing Brown’s Mandate in New Orleans Grade Schools
• 17. Catholics and Desegregation
• 18. More to the Desegregation Mandate
• 19. Reconstructing Public Education
• 20. More Direct Action
• 21. Courts Are the Way
• 22. Race against Time
• Notes
• Index

Underestimated and Misperceived

He sat in that chair day after day, reflecting on his life as he spoke haltingly into the tape recorder. He was a man whose erect bearing had once projected calm assurance and deep human insight and whose physique had once reflected his lifetime enjoyment of the rich Creole cuisine of New Orleans.

He looked much older than his seventy-three years, and a casual visitor might have thought that his lack of movement and energy reflected a mental exhaustion as well. Despite the fact that he was now gaunt and barely had enough strength to rise from a chair without assistance, he refused to give in to the constant pain that increasing doses of medication could not relieve. As he ruminated over his life, he recalled names, dates, places, and events with unerring accuracy.

The depth of knowledge and perseverance the old man exhibited seemed implausible for one in his condition. But then his entire life had been one impossible challenge after another. Through sheer will, he had changed the face of Louisiana forever. He had helped to stifle rampant segregation through a series of historic lawsuits. He had altered attitudes and conquered adversity with a disarming but unyielding demeanor. The wizened old man in the chair did not look as if he had done any of those things. But then Alexander Pierre Tureaud had been consistently underestimated and was often misperceived by others.

Knocking on the doors of houses in the Faubourg Marigny of New Orleans, whose owners awaited their early morning deliveries of French bread and other baked goods, Alexander Pierre (“Alex”) Tureaud, nine years old, cheerfully greeted the customers as he delivered purchases to their doorstep. The white woman who managed the neighborhood store where he worked assumed, when hiring the curly-haired boy, that he was white.

When the owner of the store later discovered that Alex was a Negro, he instructed the manager to fire him. It did not matter that Alex did a good job, was conscientious, punctual, polite, and liked by the customers. In fact, the store manager paid him a little extra each week, called “lagniappe” by Creoles, because she was more than satisfied with his performance. Following the directive of the owner, the manager fired Alex, and the boy’s initial opportunity to earn his own money was taken away because of racial discrimination.

A wide-eyed, hopeful young Creole experienced his first painful rejection as a colored person during the early 1900s in the segregated South. The wages from the part-time job, though only $1 a week, enabled him to contribute to his family’s meager household income and allowed him to have his own spending money.

Years later, Alexander P. Tureaud greeted two white men with a collegial tip of his hat as he walked by them and entered the courthouse. “Seen that nigger lawyer, yet?” one ol the men asked. Realizing that the man was addressing him, Tureaud shook his head, chuckled to himself, and proceeded up the steps without a second glance in their direction. As he entered the building, he overheard the man’s next remark: “We’re gonna have some fun with that nigger today.” It was then that Tureaud realized that these men were his opposing counsel.

Instead of being angered by their racist comments, Tureaud was amused. Their off-the-cuff statements would create a psychological advantage when he confronted them later in court. Tlieir remarks served to fuel his enthusiasm for the legal battle ahead.

Once inside the courtroom, the two white lawyers could not conceal their surprise when Tureaud introduced himself as the attorney for the plaintiffs and smiled respectfully at the opposing counsel. Tureaud had been mistaken as white many times before, and he knew he could use it to advance his objectives…

…Born three years after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, which declared racial segregation the law of the land, Tureaud, in addition to his legal career, became a student of history. lie was particularly inquisitive about his lineage as a New Orleans Creole of color.

