Mixed Race Studies

Abraham Galloway is the Black figure from the Civil War you should know about

All Things Considered
National Public Radio
2022-02-08

Elizabeth Blair, Senior Producer/Reporter, Arts Desk

He has been compared to James Bond and Malcolm X, though his name has largely been left out of the history books.

Abraham Galloway was an African American who escaped enslavement in North Carolina, became a Union spy during the Civil War and recruited Black soldiers to fight with the North. That’s the short version. The fuller picture would include his work as a revolutionary and being one of the first African Americans elected to the North Carolina Senate.

David Cecelski, author of The Fire of Freedom: Abraham Galloway and the Slaves’ Civil War, calls him a “swashbuckling figure who wouldn’t take sass from Northern or Southern or Black or white, Union or Confederate.”

When Cecelski was doing research for another book about maritime slavery, he kept coming across Galloway’s name. “And the stories were sort of so different than what I had been taught about slavery or the Civil War, or the role of African Americans in the Civil War,” he says…

Read or listen to the story (00:05:07) here.

Taffy Abel medaled in the 1924 Olympics. Few knew of his Indigenous heritage

National Public Radio
2022-02-07

Troy Oppie, Host/Reporter
Boise State Public Radio, Boise, Idaho

At the 1924 Winter Olympics in Chamonix, France, about two dozen American dignitaries and athletes trudged through snowy streets in the opening parade. The American flag – then with just 48 stars – was carried by hockey player Clarence “Taffy” Abel.

What few outside his family and close friends knew at that time: Taffy Abel was Native American – the first Indigenous athlete to carry the flag at the Olympics. Within days he’d become the first Native American to win a medal in winter games history.

“A Native American, carrying our stars and stripes, nearly 100 years ago,” reflects George Jones, Abel’s 73-year-old nephew by marriage. His voice quivered with pride as he spoke of that moment.

Family stories passed down tell how Abel, his sister Gertrude, and his mother Charlotte – a Canadian Chippewa (now called Ojibwe) – all passed themselves off as white, mostly by not talking about it.

“The main thing that they were fearful of,” says Jones, “[was] that Taffy and his sister would be taken away to an Indian residential school.”…

Read the entire story here.

A New Orleans Company Shines A Light On Opera’s Diverse History

Weekend Edition Sunday
National Public Radio
2017-05-28

Malika Gumpangkum and Lulu Garcia-Navarro

For many people, New Orleans is practically synonymous with jazz; it’s the birthplace of both the music and many of its leading lights, from Louis Armstrong to Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah. But now, one organization is working to draw attention to the city’s history of opera music.

OperaCréole, an opera company founded in New Orleans, is resurrecting music written by local composers of color and others who’ve been left out of the overwhelmingly white, male canon. The company’s latest production, La Flamenca, is by the Creole composer Lucien-Léon Guillaume Lambert, whose father was born in New Orleans.

OperaCréole founder and mezzo-soprano Givonna Joseph joined NPR’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro to discuss La Flamenca and her company’s work in general. Hear their full conversation at the audio link…

Listen the entire story here.

Nadia Owusu Examines Her Ghanaian-Armenian Identity In ‘Aftershocks’

Weekend Edition Saturday
National Public Radio
2021-01-16

NPR’s Scott Simon speaks to Nadia Owusu about her memoir, Aftershocks.

Listen to the interview (00:07:02) and/or read the transcript here.

These NYC kids have written the history of an overlooked Black female composer

National Public Radio
2021-12-02

Anastasia Tsioulcas, NPR Arts Desk

For decades, it was almost impossible to hear a piece of music written by Florence Price. Price was a Black, female composer who died in 1953. But a group of New York City middle school students had the opportunity to quite literally write Florence Price’s history. Their book, titled Who Is Florence Price?, is now out and available in stores.

The kids attend Special Music School, a K-12 public school in Manhattan that teaches high-level music instruction alongside academics. Shannon Potts is an English teacher there.

“Our children are musicians, so whether or not we intentionally draw it together, they bring music into the classroom every day in the most delightful ways,” Potts says. “So if you’re talking about themes and poetry, immediately a child will qualify it with the way that a theme repeats in music.”

Potts assigned her sixth, seventh and eighth grade students to study Florence Price — a composer born in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1887. She was the first Black woman to have her music played by a major American orchestra: the Chicago Symphony Orchestra performed her Symphony No. 1 in 1933 and her Piano Concerto in One Movement the next year. In 1939, at her famed Lincoln Memorial concert, the contralto Marian Anderson included Price’s arrangement of the spiritual “My Soul Is Anchored in the Lord.”…

Read the entire article here.

‘Passing’ filmmaker Rebecca Hall shares the personal story behind her movie

Fresh Air
National Public Radio
2021-11-30

Terri Gross, Host

Actor/filmmaker Rebecca Hall had what she describes as a “real gasp” moment when she first read Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing.

The book centers on two light-skinned African American women who run into each other after not having seen each other for many years. One of the women is an active member of Harlem’s Black community. The other is married to a white man and is passing as white.

Reading the story of these fictional women, Hall realized that her maternal grandfather had also passed as white.

“Suddenly, aspects of my family life that were tinged with so much mystery and obfuscation, there was a reason for that,” Hall says.

Hall’s mother, acclaimed opera singer Maria Ewing, also passed as white, though not necessarily by her own volition. Instead, Hall says, Ewing tended to “be whatever people chose to see” — which sometimes meant being described as “exotic” by members of the opera community.

