Mixed Race Studies

Interracial births in Baltimore, 1950-1964

Public Health Reports
Volume 81, Number 11 (November 1966)
pages 967-971

Sidney M. Norton, Director of the Bureau of Vital Records
Baltimore City Health Department, Baltimore, Maryland

Also Assistant, Department of Chronic Diseases
School of Hygiene and Public Health
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland

During the course of routine, periodic examinations of birth certificates for accuracy and completeness, the Bureau of Vital Records in the Baltimore City Health Department has observed an increasing number of interracial births in Baltimore from year to year over the past decade. Although such births do not occur in large numbers, they are indicative of a contemporary social phenomenon which is taking place in numerous U.S. urban areas.

In Baltimore this social phenomenon is manifested by children born to white and Negro parents, white and Filipino parents, and white and oriental parents. These children represent the legitimate issue of interracial marriages and, to a lesser extent, the natural offspring of unwed parents.

The bona fide interracial unions are of special interest because Maryland law prohibits the intermarriage of a white person and a Negro to the third generation, a white person and a member of the Malay race, and a Negro to the third generation and a member of the Malay race. (On March 28, 1966, the Maryland House of Delegates defeated a bill previously passed by the State Senate to repeal the 305-year-old law prohibiting white-Negro marriages and the 1935 amendment which broadened the original statute by further prohibiting marriages between whites or Negroes with members of the Malay race.)

There is no provision in the statute which prohibits Japanese-white, Chinese-white, or Chinese-Negro marriages. Obviously, the marriages prohibited in Maryland were contracted in jurisdictions which have no racial restrictions.

Maryland is 1 of 19 States which have an anti-miscegenation statute, a law prohibiting white-Negro marriages. With the exception of the Union of South Africa, no other country has such a law. The legislation prohibiting the marriage of Malays with white persons or Negroes in Maryland is aimed specifically at Filipinos, who are said to represent many different racial and cultural backgrounds.

Despite this interdiction, resident Filipinos and white women have been intermarrying outside of Maryland with increasing frequency over the past several years. Many of the Filipinos in Baltimore are physicians who have come for postgraduate training in medicine. As for other mixed marriages, white persons and American Indians marry frequently and without any legal restrictions. Also noteworthy are the great numbers of U.S. military personnel who married Chinese, Japanese, and Korean women as well as the numbers of Negro servicemen, particularly those who were stationed in England and Germany, who married white women and subsequently brought their wives to the United States.

This study was undertaken to determine the complete incidence of interracial births in Baltimore from 1950 to 1964 by racial origin, country of birth, ages of parents, occupation of father, and legitimacy status of the child. When an interracial birth occurs in a Baltimore hospital, as did all those reported here, the medical records staff doublechecks to assure the accuracy of the registration…

Read the entire article here.

Interracial marriages in Maryland

Public Health Reports
Volume 85, Number 8 (August 1970)
pages 739-747

Sidney M. Norton, Director of the Bureau of Vital Records
Baltimore City Health Department, Baltimore, Maryland

Also Lecturer, Department of Chronic Diseases
School of Hygiene and Public Health
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland

A Statistical Report

Nullification of all miscegenation legislation in Maryland became effective June 1, 1967, by action of the Maryland General Assembly in September 1966. Laws were repealed(a) penalizing ministers who had united persons of the white and Negro races in marriage and (b) prohibiting marriages between the white and Negro races and members of the Malay race. The State of Maryland took more than 300 years to remove from its statutes the law banning marriages between whites and Negroes—an act the Supreme Court subsequently held had infringed on an individual’s freedom of choice to marry, which should not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations.

Methodology

The data in my report refer to recorded interracial marriages in the State from June 1, 1967, to December 31, 1968. I have emphasized the types of intermarriages occurring most frequently: (a) those between whites and Negroes, (b) between whites and Orientals, and (c) between whites and members of the Malay race.