The desire to fight racial injustice had been set long ago in the Creole culture of Louisiana. Tureaud found within his culture role models of activism and aligned himself with men and women determined to achieve equality. Pride in his heritage taught him that it is more noble to fight injustice, no matter what, than to resign oneself to it…

Creole Is, Creole Ain’t: Diachronic and Synchronic Attitudes toward Creole Identity in Southern Louisiana

Language in Society
Volume 29, Number 2 (June, 2000)
pages 237-258

Sylvie Dubois, Gabriel Muir Professor of French Studies
Louisiana State University

Megan Melançon, Associate Professor of English
Georgia College

Creole identity in Louisiana acquired diverse meanings for several ethnic groups during the French and Spanish regimes, before and after the purchase of the Louisiana Territory, and through the last part of the 20th century. In spite of a strong shift toward “Black” identity by many African Americans in the state, those who are fluent Creole French speakers now seem to be the repository of Louisiana Creole identity. This article presents a diachronic study of the different meanings applied to Creole identity which resulted from dramatic social, political, and economic changes. It also delimits and defines the actual attributes of Creole identity within two representative African American communities. Because of the historical and political conditions underlying Creole identity, African Americans who still identify as Creoles insist on linguistic attributes, rather than on the criterion of race, as essential characteristics of their ethnic identity.

European colonization during the 17th and 18th centuries gave rise to numerous Creole societies all over the world. In the 1869 edition of the Larousse dictionary, the French term créole referred to those born in, or native to, the local populace; but the 1929 edition depicted Creole as correctly designating only a Caucasian population—further noting that, “by way of analogy, it could be used to refer to non-Caucasian peoples of current or former colonies” (Dominguez 1986:15). A recent English dictionary (American Heritage 1992) gives five definitions of the word créole which pertain to identity: (a) A person of European descent born in the West Indies or Spanish America; (b) a person descended from or culturally related to the original French settlers of the southern US, especially Louisiana; (c) a person descended from or culturally related to the Spanish and Portuguese settlers of the Gulf States; (d) a person of mixed Black and European ancestry who speaks a creolized language; and (e) a Black slave born in the Americas, as opposed to one brought from Africa. In Louisiana, “the term came early to include any native, of French or Spanish descent by either parent, whose non-alliance with the slave race entitled him to social rank. Later, the term was adopted…

Decoding E. Shockley’s “mesostics from the american grammar book” Pt. 2

SIUE Black Studies Blog
Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville
2011-10-13

Cindy Lyles

Alongside [Evie] Shockley’s bold choice to write a poem using only names of black women, her stanza construction also makes a daring statement in “mesostics for the american grammar book.” The names are intentionally grouped in specific stanzas, which allows for intriguing discussion in the continuation of this decoding process.

[Related: Decoding “mesostics from the american grammar book” Pt. 1]

“doroThy dandridge / yellow maRy peazant / hAlle berry / helGa crane / marIah carey / Clare kendry” all appear in a stanza together. These women share the commonality of being light-skinned, which they are noted for in their individual cases. That observation alone warrants further examination, especially when considering that the vertical phrase “TRAGIC” traverses the names.

Shockley purposely selects the women for the “TRAGIC” stanza, as each one represents a version of the tragic mulatto. Actress Dorothy Dandridge portrayed variations of the tragic mulatto throughout her film career. The character of Yellow Mary Peazant was a product of rape yielding her of biracial ancestry. Both Halle Berry and Mariah Carey have white mothers and black fathers. In their respective novels, Helga Crane and Clare Kendry were biracial and so light-skinned that they could pass for white…

Read the entire article here.

The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency

Random House, Inc.
2011-08-16
336 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-307-37789-0
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-307-45555-0

Randall Kennedy, Michael R. Klein Professor of Law
Harvard Law School

Timely—as the 2012 presidential election nears—and controversial, here is the first book by a major African-American public intellectual on racial politics and the Obama presidency.
 
Renowned for his cool reason vis-à-vis the pitfalls and clichés of racial discourse, Randall Kennedy—Harvard professor of law and author of the New York Times best seller Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word—gives us a keen and shrewd analysis of the complex relationship between the first black president and his African-American constituency.
 
