Mixed Race Studies

The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case: Race, Law, and Justice in the Reconstruction Era [Tejada Review]

Washington Independent Review of Books
2015-01-15

Susan Tejada

When a Crescent City toddler goes missing, the tensions of the post-Civil War South are exposed.

Ross, Michael A., The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case: Race, Law, and Justice in the Reconstruction Era (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014)

The case was combustible. Two mixed-race women, abetted by the son of one of them, stood accused of kidnapping a blonde, blue-eyed white baby girl in New Orleans in 1870. How did it end? Author Michael Ross expertly keeps readers in suspense as he weaves this true tale of crime, culture, politics, and colorful Southern characters — including a riverboat captain, “mulatresses,” and a precedent-setting Afro-Creole detective.

The case began on the afternoon of June 9, 1870, when Bridgette Digby sent her 10-year-old son, Georgie, and toddler daughter Mollie outside to play under the supervision of a teenage babysitter. Two stylish, fair-skinned African-American women happened to be strolling by. As they stopped to admire Mollie, a fire broke out a few blocks away, and the excited babysitter asked Georgie to hold his sister while she ran to watch the fire.

“No bubby, I will take the baby,” one of the women said. The women asked Georgie to lead them to the home of a certain neighbor. Once there, they told Georgie it was the wrong house, and then sent him to the market to buy a treat for his sister. A heart-stopping shock awaited Georgie when he came out of the market. The women were gone, and so was his baby sister…

Read the entire review here.

The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case: Race, Law, and Justice in the Reconstruction Era

Oxford University Press
2014-10-14
320 Pages
30 half-tones
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780199778805

Michael A. Ross, Associate Professor of History
University of Maryland

• Offers a glimpse into the volatile racial world of Reconstruction era New Orleans
• Guides readers through one of the first sensationalized kidnapping trials of the late 19th Century
• Offers fresh insights on the complexities and possibilities of the Reconstruction era

In June 1870, the residents of the city of New Orleans were already on edge when two African American women kidnapped seventeen-month-old Mollie Digby from in front of her New Orleans home. It was the height of Radical Reconstruction, and the old racial order had been turned upside down: black men now voted, held office, sat on juries, and served as policemen. Nervous white residents, certain that the end of slavery and resulting “Africanization” of the city would bring chaos, pointed to the Digby abduction as proof that no white child was safe. Louisiana’s twenty-eight-year old Reconstruction governor, Henry Clay Warmoth, hoping to use the investigation of the kidnapping to validate his newly integrated police force to the highly suspicious white population of New Orleans, saw to it that the city’s best Afro-Creole detective, John Baptiste Jourdain, was put on the case, and offered a huge reward for the return of Mollie Digby and the capture of her kidnappers. When the Associated Press sent the story out on the wire, newspaper readers around the country began to follow the New Orleans mystery. Eventually, police and prosecutors put two strikingly beautiful Afro-Creole women on trial for the crime, and interest in the case exploded as a tense courtroom drama unfolded.

In The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case, Michael Ross offers the first full account of this event that electrified the South at one of the most critical moments in the history of American race relations. Tracing the crime from the moment it was committed through the highly publicized investigation and sensationalized trial that followed, all the while chronicling the public outcry and escalating hysteria as news and rumors surrounding the crime spread, Ross paints a vivid picture of the Reconstruction-era South and the complexities and possibilities that faced the newly integrated society. Leading readers into smoke-filled concert saloons, Garden District drawing rooms, sweltering courthouses, and squalid prisons, Ross brings this fascinating era back to life.

A stunning work of historical recreation, The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case is sure to captivate anyone interested in true crime, the Civil War and its aftermath, and the history of New Orleans and the American South.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Ch 1 A Kidnapping in the Back of Town
• Ch 2 Detective John Baptiste Jourdain and His World
• Ch 3 A Trace of a Missing Child?
• Ch 4 A Knock at the Digbys’ Door
• Ch 5 The Arrest of the Alleged Accessories
• Ch 6 The Woman in the Seaside Hat
• Ch 7 The Recorder’s Court
• Ch 8 A Highly Unusual Proceeding
• Ch 9 Unveiling the Mystery
• Ch 10 The Case “That Excited All New Orleans”
• Afterword and Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index

Claiming Race, Identity and a Right to Education

Mixed Roots Stories
2015-02-02

Briellen Griffin, Doctoral Student of sociology in Cultural and Educational Policy Studies
School of Education
Loyola University Chicago

It is my job to think about school. Everyday, I read, write, and speak about education. I ask, and often try to answer, the big questions. Like, why do we have schools? Or, what is the purpose of education? Even more specifically, how do I make sure all kids get the education they deserve? Since I now have my own children, these questions have taken on new meaning in my life. They have become personal. More than I expected, they have become questions that challenge who we are; who I am and who my children will become.