The following procedures are observed in all marriage license bureaus in the State. Either of the contracting parties may apply for the license. After the couple is sworn in by a clerk of the court, the marriage laws of Maryland are quoted to them, and a series of questions relating to the prospective groom and bride are asked. Their replies are given under oath and entered on the application form for the marriage license by the clerk of the court. The questions include name, residence, age, color, nativity, marital status, and information concerning former marriages, if any.

Criteria used to identify and classify the various races were based on guidelines established for court clerks when issuing marriage licenses to couples of different races. The following racial delineations were contained in a memorandum from a Maryland deputy attorney general to the clerk of the Court of Common Pleas in Baltimore:

• The white race is made up of the Caucasian peoples of the world.
• The Negro race is the black race.
• The yellow race is made up of the Mongolian peoples and includes the Chinese and Japanese.
• The Malay race is the brown race and includes the inhabitants of the Malay Peninsula and Oceania. The Polynesian race is a branch of the Malay race.
• The red race is made up of the American Indians.

The directive also stated that under Maryland law, the following persons may legally intermarry:

• Persons of the white race with persons of the red and yellow races.
• Persons of the yellow race with persons of the white, Malay, red, and Negro races.
• Persons of the Negro race with persons of the red and yellow races.
• Malayans with persons of the red and yellow races.
• Persons of the red race with persons of the white, Negro, Malay, and yellow races.
• Persons of the same race.

The following statutory provisions relate to marriages in Maryland: (a) the minimum age at marriage is 18 years for a man and 16 years for a woman except if the woman is pregnant or has given birth to a child and (b) the clerk of any court in which a marriage is licensed or recorded is required to transmit a report of eachmarriage to the State department of health.

Records of marriages filed with the Maryland State Department of Health during the study period were investigated to ascertain the number and types of interracial marriages and to analyze particular characteristics of grooms and brides (age, marital status, and resident status), political subdivision of the State in which the marriage had taken place, and type of ceremony for each such marriage.

Results

Of the 512 interracial marriages in Maryland from June 1, 1967, through December 31, 1968 (table 1), 310 were between whites and Negroes. Twice as many Negro men and white women intermarried as white men and Negro women. For the first 7 months of the study (June 1 through December 31, 1967), the ratio of Negro men marrying white women, compared with white men marrying Negro women, was 2.6 to 1; in 1968 the proportion was 1.8 to 1.

White-Malay marriages occurred 1.6 times more often between Malay grooms and white brides than between white grooms and Malay brides. The ratio between these two types of unions was slightly higher for the 7-month period in 1967 than in 1968. About an equal number of white men married Oriental women (46) as Oriental men (44) selected white women…

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Antlers, glass mark exhibit of California sculptor in College Park

Gazette.Net: Maryland Community News Online
Gaithersburg, Maryland
2013-09-12

Virginia Terhune, Staff writer

Always looking for new materials, Los Angeles sculptor Alison Saar heard that an organization she knew needed to sell a pile of antlers cast off by deer in Montana. So she bought 200 pairs.

Eager to work with glass, she spent time at the Pilchuck Glass School near Seattle learning about the medium’s malleable properties and how to incorporate them into her work.

Both antlers and glass are integral to the 11 sculptures in her exhibit “Still …” coming to the David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland, College Park.

In the exhibit, Saar, who is biracial, explores issues of racial identity and bigotry as well as sexism, ageism and love and loss…

…In “Black Lightning” (a play on the slang term “white lightning”), Saar presents a charred stool, a mop, a bucket and a set of glass boxing gloves hanging from a pole and filled with a liquid tinged with red.

She said it’s about black men and the futures once thought suitable for them — to work as a janitor or a boxer but not to work as a president.

Hateful comments about Obama also stirred up her own feelings about being biracial in a culture where often neither black nor white groups accept you as their own.

In “50 Proof,” Saar presents a metal stand holding a basin filled with a dark liquid. Tubing runs through the basin up through a glass heart and into a clear glass head that is half filled with the dark liquid, which drips from the eyes as tears.

“It’s about the theme of the ‘tragic mulatto,’ about being between two worlds, about feeling compelled to align myself,” she said…

Read the entire article here.

