Mixed Race Studies

Germany’s ‘Brown Babies’: The Difficult Identities of Post-War Black Children of GIs

Speigel Online International
2009-10-13

Stephanie Siek

Rosemarie Pena’s identity document after her adoption. “Many of us never knew we were adopted, and many of us thought we were the only one,” Pena said. Her adoptive parents changed her name to Wanda Lynn Haymon. After discovering she was adopted, she reclaimed her birth name.

For many of the now-adult children of white German women and African-American GIs, adopted by families in the United States after World War II, the search for the truth has been difficult. Online communities are helping.

Rudi Richardson knew something about what it meant to be a black man in the United States. But after being deported to Germany, the country where he was born, shortly before his 47th birthday, he had to start figuring out what it meant to be black and German—in a land he barely remembered and whose language he didn’t speak.

He started life as Udo Ackermann, born in a Bavarian women’s prison in 1955. His mother, a Jewish woman named Liesolette, was serving a prison term for prostitution. His father, whom he never met, was an African-American serviceman named George. Rudi was given up for adoption.

Like thousands of other postwar children with black GI fathers and white German mothers, Richardson was raised by an African-American military family in the US. He has spent his life trying to find where he fits in.

Born in an era when Germany was still grappling with its responsibility for the Holocaust and when the US Army had a policy of not acknowledging paternity claims brought against its soldiers stationed abroad, some of these children were put up for adoption in the United States. At the time, Germany judged itself incapable of absorbing these “brown babies”—as they have come to call themselves. In the late 1940s and 1950s, efforts were made to match them with African-American military families, many of whom were stationed around Germany at the time…

…But Cardwell, who is writing a book about his experiences, has learned that his own story is not that simple. Brought to the United States as a four-year-old and adopted by an African-American couple in Washington D.C., he was raised believing that he was a very light-skinned black man. It was not until he began trying to find his biological parents as an adult that he discovered his mother was a half-German refugee from Poland, and his father was native Hawaiian who was classified as “colored” by the military because of his skin color.

“I’ve been run out of white people’s houses: ‘Who’s this black person you’re bringing in here?’ I’ve been run out of black people’s houses: ‘Who’s this white person you’re bringing in here?'” Cardwell said of his adolescence and early adulthood. “There is no belonging, which is what brown babies sought most.”…

Read the entire article here.

Beyond Liverpool, 1957: Travel, diaspora, and migration in Jamal Mahjoub’s The Drift Latitudes

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature
Volume 46, Number 3 (September 2011)
pages 493-511
DOI: 10.1177/0021989411409813

Jopi Nyman, Professor
University of Eastern Finland, Finland

This essay discusses the novel The Drift Latitudes (2006) by the Anglo-Sudanese author Jamal Mahjoub. By telling the stories of the German refugee Ernst Frager and his two British families, I argue that Mahjoub’s novel utilizes the tropes of transnational travel and migration to present a critique of discourses of purity and nationalism. Through its uncovering of silenced family narratives, the novel hybridizes British and European identities and underlines the need to remember the stories of ordinary people omitted from official histories. As the novel’s supposedly British families appear to possess transnational links with Sudan, Germany, and the Caribbean, the novel reconstructs European identity as transnational and in need of historical reassessment. As a further contribution to the importance of hybrid identity, the story of black cultural identity and its construction in post-Second World War Liverpool is told in tandem with the importance of black music as a means of constructing black diasporic identity.

Read or purchase the article here.

Mixed Race Britain – How The World Got Mixed Up

BBC Press Office: Press Packs
2011-09-05

Ruth Williams, Seretse Khama and family

This one-off documentary explores the historical and contemporary social, sexual and political attitudes to race mixing.

Throughout modern history, interracial sex has been one of society’s great taboos, and across many parts of the world, mixed race relationships have been subjected to a range of deterrents. Mixed couples have endured shame, stigma and persecution and many have risked the threat of ostracism from their friends and families.

In several parts of the world, including South Africa during the apartheid era, governments introduced legislation to prohibit race mixing. Laws against race mixing were still in force in 16 American states until they were declared unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court’s verdict in the Loving v Virginia case of 1967.

Yet despite the social and legal constraints–and the even more violent extra-judicial attempts to discourage race mixing organised by extreme nationalist groups like the Ku Klux Klan–interracial relationships have been an ever-present feature of societies throughout modern times.

