Mixed Race Studies – Page 37 – Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

The Fire of Freedom: Abraham Galloway and the Slaves’ Civil War

2022-02-13
The Fire of Freedom: Abraham Galloway and the Slaves’ Civil War

University of North Carolina Press
September 2012
352 pages
17 halftones, 4 maps, notes, bibl., index
6.125 x 9.25
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-2190-6
eBook ISBN: 978-0-8078-3812-9

David S. Cecelski

AWARDS & DISTINCTIONS
- 2012 North Caroliniana Book Award, The North Caroliniana Society
- Ragan Old North State Award, North Carolina Literary and Historical Association
Abraham H. Galloway (1837-1870) was a fiery young slave rebel, radical abolitionist, and Union spy who rose out of bondage to become one of the most significant and stirring black leaders in the South during the Civil War. Throughout his brief, mercurial life, Galloway fought against slavery and injustice. He risked his life behind enemy lines, recruited black soldiers for the North, and fought racism in the Union army’s ranks. He also stood at the forefront of an African American political movement that flourished in the Union-occupied parts of North Carolina, even leading a historic delegation of black southerners to the White House to meet with President Lincoln and to demand the full rights of citizenship. He later became one of the first black men elected to the North Carolina legislature.

Long hidden from history, Galloway’s story reveals a war unfamiliar to most of us. As David Cecelski writes, “Galloway’s Civil War was a slave insurgency, a war of liberation that was the culmination of generations of perseverance and faith.” This riveting portrait illuminates Galloway’s life and deepens our insight into the Civil War and Reconstruction as experienced by African Americans in the South.
He risked his life to become a founding father of civil rights. Why was he forgotten?

2022-02-11

He risked his life to become a founding father of civil rights. Why was he forgotten?

The Los Angeles Times
2022-02-09

Stuart Miller

Walter F. White, forgotten civil rights hero and the subject of a new book. (Schomberg Center, New York Public Library)

Mention Walter White and it will likely conjure an image of Bryan Cranston from “Breaking Bad,” playing the man who snarled, “I am the danger.”

But there’s a real-life Walter White who deserves to be a household name — a Black man who faced unfathomable danger in pursuit of truth and justice as he did battle with the American way. White should rank alongside Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X as a founding father of the civil rights era. Yet he is all but forgotten today.

That oversight gets an overdue correction in A.J. Baime’s engrossing new biography, “White Lies: The Double Life of Walter F. White and America’s Darkest Secret.”…

Read the entire article here.
All Tangled Up: Intersecting Stigmas of Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Mariana Rondón’s Bad Hair

2022-02-11

All Tangled Up: Intersecting Stigmas of Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Mariana Rondón’s Bad Hair

Black Camera: An International Film Journal
Volume 9, Number 1, Fall 2017
pages 47-61

Reighan Gillam, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
University of Southern California

The film Pelo Malo / Bad Hair (dir. Mariana Rondón, 2013) depicts the story of Junior, a mixed-race young boy in Venezuela who wishes to straighten his curly hair. This essay shows that the stigmatization of black hair is part of Venezuela’s racial aesthetic regime and thus contextualizes the actions and desires of the main character. Moreover, while much of the literature on race and beauty in Latin America focuses on women’s experiences, this essay examines men’s and boys’ experiences of aesthetic regimes that value whiteness. Junior’s continual fussing with his hair, as well as his other actions, informs his mother’s fears that he is gay. I argue that the main character, Junior, is subject to shifting forms of stigma that inform his attempts to straighten his curly hair and in turn inform Junior’s mother’s perception that he is gay.

Read or purchase the article here.
Black soldier who crossed Delaware with Washington will be honored in New Jersey

2022-02-11

Black soldier who crossed Delaware with Washington will be honored in New Jersey

Courier Post
Cherry Hill, New Jersey
2022-02-09

Matthew Korfhage, USA Today Network

New Jersey’s Oliver Cromwell, who crossed the Delaware with George Washington and lived to nearly 100, will at long last receive a historical marker.

Since they were children, cousins Arianna Murray and Jane Fox Long had known the story of Oliver Cromwell.

His story wasn’t taught in schoolbooks. But in Burlington, New Jersey, and across the country, nine generations of his family helped keep it alive.

“We knew that our great-great-great grandfather — I forget how many greats — had crossed the Delaware with Washington,” Fox Long said. “It was the story that my mom had told, and it was also passed down to her.”

“Every Fourth of July, it was always a conversation piece,” said Murray, from her home in Philadelphia. “How could it not be?”

Cromwell was a decorated hero of New Jersey, they knew, a representative of an American history that had gone unheralded for much of this nation’s lifetime: an African American patriot of the Revolutionary War…

…Against this backdrop, Cromwell was born on the farm of tavernkeeper John Hutchin on May 24, 1753, in present-day Burlington County, an area whose taverns “Burlington Biographies” author Richard L. Thompson described as a hotbed for American revolutionary sentiment.

Cromwell’s parentage is not known with certainty, but multiple records refer to him as being of mixed race, likely African and white heritage. Late in life, he referred to himself as being “in the family of John Hutchin.”