Kennedy tackles such hot-button issues as the nature of racial opposition to Obama, whether Obama has a singular responsibility to African Americans, electoral politics and cultural chauvinism, black patriotism, the differences in Obama’s presentation of himself to blacks and to whites, the challenges posed by the dream of a postracial society, and the far-from-simple symbolism of Obama as a leader of the Joshua generation in a country that has elected only three black senators and two black governors in its entire history.
 
Eschewing the critical excesses of both the left and the right, Kennedy offers a gimlet-eyed view of Obama’s triumphs and travails, his strengths and weaknesses, as they pertain to the troubled history of race in America.

Read an excerpt here.

Table of Contents

The Anglo-Indian Community

American Journal of Sociology
Volume 40, Number 2 (September, 1934)
pages 165-179

Elmer L. Hedin
Halcyon, California

Of the several half-caste croups in Asia, the largest and most self-conscious is the Anglo-Indian Community. It numbers perhaps two hundred thousand persons who maintain themselves precariously on the outskirts of British-Indian officialdom, employed for the most part in clerical and other minor positions under the government. The life of the Anglo-Indian is one protracted struggle for status, occupational and social, and in that struggle he seems to be losing ground. Despised by both British and Indians, he may well be submerged in the turmoil of the present, trampled under by the march of India’s millions toward nationalism.

With the discovery of a sea route to eastern Asia in the last decade of the fifteenth century there began a new era of intimate and exten sive trade relationships between the nations of Europe and those of the Far East. The first European traders belonged to a world in many respects more tolerant than the present one, a world in which race prejudice was almost unknown. Consequently, more often than not they entered into more or less permanent marriage relationships with native women, a custom which resulted, after a few generations of trade and political expansion, in the presence of considerable numbers of half-castes. Such half-castes were in a special position and tended to form self-conscious communities, the largest, the best organized, and the most interesting of which is that community in India variously known as East Indian, Eurasian, or Anglo-Indian.

Some fifteen hundred years before Christ, India was conquered by a people speaking an Aryan language and allied to the present Europeans in blood. Later there were invasions of Greeks, Parthians, and Arabs. As a consequence, there was a not inconsiderable intermixture of invaders’ blood with that of the already hybrid population they found, fought with, and often ruled. But these mixtures took place so long ago that it is not easy to tell what proportion of white and what proportion of dark blood there is in any native of India. Furthermore, it has been and is customary for Europeans to think of all Indians as “colored” without regard to their possible…

Purchase the article here.

Slaves and Masters: The Louisiana Metoyers

National Genealogical Society Quarterly (current source: Historic Pathways)
Volume 70, Number 3 (September 1982)
pages 163-189

Elizabeth Shown Mills

Gary B. Mills (1944-2002)

The pursuit of genealogical research by Afro-Americans is a fairly-recent innovation in the American social experience. From an academic standpoint, today’s generation of black family historians are pioneers on the threshhold of a challenge, an adventure through which traditional white genealogists have already passed. They are heirs to a rich legacy of family tradition, almost invariably undocumented. They face a world of resources whose limits appear to be boundless, but are frustratingly underdeveloped. The guides which exist for them are often crude and elementary, even contradictory. There also exists, to some extent, a self-defeating presumption that documentation of miscegenous, illegitimate births is not possible—as reflected in the recent assertion of awell-known black writer:

In those days, slaves were sold and shifted much like livestock, so records were sporadic. Nor did records reflect things like children born from unions between white masters and black women. So to expect these records to provide an accurate account is pure naivete. When it comes to black genealogy, well-kept oral history is without question the best source.

Even more unfortunately, contemporary black genealogists, like the older generations of more naive white genealogists, often begin their pursuit with a handicap; a stereotyped, often onc-dimensional concept of American historiography that may limit their potential success. Americans, black and white, are prone to|draw too-sharp lines between certain races and classes of men. A white with Southern heritage traditionally expects his forebears to be slaveowners, while the American black expects his ancestors to be enslaved.