Through the stories of interracial relationships which created scandals in their own time–including the liaisons between the East India Company’s James Achilles Kirkpatrick and the Muslim princess Khair un-Nissa at the beginning of the 19th Century, and the romance of the Botswanan royal Seretse Khama and the middle-class British girl Ruth Williams in the years after the Second World War–the film examines the complex history of interracial relationships and chronicles the shifts in attitudes that for centuries have created controversy and anxiety all around the world.

Contributors to this film include the former Labour Cabinet minister Tony Benn; who founded the Seretse Khama Defence Council; and the esteemed moral philosopher Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah, whose mother Peggy Cripps–the daughter of the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Stafford Cripps married his father, the Ghanaian political activist Joe Appiah in 1953.

Mixed Race Britain – Mixed Britannia

BBC Press Office: Press Packs
2011-09-05

In this three-part series George Alagiah explores the remarkable and untold story of Britain’s mixed-race community and examines through the decades how mixed race has become one of the country’s fastest growing ethnic groups. Most of all, the films tell a tale of love, of couples coming together to fight prejudice and create a new society.

The first film (1910-1939) [Air Date: 2011-10-06, 20:00Z] discovers the love between merchant seamen and liberated female workers and witnesses the riots in British port cities as returning white soldiers find local girls in relationships with other men. George hears about the eugenics research examining mixed-race children and learns how Britain avoided the race laws and race hatred of fascism that scarred other countries in Europe.

The second film (1940-1965) sees the Second World War creating a miniature baby boom of “brown babies” born to local British women and African American GIs, and tells the tragic story of the British-Chinese children in Liverpool who lost their Chinese seamen fathers. With the post-war mass immigration, mixed couples, once rare and exotic, were becoming more common and society finally witnessed the first interracial kiss on British television.

In the Seventies a new wave of immigration was settling in Britain, the National Front was on the march and mixed-race families faced violence on the street (film three, 1965-2011). George learns about the debates surrounding mixed race adoption and hears about a 21st story love-story as the couple struggle to overcome the cultural prejudice from the community.

Notes from Steven F. Riley.

For some early 20th century background material on the topics covered in Mixed Britannia, see:

• Jacqueline Nassy Brown. Dropping Anchor, Setting Sail: Geographies of Race in Black Liverpool. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005, 312 pp., ISBN: 978-1-4008-2641-4).
• Mark Christian. “The Fletcher Report 1930: A Historical Case Study of Contested Black Mixed Heritage Britishness,” Journal of Historical Sociology, Volume 21, Issue 2-3 (2008): 213-241.
• Lucy Bland. “White Women and Men of Colour: Miscegenation Fears in Britain after the Great War,” Gender & History, Volume 17, Issue 1 (2005): 29-61.
• Rachel M. Fleming.“Human hybrids in various parts of the world,” Eugenics Review, Volume 21, Number 4 (1930): 257-263.
• Carina E. Ray. “‘The White Wife Problem’: Sex, Race and the Contested Politics of Repatriation to Interwar British West Africa,” Gender & History, Volume 21, Number 3 (2009): 628-646.
• Daniel R. McNeil. Sex and Race in the Black Atlantic: Mulatto Devils and Multiracial Messiahs. (London: Routledge, 2009, 204 pp., ISBN: 978-0-415-87226-3).
• Alison Blunt. “Geographies of diaspora and mixed descent: Anglo-Indians in India and Britain,” International Journal of Population Geography (Special Issue: Geographies of Diaspora) Volume 9, Issue 4 (2003): 281-294.
• Sydney F. Collins. “The Social Position of White and “Half-Caste” Women in Colored Groupings in Britain,” American Sociological Review, Volume 16, Number 6 (1951): 796-802.

My Long Trip Home: A Family Memoir

Simon and Schuster
October 2011
368 pages
Hardcover ISBN-10: 1451627548; ISBN-13: 9781451627541
eBook ISBN-10: 1451627564; ISBN-13: 9781451627565

Mark Whitaker

In a dramatic, moving work of historical reporting and personal discovery, Mark Whitaker, award-winning journalist, sets out to trace the story of what happened to his parents, a fascinating but star-crossed interracial couple, and arrives at a new understanding of the family dramas that shaped their lives—and his own.