Cromwell joined the New Jersey militia in 1775, where he was listed as “Indian,” leading to speculation he may have had Native American heritage. This is far from definitive, said Burlington County historian Jeff Macechak, who noted that other soldiers he believed to be of African descent were also listed the same way…

Read the entire article here.
Slavery took hold in Florida under the Spanish in the ‘forgotten century’ of 1492-1619.

2022-02-09

Slavery took hold in Florida under the Spanish in the ‘forgotten century’ of 1492-1619.

Tampa Bay Times
2019-08-29

J. Michael Francis, Hough Family Endowed Chair
University of South Florida, St. Petersburg

Gary Mormino, Professor emeritus of History
University of South Florida, St. Petersburg

Rachel Sanderson, Associate Director, La Florida: The Interactive Digital Archive of the Americas
University of South Florida, St. Petersburg

Artistic rendering of Luisa de Abrego and others [ KATE GODFREY | University of South Florida, St. Petersburg ]

Every 16th century Spanish expedition to Florida included Africans, both free and enslaved.

On Jan. 5, 1595, an infant boy named Esteban was baptized in the small Spanish garrison town of St. Augustine. In the priest’s three-line baptism entry, Esteban’s mother is identified only by her first name, Gratia. Described as a slave owned by a Spanish woman named Catalina, Gratia was one of perhaps 50 slaves who lived in St. Augustine at the end of the 16th century. And like Gratia, most of the town’s other slaves appear only briefly in the historical record, with few personal details besides a Christian name: Simón, María, Agustín, Francisca, Ana, Baltasar, Felipe or Ambrosio.

Collectively, their long-forgotten stories document and complement a remarkable history that dates back more than a century before the first slaves reached Virginia in 1619. They portray a society that was fluid and eclectic. By 1619, La Florida’s population included Spaniards, Portuguese, Greeks, Italians, French, Flemish, Germans, two Irishmen, West Africans, Sub-Saharan Africans and a diverse group of Native Americans. In other words, early Florida reflected a population that resembled modern America.

Floridanos of African descent were present from the earliest Spanish expeditions to the peninsula. Most readers are familiar with the founding myth of Florida and Juan Ponce de León’s alleged search for the Fountain of Youth. However, his 1513 voyage takes on a different complexion when we understand the crew’s composition, which included several free blacks. One of them, Juan Garrido, a native of West Africa, later participated in Hernando Cortés’s 1519 conquest of Mexico, where he lived over the next two decades, participating in numerous conquest expeditions. In a lengthy petition submitted to the Spanish Crown in 1538, Garrido highlighted his three-decade career as a “conquistador,” adding that he commissioned the construction of Mexico City’s first Christian chapel and that he was the one who introduced wheat into Mexico…

Read the entire article here.
A Man Called White and Exploring America’s Darkest Secret in “White Lies”

2022-02-09

A Man Called White and Exploring America’s Darkest Secret in “White Lies”

Chicago Review of Books
2022-02-07

Steve Nathans-Kelly

An interview with A.J. Baime about his new book, “White Lies: The Double Life of Walter F. White and America’s Darkest Secret.”

When we speak of the peak years of the Civil Rights Movement, typically we refer to the period beginning with Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-56—which thrusted Martin Luther King, Jr. onto the national stage. This canonical era concludes with the passage of the Voting Rights Act in August 1965 following the pivotal showdown in Selma. Those eleven years formed the Movement’s dominant narrative, which blurred and obscured most of what came before and after (and oversimplified much that’s in between).

Jacquelyn Dowd Hall’s landmark 2005 essay, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Uses of the Past,” ushered in a critical reassessment of these artificial historical boundaries. Hall argued that anointing this era not only limited the movement’s lifespan to a “halcyon decade,” but also narrowed its goals to the pursuit of a vaguely defined “color-blind” society, a notion later used to recast King and others as proponents of neoliberal social and fiscal policy.

Focusing exclusively on this period also meant overlooking many of the foundational figures who preceded it and laid the groundwork for nearly everything that followed.

One such figure is Walter F. White—known in his lifetime as “Mr. NAACP”—who led America’s most powerful civil rights organization from 1929 until his death in 1955. White featured prominently in nearly every important battle against segregation and white supremacy during those years. White’s extraordinary life demonstrates how blinding white Americans’ appalling lack of color-blindness could be.

By all appearances, the blond-haired and blue-eyed Walter White was white. But like his multiracial parents, both born to formerly enslaved people, White identified as Black throughout his life. In his early years with the NAACP, he used his appearance to infiltrate Southern white communities as an undercover white man, gathering critical information on brutal lynchings from killers keen to brag about their crimes…

Read the entire interview here.
Mirror Girls

2022-02-09

Mirror Girls

Little, Brown Young Readers
2022-02-08
304 pages
Hardcover ISBN-13: 9780759553859
eBook ISBN-13: 9780759553859
Audiobook ISBN-13: 9781549165962

Kelly McWilliams

A thrilling gothic horror novel about biracial twin sisters separated at birth, perfect for fans of Lovecraft Country and The Vanishing Half

As infants, twin sisters Charlie Yates and Magnolia Heathwood were secretly separated after the brutal lynching of their parents, who died for loving across the color line. Now, at the dawn of the Civil Rights Movement, Charlie is a young Black organizer in Harlem, while white-passing Magnolia is the heiress to a cotton plantation in rural Georgia.

