Mixed Race Studies

A History of Loss

The Chronicle Review
The Chronicle of Higher Education
2015-02-09

Allyson Hobbs, Assistant Professor of History
Stanford University

Alexander L. Manly could have been the first victim of the bloody race riot that exploded in Wilmington, N.C., in early November 1898. Manly, publisher of the Daily Record, North Carolina’s only African-American newspaper, was the target of the rioters after he wrote an inflammatory editorial about white supremacists’ charges that black men were assaulting white women. Manly fired back that the white women who claimed that black men had raped them had, in fact, engaged in consensual sex. His press was burned to the ground. He narrowly escaped to Philadelphia, but upon arrival, discovered that work was hard for a black man to find. Employers summarily rejected his applications for employment as a painter, insisting that no union would accept a black member.

“So I tried being white,” Manly later explained to the journalist Ray Stannard Baker, “that is, I did not reveal the fact that I had coloured blood, and I immediately got work in some of the best shops in Philadelphia. I joined the union and had no trouble at all.”

But Manly soon tired of the charade. Passing only during the work day—”9-to-5 passing,” it was called—meant that he had to leave his house early in the morning and could not return until after nightfall. He feared discovery. “The thing became unbearable,” he lamented. “I preferred to be a Negro and hold up my head rather than to be a sneak.” So he became a janitor and lived openly with his recognizably black wife and children.

Manly could have reaped all of the benefits that accrued to whiteness: economic opportunity and security, political agency, and countless social privileges. Indeed, by some accounts, his light skin had eased his escape from Wilmington, protected him from the racial violence that had engulfed the city, and very likely saved his life. But for Manly, those gains were far outweighed by all that there was to lose…

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Association for Critical Race Art History: Building a Multiracial American Past

CAA 103rd Annual Conference
College Art Association
New York, New York
2015-02-11 through 2015-02-14

Session Location/Time:
New York Hilton Midtown
2nd Floor, Sutton Parlor Center
1335 Avenue of the Americas
New York, New York 10019
2015-02-11, 12:30-14:00 EST (Local Time)

Charles Paxson, Learning is Wealth. Wilson, Charley, Rebecca, and Rosa. Slaves from New Orleans, 1864

Free and open to the public.

Chair:

Susanna Gold, Assistant Professor of Art History
Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; New York Public Library, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

Panelists:

“The Drop Sinister: Harry Watrous’s Visualization of the ‘One Drop Rule’”
Mey-Yen Moriuchi, Assistant Professor of Art History
La Salle University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

“You Are What You Eat: Racial Transformation and Miscegenation in Nineteenth-Century Representations of Food”
Shana Klein
Department of Art History
University of New Mexico

“‘Half-Breed’: Picturing Native American Identity in the Early Nineteenth Century”
Elizabeth W. Hutchinson, Associate Professor of Art History
Barnard College, Columbia University

For more information, click here.