His father, “Syl” Whitaker, was the charismatic grandson of slaves who grew up the child of black undertakers from Pittsburgh and went on to become a groundbreaking scholar of Africa. His mother, Jeanne Theis, was a shy World War II refugee from France whose father, a Huguenot pastor, helped hide thousands of Jews from the Nazis and Vichy police. They met in the mid-1950s, when he was a college student and she was his professor, and they carried on a secret romance for more than a year before marrying and having two boys. Eventually they split in a bitter divorce that was followed by decades of unhappiness as his mother coped with self-recrimination and depression while trying to raise her sons by herself, and his father spiraled into an alcoholic descent that destroyed his once meteoric career.

Based on extensive interviews and documentary research as well as his own personal recollections and insights, My Long Trip Home is a reporter’s search for the factual and emotional truth about a complicated and compelling family, a successful adult’s exploration of how he rose from a turbulent childhood to a groundbreaking career, and, ultimately, a son’s haunting meditation on the nature of love, loss, identity, and forgiveness.

A Breath of Freedom: The Civil Rights Struggle, African American GIs, and Germany

Palgrave Macmillan
September 2010
282 pages
6 x 9 1/4 inches, Includes: 50 pgs illus
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-230-10473-0, ISBN10: 0-230-10473-8
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-230-10472-3, ISBN10: 0-230-10472-X

Maria Höhn, Professor of History
Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York

Martin Klimke, Research Fellow
German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C.

Based on an award-winning international research project and photo exhibition, this poignant and beautifully illustrated book examines the experiences of African American GIs in Germany and the unique insights they provide into the civil rights struggle at home and abroad. Thanks in large part to its military occupation of Germany after World War II, America’s unresolved civil rights agenda was exposed to worldwide scrutiny as never before. At the same time, its ambitious efforts to democratize German society after the defeat of Nazism meant that West Germany was exposed to American ideas of freedom and democracy to a much larger degree than many other countries. As African American GIs became increasingly politicized, they took on a particular significance for the Civil Rights Movement in light of Germany’s central role in the Cold War. While the effects of the Civil Rights Movement reverberated across the globe, Germany represents a special case that illuminates a remarkable period in American and world history.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Closing Ranks: World War I and the Rise of Hitler
• Fighting on Two Fronts: World War II and Civil Rights
• “We Will Never Go Back to the Old Way Again”: African American GIs and the Occupation of Germany
• Setting the Stage for Brown: Desegregating the Army in Germany
• Bringing Civil Rights to East and West: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Cold War Berlin
• Revolutionary Alliances: The Rise of Black Power
• Heroes of the Other America: East German Solidarity with the African American Freedom Struggle
• A Call for Justice: The Racial Crisis in the Military and the GI Movement
• Epilogue

GIs and Fräuleins: The German-American Encounter in 1950s West Germany

University of North Carolina Press
December 2001
360 pages
6.125 x 9.25, 13 photos, 1 map, notes, bibl., index
Paper ISBN  978-0-8078-5375-7

Maria Höhn, Professor of History
Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York

With the outbreak of the Korean War, the poor, rural West German state of Rhineland-Palatinate became home to some of the largest American military installations outside the United States. In GIs and Frauleins, Maria Hohn offers a rich social history of this German-American encounter and provides new insights into how West Germans negotiated their transition from National Socialism to a consumer democracy during the 1950s.

Focusing on the conservative reaction to the American military presence, Hohn shows that Germany’s Christian Democrats, though eager to be allied politically and militarily with the United States, were appalled by the apparent Americanization of daily life and the decline in morality that accompanied the troops to the provinces. Conservatives condemned the jazz clubs and striptease parlors that Holocaust survivors from Eastern Europe opened to cater to the troops, and they expressed scorn toward the German women who eagerly pursued white and black American GIs. While most Germans rejected the conservative effort to punish as prostitutes all women who associated with American GIs, they vilified the sexual relationships between African American men and German women. Hohn demonstrates that German anxieties over widespread Americanization were always debates about proper gender norms and racial boundaries, and that while the American military brought democracy with them to Germany, it also brought Jim Crow.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 “… And Then the Americans Came Again”
• 2 Living with the New Neighbors
• 3 When Jim Crow Came to the German Heimat
• 4 Heimat in Turmoil
• 5 Controlling the “Veronikas” and “Soldiers’ Brides”
• 6 Keeping America at Bay
• 7 Punishing the “Veronikas”
• 8 The Kaiserslautern Steinstrasse Affair
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Introduction