Passing for Black in Seventeenth-Century Maryland

Chapter in:

Interpreting the Early Modern World: Transatlantic Perspectives
Springer
2011
246 pages
eBook ISBN: 978-0-387-70759-4
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-387-70758-7
Softcover ISBN: 978-1-4614-2709-4

Edited by: Mary C. Beaudry and James Symonds

Chapter Authors:

Julia A. King, Associate Professor of Anthropology
St. Mary’s College of Maryland

Edward E. Chaney

In the Chesapeake region of the United States, archaeologists (including ourselves) typically organize the men and women who made up colonial society into one of three categories: European, African, or Native American. Although these three categories at one time were conflated with skin color, today, they are conceived primarily (although not always) in terms of ancestry or origin. Archaeologists have used these categories to document and interpret social life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and to understand the nature and origins of altitudes toward difference, especially racial and ethnic difference. The best of this work has revealed a range of responses to post-Contact life in the region. Enslaved Africans, for example, were able to use material culture to exert some control over their material and spiritual lives. Many Chesapeake Bay Indians maintained traditional practices long after the arrival of English men and women, while others did not. Meanwhile. English men and women were doing their damndest to transplant English ways of life to the region, usually, but not always, with considerable success.

Indeed, the use of the terms European, African, and Indian to frame Chesapeake history has often served as a counterbalance to the work of the region’s very productive social history school, which focused the majority of its scholarly attention on the experiences of the English colonists who made their way to Maryland and Virginia in the seventeenth century. This work, which has contributed enormously to Chesapeake historiography, has, with some important exceptions, had the unintentional effect of displacing and even erasing the indigenous and African people who were also a part of this history. Putting Native Americans and Africans back into the landscape was a necessary corrective to what was then shaping up to be a wholly European story. The cure, however, while not worse than the disease, raises its own issues concerning the study of racial and ethnic difference. European, African, and Indian have become fixed, unchanging, a priori categories of identity, givens rather than problems for study. Not only do the categories mask considerable variability, they ignore how these identities themselves came to be constructed, and how these identities, then and now. subtly reinforce colonial hierarchies through the use of imposed identities (sec Epperson. 1999 for an early critique).

That such assumptions about race and ethnicity continue to influence the direction of Chesapeake studies is illustrated by the Smithsonian Institution’s recently opened (2009) exhibit. Written in Hone: Forensic Files from the 17th Century. The exhibit’s curators use morphological and metrical measurements collected from Chesapeake skeletons to conclude that “only three groups … were here in the 1600s and early 1700s—individuals of Native American. European, and African origins” (Smithsonian Institution, 2009). The exhibit goes on to list the biological attributes of these “origins” and then quite seamlessly link these attributes to culturally specilied groups. As historian Ken Cohen has pointed out in his review of the Smithsonian’s exhibit for the Journal of American History (2009), such determinations and linkages conflate origin and identity, imposing twentieth- and twenty-first-century racial categories on past groups and. in so doing, “[erasing] multi-racial individuals and cultural adaptations such as ‘passing.'” Cohen concludes that, for the exhibit’s visitors, “the oversimplified treatment of race [will prevent them] from understanding the dynamic experience of the seventeenth-century moment when modern definitions of race were forming but not yet crystallized.”

Cohen’s point is especially well-taken for the seventeenth-century period, when racial categories of identity were not nearly as fixed as they would become in the eighteenth century. And, even in the eightteenlh century, while these imposed categories became increasingly “real” in a social sense, we still have trouble showing how people in this period constructed their own identity. Studies of race and ethnicity in other places have revealed the role of material culture in identity formation. Yet, surprisingly few archaeological studies of the construction of racial categories have been undertaken for the Chesapeake region’s first century of colonization. In Maryland, this is largely because, or at least the argument goes, Africans constituted a small minority of the population through the end of the century. Given the profound influence of the social history school on Chesapeake historiography and its emphasis on a quantitative approach, this argument is not unexpected. The argument is unpersuasive, however, given that the indigenous population, especially in the first century of sustained contact, hardly constituted a minority, and few studies have focused on the emergence of the category Indian in the seventeenth century (but see Potter. 1993).