When I think back to my earliest years of schooling, I can’t pinpoint a specific moment when I knew that I was getting a different education that my friends. I grew up in urban public schools, not unlike the one my own kids attend today. I LOVED SCHOOL. I mean, LOVED it. All parts. Carrying the milk crate for snack, practicing handwriting, chasing friends on the playground. Later, the love grew to encompass algebra and writing, student council and more writing… I was good at school and that made every moment satisfying and fulfilling.

At some point, I began to realize that I got more credit than I deserved. It wasn’t just that I was good at what I did. Maybe, I thought, it wasn’t even that I was better than anyone else at school, at all. It did have something to do with having blond hair and blue eyes. It had to do with feeling free in a place that didn’t criminalize me. It had to do with looking white.

I am, perhaps, one of the more stereotypical American multiracial blends, one that connotes the taboo of race-mixing specific to slavery in this country. My mother is white and my father is Black, though his heritage includes European & American Indian and is evidenced by a “high yellow” complexion and wavy black hair. What is less stereotypical about my multiracial identity is that I look white, especially to most white people. And the result is that I benefit from white privilege…

Read the entire article here.

‘One Drop’ at Cambridge Rindge & Latin

The Boston Globe
2015-02-03

Meredith Goldstein, Entertainment Reporter

From left: Junot Díaz, Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni, and Kate Ellis. (Aram Boghosian for The Boston Globe)

Actor-producer Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni brought her one-woman show, “One Drop of Love,” to the Cambridge Rindge & Latin School on Friday night. The play, co-produced by famous Rindge alums Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, is about family, race, class, and reconciliation. DiGiovanni stuck around to talk about the big themes with a panel that included Pulitzer-Prize-winning author and MIT professor Junot Díaz and educator Donald Burroughs. The evening benefited the school’s Kimbrough Scholars Program.

Brooklyn is: Feature of the Week [Beth Consetta Rubel]

Brooklyn Artistry
Brooklyn, New York
2015-02-02

The latest and greatest untouched talent of the borough.

Being a biracial woman from the South we wanted to know what it was like for Beth Consetta Rubel as an artist. So many things can be triggering for an artists like her. You’d think she would have to battle for both sides, especially now when it seems like racial tension is at an all time high. We spoke with Consetta, one of the illest portraiture painters today, about her experience. Talk about in your face! Beth Consetta Rubel is not the one to hold back especially through her work. Her new series Paper Bag Test shows her pride in all of it’s grace.

If you haven’t already heard about her here’s a little something you should know, her name is Beth Consetta Rubel. She’s an Austin based visual artist. Raised in the South, Rubel draws upon her personal narrative and mixed-race ancestry to create work deeply rooted in her ethnic heritage. Focusing on painting and drawing in college, she received her BFA from the University of Texas San Antonio. Her recent “Paper Bag Test Series” references historical tests used to ascertain race based on phenotype, addressing contentious political and social issues on race, cultural identity, and class struggle…

Read the entire interview here.

The Indomitable Spirit of Edmonia Lewis. A Narrative Biography

Esquiline Hill Press
2012
567 pages (est.)
mobi ISBN: 978-1-58863-450-4
PDF ISBN: 978-1-58863-451-1
ePub ISBN: 978-1-58863-452-8

Harry Henderson

Albert Henderson

Edmonia Lewis was the first famous “colored sculptor” and the first to idealize her African and American Indian heritages in stone. She flourished from 1864 through 1878, and, as an artist, was a rare instrument for social change in the aftermath of the Civil War. She pressed her case for equality from her studio in Rome, Italy, and with annual tours of the United States.

Our new narrative of Lewis’s life and art updates many “established facts” – well beyond erroneous birth and death dates – with more than 100,000 words, 50 illustrations, 800 references, bibliography, index, and a reference list of more than 100 works with notes on museum holdings. It is based on private letters, public documents, essays, hundreds of news items, reviews of her work, museum collections, and more than two dozen published interviews. It reveals how a world biased against her color, class, gender and religion received her. Of special interest to African-American and American-Indian studies, as well as art, women’s, and American history, the narrative opens an abundance of previously unrecognized sources, reinterprets important relationships, names missing works, and corrects the identification of an important portrait. Students of the nineteenth century will find it a cool counterpoint to the bitter rage of Civil War and Reconstruction.

Readers familiar with her legendary icons of race may be surprised by her many portraits and her untold moves to Paris and London. They will also find answers to long-standing questions: Where, when, and how did she die? Why did her encounter with a bronze Ben Franklin leave her reeling? Why did she idealize a woman with African features only once in her career? Why did she never cite the now-famous Forever Free after her first interviews in Rome? Why did she have to stalk Henry Wadsworth Longfellow through the streets to make his portrait? Where was her studio? How often did she tour America? How did she enter her work in the 1876 Centennial expo, which had barred colored people absolutely? What were her relationships with fans, mentors, and fellow sculptors? Who were her rivals, her best friends, and her worst enemies? Fresh evidence, never before collected and collated, argues a novel motive for her erotic masterwork, the Death of Cleopatra, which sits apart in her œuvre like a hussy in a small town church. Newly realized sources also change our view of her childhood and provide ample support to refute distortions of her personal character, sexuality, and appearance.