In October 1952, the German Bundestag declared a large stretch of Rhineland-Palatinate—a poor, rural state in the southwest of Germany—to be a moral disaster area.  The legislators resorted to this dramatic step because the buildup of American military personnel in West Germany in the wake of the Korean War had allegedly wrecked havoc in the provinces. The American troop deployment, they complained, instead of creating a bulwark against Soviet expansionism, had brought striptease parlors, prostitution, common-law marriages, and unprecedented levels of illegitimacy. The Christian Democratic legislators, who dominated the debate, were equally distressed to report that in one small town alone, 343 German women were neglecting their children because they were in the employ of the American occupation power. The counties of Birkenfeld and Kaiserslautern, home to the garrison communities Baumholder and Kaiserslautern, were identified as the key trouble spots. Convinced that the American-induced economic boom had rendered the rural population oblivious to the moral emergency, the conservative Christian Democrats demanded federal intervention. With great dismay, the Bundestag resolved that West Germany’s military rearmament underway in Rhineland-Palatinate needed to be accompanied by a moral rearmament of the state’s population.

Discovering this anxious Bundestag debate during the preliminary stages of my research significantly changed the direction of this book. When I first began my project on the American military in Rhineland-Palatinate, I set out to explore how West Germans had negotiated their transition from Nazism into consumer democracy during the 1950s. I had chosen my topic because I speculated that the extensive presence of American military personnel and their injection of the “American way of life” would produce a rich collection of sources to comment on those crucial founding years of the Federal Republic. My exploration of the German-American encounter was to provide insights into how economic, social, and cultural changes after 1945 played out in the everyday life of people. How did Germans, after the experience of Nazism, manage to establish a successful democracy in West Germany? Moreover, I hoped that the German-American encounter would reveal how Germans assessed the transformations in their lives. Would they agree with those historians who dismiss “Americanization” as an explanatory model by insisting that the transformation of German society after 1945 was part of a larger process of modernization that had been long underway and was merely disrupted by World War II and the postwar suffering? What would Germans living in close proximity to the American military bases have to say to the Westernization scholars who do not ignore America’s impact on postwar Germany but nonetheless stress that the Bonn Republic succeeded because West Germany’s political and cultural élites abandoned their resistance to the “Western” liberal tradition?…

…By exploring local reactions to the conservative project, I show that the moral rearmament of German society is only one aspect, albeit an important one, of the 1950s. By the second part of the decade, conservative observers in Rhineland-Palatinate provided exasperated accounts of their failure to keep the population from eagerly embracing the prosperity and social mobility that the American-induced economic boom entailed. Their accounts also bemoan the fact that the strict morality that the deeply conservative Christian Democratic state and federal governments were trying to enforce through the Christian welfare agencies, the police, and the courts did not play well in the provinces. Most Germans were unwilling to return to the rigid pre-Weimar sexual norms that conservatives wanted to reimpose. The unprecedented prosperity of the Korea Boom convinced all too many that the era of deprivation and self-sacrifice was over; indeed, the time had come to “live for once.” In light of their experience with Nazism, many Germans also found the conservative program intrusive and inappropriate for the new democracy. Consequently, the population rejected the conservative effort to stigmatize and punish as prostitutes all women who associated with American GIs. Notwithstanding the concerted efforts of the chruches and of state and federal ministries, even in the deepest provinces, attitudes toward premarital sexuality and women’s sexual expressiveness outside of marriage relaxed considerably by the later part of the decade.

However, this greater tolerance in sexual matters tells only part of the story. Germans negotiated this overall relaxation of sexual mores by vilifying as unacceptable the sexual relationships between African American men and German women. When Germans, in both East and West, read about the American garrison communities during the 1950s, the focus was increasingly on the “many” black GIs who met “sexually unrestrained” women in the bars that Eastern European Jews made available to them. The prostitution records of Baumholder and the press coverage of the garrison communities reveal that attitudes toward such relationships hardened considerably, especially after Germany regained sovereignty in 1955.