An important exception is Alison Bell’s (2005) study of white ethnogenesis in the colonial Chesapeake. Using patterns in Chesapeake domestic architecture first identified by Cary Carson (Carson et al.. 1981). James Deetz (1993. 1996). Henry Glassie (1975), and Dell Upton (1982, 1986), Bell concluded that changes in the construction and layout of Chesapeake dwellings through time revealed one strategy by which Anglo-Americans (her term) were able to reconfigure themselves as a new social category they called “white.” As Chesapeake planters began building houses distancing themselves from the men and women who labored on their farms, they continued to use technologies and building designs that required planters to rely on other planters (and “whites”) in a kind of traditional network lo help maintain those houses. Racism, Bell (2005:457) concluded, “slowed the development of capitalism…

Read or purchase the chapter here.

Void and Voidable Marriages in Maryland and Their Annulment

Maryland Law Review
Volume 2, Issue 3 (1938)
Article 2
pages 211-259

John S. Strahorn Jr., Professor of Law
University of Maryland

The essential task of this article will be to classify invalid or defective marriages in Maryland into those which are totally void and hence subject to collateral attack and those which are only voidable by appropriate steps of direct attack taken during the joint lifetime of the spouses. But, as investigation of this question requires a survey of all the local law concerning the requirements of and impediments to a valid marriage, and, as well, an inquiry into the procedural aspects of annulment, the article will be, in effect, one on the broader questions of validity of marriage and annulment in Maryland.

THE GENERAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN TOTAL VOIDNESS AND VOIDABILITY

Terminology presents the first problem. The phrase “totally void” will be used herein to express the idea of a marriage’s possessing some defect rendering it susceptible to collateral attack, even after the death of one or both of the spouses. For such marriages no direct step or proceeding to annul is necessary, although the latter may be desirable. “Voidable” will be used to express the idea that the defect, at most, permits the validity of the marriage to be directly attacked by appropriate steps during the joint lifetime of the spouses, although without that the invalidity may not be asserted collaterally in any other proceeding. “Valid” and “completely valid” will be used interchangeably in the sense that the marriage meets all the requirements and encounters none of the impediments so that it can withstand both direct and collateral attack.

In addition to the question of total voidness or mere voidability, there must be considered whether, if the marriage be only voidable, it may be avoided by simple private act, or a judicial proceeding is necessary. Related to this is the matter of ratification, which is possible for some, though not all, voidable marriages and which is considered by some writers to be possible for certain marriages which are otherwise totally void. Whether such a latter class exists in Maryland law will be one of the inquiries of this article.’ A certain confusion exists between a marriage’s being totally void although capable of ratification, and its being voidable by private act without judicial proceeding…

…C. Race (Miscegenation).

White persons and Malayans are forbidden to intermarry and both are forbidden to marry Negroes or persons of Negro descent to the third generation. The statutory mode of expression to cover persons of mixed white and Negro blood is an awkward one and makes doubtful just what proportion of Negro blood will disqualify one from marrying a pure white person or Malayan. It is suggested that if the person in question has some non-Negro blood and that if all of his parents and grand-parents also had some, he is eligible for purposes of the statute, even though he is predominantly Negro.

Is a marriage which is definitely under the statutory ban totally void or only voidable? While no Maryland case has ever dealt directly with either the prohibition generally or the specific problem, a strong dictum in Jackson v. Jackson has indicated that such a marriage, forbidden by our statute, is so totally void that it cannot be recognized even when performed in a state sanctioning such marriages. As has been suggested, this should also determine the issue of total voidness or voidability for the purpose of internal law. This is particularly so in view of the fact that the Jackson case dictum put this type of marriage under the part of the exception to the conflicts rule for those marriages which “the local law making power has declared shall not have
any validity.