Both are likely to be surprised at the degree of variance which may emerge between reality and their stereotyped expectations. The Louisiana family of Metoyer provides an intriguing example of the degree to which class, race, and economic lines were blurred in early America. The Metoyers were both slaves and masters, but they were not unique. Pioneer black historian Carter G. Woodson in 1924 identified 3,765 black Southerners who were, in the single year 1830, owners of other blacks. On the eve of the Civil War (1860) the enumerators of the federal census tabulated almost half a million blacks who were already free—roughly one out of every eight blacks in America. Surprisingly, almost half this number were found in the Southern Slates. The white American looks for his heritage among the records of free men, while the black is conditioned to believe his search must begin in slave records…

Read the entire article here.

Student reflection on the Luther Lecture

Impetus
Luther College at the University of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada
Fall 2011

Jenna Tickell

Senator Lillian Eva Dyck was the 36th Annual Luther Lecturer.  Senator Dyck presented her personal story in relation to the issues of racism and sexism in Canada.  She began with power-point statistics and ended with a standing ovation from the audience.  Her main point pertaining to statistics was to indicate the reality that statistics can be manipulated in various ways, so we must be cautious of what we take as fact from presumably unbiased numbers.  When looking at statistics, Senator Dyck reminded us not to get overwhelmed with the notion that maybe some race and gender issues are too big to tackle; for one, because statistics can be manipulated in various ways and truth from numbers is always subjective, and two, that the positive changes that have occurred in Canada regarding gender and race equality should be used to empower us to take the next step.  When Senator Dyck began her personal life story, her lecture really blossomed for me.  Through telling her life story, she reinforced what I had learned through my university studies while also educating me on a piece of Canadian history that I had not heard before.  As a Métis woman and as a university student, the value of guest lectures such as this is immense; she educated me regarding her personal history while at the same time empowered my activism and sense of self-discovery.              
 
Senator Dyck comes from a “mixed” racial family; her mother is Cree and her father is Chinese.  Her mother grew up on a reserve where abuse was high and poverty was extreme because of colonialist policies and laws.  During the same time period, there was considerable immigration from China, as workers were first needed to build the railway and then were left to find employment, often resulting in local Chinese cafes scattered throughout the small prairie towns in Saskatchewan.  Due to restrictive immigration policies, Chinese men were forced to leave their families behind but hoped that one day they would have the financial means to bring them to Canada. Unfortunately, immigration laws became even more restrictive, and this created an interesting phenomenon called the Chinese bachelors.  The government allowed their entrepreneurial efforts, but implemented a rule stating that Chinese men could not hire white women to work for them.  Chinese men needed waitresses for their small restaurants and since they could not hire white women it opened the opportunity for Aboriginal women to work with and meet Chinese men.  Thus, the racist laws actually facilitated “mixed” marriages between Chinese men and Aboriginal women within Saskatchewan…

Read the entire article here.

Absalom, Absalom!

Random House
1936
432 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-679-73218-1

William Faulkner

First published in 1936, Absalom, Absalom! is William Faulkner’s ninth novel and one of his most admired. It tells the story of Thomas Sutpen and his ruthless, single-minded attempt to forge a dynasty in Jefferson, Mississippi, in 1830. Although his grand design is ultimately destroyed by his own sons, a century later the figure of Sutpen continues to haunt young Quentin Compson, who is obsessed with his family legacy and that of the Old South. “Faulkner’s novels have the quality of being lived, absorbed, remembered rather than merely observed,” noted Malcolm Cowley. “Absalom, Absalom! is structurally the soundest of all the novels in the Yoknapatawpha series—and it gains power in retrospect.” This edition follows the text of Absalom, Absalom! as corrected in 1986 under the direction of Faulkner expert Noel Polk and features a new Foreword by John Jeremiah Sullivan.