Historians of postwar Germany have only recently begun to explore how racial hierarchies continued to inform notions of German identity. Exciting new scholarship on German reactions to American popular culture and German policies toward the children born of German mothers and African American fathers make important contributions to the field. That scholarship also shows that it would be too simple to assume a straightforward continuity from Nazi racism to racial attitudes in the 1950s. A process of negotiation was at work as liberal policy makers, influenced by social science research in the United States, distanced themselves from the biologically based racial hierarchies of the past. While the language of eugenics disappeared, this did not mean that racial hierarchies ceased to matter. German policy makers, for example, drew on this psychologically based language of difference to condemn jazz and rock and roll for undermining proper class, race, and gender boundaries.

My book contributes to this work by expanding the exploration of German racial attitudes beyond those of politicians and policy makers to include such debates at the grassroots level. The fact that millions of black GIs have spent time in Germany since 1945 makes it clear that German racial debates after 1945 did not take place in a vacuum. Because of the national attention the garrison communities received throughout the 1950s—not just in Germany’s tabloid press—these debates on race also did not remain just local affairs but engaged the country as a whole.

We know from Heide Fehrenbach’s important work that during the late 1940s and the 1950s the German liberal discourse on race shifted from a preoccupation with Jews to an overwhelming concern with blacks. However, in the garrison towns, that shift is less manifest for a number of reasons. Most importantly, debates on race are not driven by the self-conscious efforts of national policy makers to overcome the shameful Nazi past. Just the same, despite the murderous rage of the Nazi regime, Jews were not “absent” from German communities or German consciousness during the 1950s. Germans in these communities encountered Eastern European Jews and American blacks simultaneously and on a daily basis. Consequently, German debates on race were marked by the coexistence of separate but also overlapping discourses on “racial others.”

This study is also a first attempt to argue that German racial attitudes after 1945 can be understood only if they are examined in light of their face-to-face interaction with those of the American military. Black GIs, and not just those from the Jim Crow South, experienced in Germany a tolerance and acceptance unknown to them in their own country. Their status, first as conquerors and then as occupation soldiers, made possible unprecedented encounters with white Germans. In My American Journey, General Colin Powell gave voice to that experience when he recalled his service in Germany in 1958: “[For] black GIs, especially those out of the South, Germany was a breath of freedom—they could go where they wanted, eat where they wanted, and date whom they wanted, just like other people. The dollar was strong, the beer good, and the German people friendly, since we were all that stood between them and the Red hordes. War, at least the Cold War in Germany, was not hell.” Yet the record also shows that side-by-side with this tolerance existed a profound unease and often even resentment over the presence of black GIs. Nowhere were the limits of German racial tolerance more forcefully expressed than in the condemnation evoked by the relationships between black GIs and white German women.

Observing the deep reluctance, if not outright opposition, in the American military toward the relationships between German women and black American soldiers convinced many Germans, and not just conservatives, that their own racial prejudices should not mark them as Nazis. Thus, when Germans during the 1950s condemned the relationships between German women and African American soldiers, they cited the model of racial segregation of their American mentor as informing their own convictions. Germans were able to do so with ease because American opposition to interracial sexuality and interracial marriage was so similar to their own pre-Nazi models of racial exclusion. Thus Germans could reject the racial excesses of Nazism while at the same time invoking racial hierarchies of exclusion that were based in timeless laws of nature and tied firmly to the Western liberal tradition…

Read the entire Introduction here.

Book Review Essay – The Legacy of Jim Crow: The Enduring Taboo of Black-White Romance

Texas Law Review
Volume 84, Number 3 (February 2006)
pages 739-766

Kevin R. Johnson, Dean and Mabie-Apallas Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o Studies
Univesity of California, Davis

Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond. By Essie Mae Washington-Williams & William Stadiem. New York: Regan Books, 2005. Pp. 223.

Unforgivalbe Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson. By Geoffrey C. Ward. New York: Knopf, 2004. Pp. xi, 492.

Over the last one hundred years, racial equality has made momentous strides in the United States. State-enforced segregation ended. Slowly but surely, the nation dismantled Jim Crow. As part of that dismantling, the Supreme Court struck down bans on interracial marriage, which were popular in many states.