Granting such marriages to be totally void, what procedures are available for directly declaring that quality. The statutory procedure does not apply. No doubt, a divorce on the ground of marriage void ab initio could be procured. It is doubtful that an annulment under the general equity practice could be secured. A successful criminal prosecution for entering into the unlawful marriage (if the ceremony occurred in Maryland) or for illicit cohabitation s in Maryland under such an invalid marriage might accomplish the result of a judicial declaration of nullity, even though this does not come under the statutory method, which makes specific mention of criminal prosecution as an annulment device…

Read the entire article here.

From Slave Ship to Harvard: Yarrow Mamout and the History of an African American Family

Fordham University Press
May 2012
310 pages
6 x 9
25 Black and White Illustrations
Hardcover ISBN: 9780823239504

James H. Johnston, Lawyer and Writer
Washington, D.C.

From Slave Ship to Harvard is the true story of an African American family in Maryland over six generations. The author has reconstructed a unique narrative of black struggle and achievement from paintings, photographs, books, diaries, court records, legal documents, and oral histories. From Slave Ship to Harvard traces the family from the colonial period and the American Revolution through the Civil War to Harvard and finally today.

Yarrow Mamout, the first of the family in America, was an educated Muslim from Guinea. He was brought to Maryland on the slave ship Elijah and gained his freedom forty-four years later. By then, Yarrow had become so well known in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C., that he attracted the attention of the eminent American portrait painter Charles Willson Peale, who captured Yarrow’s visage in the painting that appears on the cover of this book. The author here reveals that Yarrow’s immediate relatives—his sister, niece, wife, and son—were notable in their own right. His son married into the neighboring Turner family, and the farm community in western Maryland called Yarrowsburg was named for Yarrow Mamout’s daughter-in-law, Mary “Polly” Turner Yarrow. The Turner line ultimately produced Robert Turner Ford, who graduated from Harvard University in 1927.

Just as Peale painted the portrait of Yarrow, James H. Johnston’s new book puts a face on slavery and paints the history of race in Maryland. It is a different picture from what most of us imagine. Relationships between blacks and whites were far more complex, and the races more dependent on each other. Fortunately, as this one family’s experience shows, individuals of both races repeatedly stepped forward to lessen divisions and to move America toward the diverse society of today.

Contents

• Introduction
• 1. Yarrow Mamout. a West African Muslim Slave
• 2. Tobacco and the Importation of a Labor Force
• 3. Welcome to America
• 4. Slavery and Revolution
• 5. Yarrow of Georgetown
• 6. The Portraits: Peale, Yarrow, and Simpson
• 7. Free Hannah, Yarrow’s sister
• 8. Nancy Hillman, Yarrow’s Niece
• 9. Aquilla Yarrow
• 10. Mary “Polly” Turner Yarrow
• 11 Aquilla and Polly in Pleasant Valley
• 12. Traces of Yarrow
• 13. Unpleasant Valley
• 14. Freedom
• 15. From Harvard to Today
• Epilogue: Guide to the Yarrows’ and Turners’ World Today
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index

Brendon Ayanbadejo, Baltimore Ravens Linebacker, Talks Gay Marriage And LGBT Rights

The Huffington Post
2012-09-12

Michelangelo Signorile

Baltimore Ravens linebacker Brendon Ayanbadejo is going “full steam ahead” after his battle with Maryland legislator C. Emmett Burns Jr., who last week wrote a letter calling on the team’s owner to silence Ayanbadejo regarding his public advocacy of gay marriage, only to back down amid a national uproar. (Listen to the full interview below)

“The Ravens reached out to me,” Ayanbadejo said. “[Ravens president] Dick Cass and [Ravens] owner Steve Bisciotti said, ‘Brendon, you’re a great person. Keep doing your thing. We believe in you. This is not a team that believes in discrimination in any way, shape, or form. You have this tremendous platform here. Use it. And go ahead and continue to be you, and grow and shape and change the world while you have the ability to do it.’”…

…Discussing what motivates him to take up the cause of LGBT equality and gay marriage, Ayanbadejo pointed to his upbringing.