Magnolia knows nothing of her racial heritage, but secrets are hard to keep in a town haunted by the ghosts of its slave-holding past. When Magnolia finally learns the truth, her reflection mysteriously disappears from mirrors—the sign of a terrible curse. Meanwhile, in Harlem, Charlie’s beloved grandmother falls ill. Her final wish is to be buried back home in Georgia—and, unbeknownst to Charlie, to see her long-lost granddaughter, Magnolia Heathwood, one last time. So Charlie travels into the Deep South, confronting the land of her worst nightmares—and Jim Crow segregation.

The sisters reunite as teenagers in the deeply haunted town of Eureka, Georgia, where ghosts linger centuries after their time and dangers lurk behind every mirror. They couldn’t be more different, but they will need each other to put the hauntings of the past to rest, to break the mirrors’ deadly curse—and to discover the meaning of sisterhood in a racially divided land.
White Lies: The Double Life of Walter F. White and America’s Darkest Secret

2022-02-09

White Lies: The Double Life of Walter F. White and America’s Darkest Secret

Mariner Books
2022-02-08
400 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0358447757
Paperback ISBN: 978-0358581772
eBook ISBN: 9780358439660
Audiobook ISBN: 9780358581932

A. J. Baime

A riveting biography of Walter F. White, a little-known Black civil rights leader who passed for white in order to investigate racist murders, help put the NAACP on the map, and change the racial identity of America forever

Walter F. White led two lives: one as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance and the NAACP in the early twentieth century; the other as a white newspaperman who covered lynching crimes in the Deep South at the blazing height of racial violence. Born mixed race and with very fair skin and straight hair, White was able to “pass” for white. He leveraged this ambiguity as a reporter, bringing to light the darkest crimes in America and helping to plant the seeds of the civil rights movement. White’s risky career led him to lead a double life. He was simultaneously a second-class citizen subject to Jim Crow laws at home and a widely respected professional with full access to the white world at work. His life was fraught with internal and external conflict—much like the story of race in America. Starting out as an obscure activist, White ultimately became Black America’s most prominent leader. A character study of White’s life and career with all these complexities has never been rendered, until now.

By the award-winning, best-selling author of The Accidental President, Dewey Defeats Truman, and The Arsenal of Democracy, White Lies uncovers the life of a civil rights leader unlike any other.
Debate is growing over use of ‘Latinx’ for ethnic identity

2022-02-08

Debate is growing over use of ‘Latinx’ for ethnic identity

The Houston Chronicle
2021-01-24

Olivia P. Tallet, Staff Writer

James Durbin
Many Latinos and Hispanics who are familiar with the word “Latinx” respect it in the context of LGBTQ+ inclusiveness. But it’s overwhelmingly unsupported as a pan-ethnic identity word.

Latinx is a buzzword for individuals of Latin American origin in the United States, yet the use of “Latinx” as a noun to identify people of Latino and Hispanic heritage is not universally welcomed.

“Ooooo, you’ve entered the dangerous territory of ‘identity politics,’” said Rice University professor Luis Duno-Gottberg on a social media post where a journalist asked for opinions about the use of Latinx.

The word “Latinx” and its plural “Latinxs” spark passionate discussions, with supporters asserting it is more inclusive than the predominant “Latinos” or “Hispanic” to group the multifaceted identities of people who trace their origins to Latin America and Spanish-speaking countries.

Some analysts trace the original use of Latinx to the mid-2000s when it began to appear in web searches. The word started a slow trend upward in June 2016, according to Google Trends data. Some observers associated it with the mass shooting that month at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando where 49 people were killed and 53 injured…

Read the entire article here.
The Nazi Holocaust in Europe and slavery and Jim Crow in the United States are outgrowths of the same ideology—the belief that human beings can be delineated into categories that share immutable biological traits distinguishing them from one another and determining their potential and behavior.

2022-02-08

The Nazi Holocaust in Europe and slavery and Jim Crow in the United States are outgrowths of the same ideology—the belief that human beings can be delineated into categories that share immutable biological traits distinguishing them from one another and determining their potential and behavior. In Europe, with its history of anti-Jewish persecution and violent religious divisions, the conception of Jews as a biological “race” with particular characteristics was used by the Nazis to justify the Holocaust. In the United States, the invention of race was used to justify the institution of chattel slavery, on the basis that Black people were biologically suited to permanent servitude and unfit for the rights the nation’s Founders had proclaimed as universal. The American color line was therefore much more forgiving to European Jews than the divisions of the old country were. But they are branches of the same tree, the biological fiction of race.

Adam Serwer, “Whoopi Goldberg’s American Idea of Race,” The Atlantic, February 3, 2022. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/02/whoopi-goldbergs-american-idea-race/621470/.

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