Hall was so moved by Larsen’s novel that she drafted a script for a film adaptation — and then she put it away until she felt ready to do something with it. Now, 13 years later, her adaptation of Passing is available on Netflix…

Read the entire interview here.

‘Passing’ — the original 1929 novel — is disturbingly brilliant

Book Reviews
National Public Radio
2021-11-10

Carole V. Bell

The one thing most people know about Nella Larsen’s Passing is that it explores a peculiar kind of deception — being born into one marginalized racial category and slipping into another, for privilege, security, or power. But the significance of Passing isn’t found in the surface facts but in the brilliance of its execution: the beauty of the writing, the close character study, and the intense psychological suspense.

Like a decades-early precursor to a Patricia Highsmith novel, a sense of sensual glamour, frustration and foreboding pervades Larsen’s famed novella. In 1927 Chicago, two light-skinned Black women, childhood friends whose lives took different paths, meet again in a theoretically white space, and a strange friendship is renewed despite the danger that the connection might bring. For Irene Redfield, a proper Black doctor’s wife and a doyenne of Harlem society, passing is a petty indulgence, something she dabbles in on occasion, for “the sake of convenience.” Her racial dexterity gains her “restaurants, theater tickets, and things like that.” But to beautiful, orphaned Clare Kendry, passing is a means of survival. Clare had a home with her white relatives who disdained her race; she wanted something more, and she grabbed it, making a permanent break…

Read the entire review here.

1 In 7 People Are ‘Some Other Race’ On The U.S. Census. That’s A Big Data Problem

National Public Radio
2021-09-30

Hansi Lo Wang

Growing numbers of Latinos identifying as “Some other race” for the U.S. census have boosted the category to become the country’s second-largest racial group after “White.” Researchers are concerned the catchall grouping obscures many Latinx people’s identities and does not produce the data needed to address racial inequities.
Ada daSilva/Getty Images

For Leani García Torres, none of the boxes really fit.

In 2010, she answered U.S. census questions for the first time on her own as an adult. Is she of Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin? That was easy. She marked, “Yes, Puerto Rican.”

But then came the stumper: What is her race?

“Whenever that question is posed, it does raise a little bit of anxiety,” García Torres explains. “I actually remember calling my dad and saying, ‘What race are you putting? I don’t know what to put.’ ”

The categories the once-a-decade head count uses — “White,” “Black” and “American Indian or Alaska Native,” plus those for Asian and Pacific Islander groups — have never resonated with her.

“It’s tricky,” the Brooklyn, N.Y., resident by way of Tennessee says. “Both of my parents are from the island of Puerto Rico, and we’re just historically pretty mixed. If you look at anyone in my family, you wouldn’t really be able to guess a race. We just look vaguely tan, I would say.”…

Read the entire article here.

The Story Of J.P. Morgan’s ‘Personal Librarian’ — And Why She Chose To Pass As White

Code Switch
National Public Radio
2021-08-31

Karen Grigsby Bates, Senior Correspondent

Marie Benedict (left) and Victoria Christopher Murray Phil Atkins

This summer on Code Switch, we’re talking to some of our favorite authors about books that taught us about the different dimensions of freedom. In our last installment, we talked to author Julia Alvarez about her poetry collection The Woman I Kept to Myself and how difficult it can be to share your many selves with the world. Next up, a conversation with authors Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray on their book The Personal Librarian.

At the turn of the 20th century, financier J.P. Morgan amassed a rich collection of antique objects related to the power of the written word: manuscripts, books, artwork. He did it all with the idea of enjoying his collection privately. But shortly after his death, Morgan’s personal librarian, a woman named Belle da Costa Greene, convinced J.P. Morgan’s son, Jack Morgan, to make the library a gift to New York City.

The Morgan, as it is now known, welcomes thousands of visitors each year — scholars, researchers, tourists and art lovers — to enjoy the collection. What most don’t know is this: For more than four decades, the library’s collections were acquired and curated by a Black woman. Belle da Costa Greene was quietly passing as white in order to work for one of the most powerful men in the United States…

Read the story here.

Work Of First African American Painter With International Reputation Explored

Art Where You’re At
National Public Radio
2021-09-07

Susan Stamberg, Special Correspondent

Photograph of Henry Ossawa Tanner in 1907. Frederick Gutekunst (1831–1917)/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

I just met Henry Ossawa Tanner. Nice trick, since he died in 1937. Tanner was the first African American artist with an international reputation. His paintings are in many museums, but I’ve walked past them countless times. Now, preparing for this column, I got to know a bit about his life and times (as well as new revelations about his artistic thinking) and thought I’d make the introductions.

Quite the gentleman. Born in Pittsburgh, 1859. Grew up in Philadelphia. Died an expatriate in Paris. “He saw right away that he could do better in France,” says Dallas Museum of Art curator Sue Canterbury.

He was having trouble getting into the art classes he wanted — and finding teachers who’d take him on. In France, skin color didn’t matter as much. He told a magazine writer, “in Paris no one regards me curiously. I am simply M[onsieur] Tanner, an American artist. Nobody knows or cares what was the complexion of my forebears.”

The French liked his work. In 1897, the government bought one of his pieces for the state collections. With that rare honor his reputation soared. Museums started buying Tanners. By 1900, when mass reproductions of Christ’s portrait and books on his life were circulating, curator Canterbury says, “Tanner was considered the leading European painter of religious scenes…

Read the entire article here.