“I’m a product of two biracial parents — so actually, I’m not biracial, but I’m a product of it,” he said, laughing. “My dad is Nigerian. My mom is Irish-American. So I kind of never really fit in. From the black community, I was considered white. From the white community, I was considered black. And then from my own Nigerian community, I wasn’t considered Nigerian. I was considered a black American. I kind of never fit in, kind of had to find my own niche and find my own way. So I’ve experienced discrimination at a young age, and it’s made me the person who I am today.”…

Read the entire article here.

Banneker’s family tree still bears rich fruit

The Baltimore Sun
2006-06-12

Gregory Kane

And so Molly Welsh, an Englishwoman sentenced to indentured servitude in 17th-century Maryland, wed an African slave named Bannaka. And they begat four daughters, one of whom was named Mary.

And Mary wed a slave named Robert, who took her last name, which, by the time of their nuptials, had become Bannaky. Mary and Robert begat one son and three daughters. One of the daughters, Jemima, wed Samuel D. Lett. From that union came eight children, including a son named Aquilla.

“Aquilla Lett eventually moved to Ohio,” Gwen Marable said Saturday afternoon. A number of generations later, “that’s how I came to be born in Ohio,” she said. Marable eventually found her way to Maryland. She may be in these parts for good.

“The project has really kept me here,” Marable said.

That project would be the Benjamin Banneker Historical Park and Museum in Baltimore County. That son Mary and Robert Bannaky had was none other than Benjamin Banneker—the farmer, astronomer, mathematician, surveyor and publisher—whose farm once sat on the site where the park is now located. Marable described herself as a collateral descendant of Banneker, not a direct descendant…

…”It’s been said that she married Bannaka to keep him from running off,” said Cole Wiggins, a board member of the Friends of the Banneker Historical Park and Museum. “But don’t quote me on that. It’s never been proved.”

Actually, wisecracking husbands might say that Welsh’s marrying Bannaka might have been the sure way to make him run off. What may be closer to the truth is that marriages between white, female indentured servants and black men—whether slave or “free men of color”—could have been quite common at the time…

Read the entire article here.

Family Tree’s Startling Roots

The New York Times
2012-03-19

Felicia Lee

Thirty-nine lashes “well laid” on her bare back and an extension of her indentured servitude was Elizabeth Banks’s punishment for “fornication & Bastardy with a negroe slave,” according to a stark June 20, 1683, court document from York County, Va. Through the alchemy of celebrity and genealogy, that record and others led to the recent discovery that Banks, a free white woman despite her servitude, was the paternal ninth great-grandmother of Wanda Sykes, the ribald comedian and actress.

More than an intriguing boldface-name connection, it is a rare find even in a genealogy-crazed era in which Internet sites like ancestry.com, with more than 14 million users, and the popular NBC program “Who Do You Think You Are?” play on that fascination. Because slavery meant that their black ancestors were considered property and not people, most African-Americans are able to trace their roots in this country only back to the first quarter of the 19th century.

“This is an extraordinary case and the only such case that I know of in which it is possible to trace a black family rooted in freedom from the late 17th century to the present,” said the historian Ira Berlin, a professor at the University of Maryland known for his work on slavery and African-American history.

Mary Banks, the biracial child born to Elizabeth Banks around 1683, inherited her mother’s free status, although she too was indentured. Mary appeared to have four children. There are many other unanswered questions, but the family grew, often as free people of color married or paired off with other free people of color.

Ms. Sykes’s family history was professionally researched for a segment of “Finding Your Roots With Henry Louis Gates Jr.,” a new series that has its debut Sunday on PBS.

“The bottom line is that Wanda Sykes has the longest continuously documented family tree of any African-American we have ever researched, ” said Mr. Gates, the director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard. He was referring to the dozens of genealogies his researchers have unearthed for his television roots franchise, which began in 2006 with the PBS series “African-American Lives” and includes three other genealogy-inspired shows. Mr. Gates said he also checked Ms. Sykes’s family tree with historians, including Mr. Berlin…

…Johni Cerny, who is the chief genealogist for Mr. Gates’s television programs, noted that many African-Americans with white ancestry could trace their heritage beyond the 1600s to European ancestors. She said 85 percent of African-Americans have some European ancestry.

“The unique thing about Wanda is that she descends from 10 generations of free Virginia mulattos, which is more rare than descendants of mixed-race African-Americans who descend from English royalty,” Ms. Cerny wrote in an e-mail message.

More than 1,000 mixed-race children were born to white women in colonial Virginia and Maryland, but their existence has been erased from oral and written history, said Paul Heinegg, a respected lay genealogist and historian. Mr. Heinegg’s Web site, freeafricanamericans.com, features books and documents like tax lists that provide information about those families…

Read the entire article here.

The Mysterious Portraitist Joshua Johnson

Archives of American Art Journal
Volume 36, Number 2 (1996)
pages 2-7

Jennifer Bryan

Robert Torchia

The Maryland Historical Society’s Department of Manuscripts recently received three volumes of Baltimore County court chattel records—registers of personal property transactions such as mortgages, deeds of gift, powers of attorney, bills of sale, and releases of slaves from bondage. The earliest of the three volumes contains the bill of sale and the manumission record of America’s first-known black artist, the mysterious portraitist Joshua Johnson, who was active from 1790 to 1825. These extremely significant documents have survived through pure chance. According to the donor, M. Peter Moser. when the Baltimore City courthouse underwent renovation in 1954, many original documents were slated for destruction. His father. Judge Herman M. Moser, saw the discarded chattel records being thrown into bins and asked if he could have a few of the books, coincidentally saving the volume containing Johnson’s sale and manumission records.

Johnson’s existence was unknown until 1939, when Baltimore genealogist and an historian J. Hall Pleasants attributed thirteen paintings to him and attempted to reconstruct his career on the basis of fragmentary and often contradictory information. Pleasants characterized Johnson as a “nebulous figure” and he has remained so over the last fifty-eight years, despite numerous exhibitions and articles devoted to him. Only one of Johnson’s paintings bears his signature, Sarah Ogden Gustin (ca.  1805, National Gallery of Art, Washington. D.C.), and only one is documented in papers left by a patron, the well-known Rebecca Myring Everett and Her Children (1818, Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore). His life dates are unknown, and historians argue over whether his name was spelled Johnson or Johnston.

Even Johnson’s race has been a subject of contention. The idea that the artist was black was challenged when prices for his paintings escalated on the an market during the early 1970s. The authors of a history of African-American artists cast stronger doubts when they noted the highly circumstantial and speculative nature of the “evidence.”* Pleasants had collected four different accounts from the descendants of old Baltimore families who owned portraits by Johnson in which the artist was variously described as a slave, a slave trained as a blacksmith, a black servant afflicted with consumption, and an immigrant from the West Indies. In the federal censuses for Baltimore of 1790 and 1800, a Joshua Johnson is listed as a free white head of household. In the most comprehensive survey of Johnson’s life to date, Carolyn J. Weekley discovered an additional family tradition that held that Johnson was black and one that identified him as a “red man.” Until now, the sole documentary evidence that Joshua Johnson was indeed black was the Baltimore City Directory of 1817-1818, in which he is listed among “Free Householders of Colour.”

The issue of Johnson’s race has sociological and political ramifications. His gradual rise from anonymity to prominence paralleled the civil rights movement and, more recently, the academic emphasis on multiculturalism. Influenced by this climate, historians have tended to romanticize the artist, often at the expense of historical accuracy. Johnson has progressed from being parenthetically mentioned in a 1954 survey of American art as “a colored artist” who “remained a true primitive” to being the African-American artist par excellence.

The chattel records conclusively prove that Johnson was a mulatto, the son of a white man and a black slave woman owned by a William Wheeler. Sr. On July 15, 1782. the clerk of the Baltimore County court enrolled two documents, the bill of sale and the release from bondage of a slave named Joshua, “now aged upwards of Nineteen Years.” The bill records that on October 6…