Interracial relationships have increased dramatically over the last fifty years. In 2006, they meet with much greater acceptance than they did in 1950, especially in the nation’s major urban centers. The United States has begun to grapple with the issues related to interracial intimacy, such as the increasing number of mixed-race people and the controversy over transracial adoption, two topics that would have been wholly unnecessary to mention, much less analyze, just years ago. Ultimately, by transforming notions of race and races, racial mixture promises to transform the entire civil rights agenda in the United States.

Juxtaposed against this promise of transformed racial notions, however, lies this nation’s continuing battle against the enduring legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. While adeptly shedding light on the complexities of U.S. racial history, Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond and Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson reveal just how far from this legacy the nation has advanced over the twentieth century. At the same time, the books highlight the many ways in which race relations have remained more or less the same.

Born in 1925, Essie Mae Washington-Williams is the half-black daughter of the late U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond. Dear Senator tells the story of her life as the invisible child of a staunch segregationist and prominent national politician. Raised by her aunt in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, Washington-Williams was first stunned to learn as a teenager that her real mother—not her aunt as she had been told—was Carrie Butler, a young African-American woman who had worked as a domestic in the Strom Thurmond family home in South Carolina. A few years later she met her father, whose identity had been a tightly kept family secret. Only upon Thurmond’s death in 2003 did it become widely known that he had fathered Washington-Williams.

A generation before Washington-Williams’s birth, Jack Johnson became the first African-American heavyweight boxing champion of the world. Unforgivable Blackness details his capture of the championship as a milestone in the social history of the United States. Previously reserved exclusively for white men, the title served as a high profile symbol of white supremacy. Consequently, Johnson’s championship reign generated great controversy and contributed to heightened racial tensions…

…Both books reveal much about the deep-seated legal and social taboos that surrounded and influenced black–white relationships before the Supreme Court’s 1967 decision in Loving v. Virginia. The stories of Essie Mae Washington-Williams and Jack Johnson demonstrate how law and policy, combined with strong social forces, sought to enforce the strict separation of the races in intimate relationships. Nonetheless, from the days of Thomas Jefferson, such relationships (often nonconsensual) frequently formed between prominent white men and subservient African-American women. Interracial sex was kept secret; this secrecy served to maintain the myth of complete racial separation.

Dear Senator and Unforgivable Blackness also reveal much about the social and legal double standards used to judge interracial relationships. African Americans like Jack Johnson were harshly punished for crossing the color line. Strom Thurmond, of course, legally married a series of glamorous “All-American” women and was able to keep his relationship with an African-American domestic service worker—and his half-black daughter—a secret from the general public. That liaison crossed the same line violated by Jack Johnson but was not sanctioned in the least; indeed, it fit comfortably into a long history of white men exploiting black women.

The legacy of Jim Crow and the legal and social separation of the races continues to affect the formation of interracial relationships in the modern United States. Most Americans marry persons of the same race. Although increasing, white–black relationships are relatively rare and much less common than Asian American–white, Latino–white, and Native American– white relationships.

A body of legal scholarship analyzing racial mixture has emerged in recent years. Some of that scholarship is autobiographical, including James McBride’s best-selling book The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother. Adding to this body of literature, Dear Senator and Unforgivable Blackness tell memorable stories of the lives of two remarkable people and, at the same time, offer fascinating glimpses of how law and policy indelibly influenced them and their relationships.

This Essay analyzes how these books reveal the lasting impacts of slavery and Jim Crow on modern social relations. For even with the demise of the legal prohibition on interracial relationships, the social taboo on black–white relationships remains. So long as we live in a socially segregated society, low intermarriage rates between African Americans and whites will likely remain.

Part I of this Essay briefly summarizes the two books and places them in their proper historical, legal, and social contexts. Part II analyzes the enduring legacies of Jim Crow that Dear Senator and Unforgivable Blacknesshig highlight and discuss. These legacies include: (A) the persistence of social disfavor for black–white relationships; (B) the continued portrayal of African-American men as stereotypical criminals and hypersexual beings; (C) the endurance of the longstanding conflict between assimilation and nationalism as strategies for minorities seeking social change, personal survival, success, and happiness; and (D) the existence of white privilege in the United States, then and now…

One is left to conclude that Washington-Williams did not really know her father. The relationship was a formally cold one; one of her most lasting memories of Strom Thurmond was his strong handshake. This lack of love, or formal public acknowledgment, could not have been anything other than deeply hurtful, even though Washington-Williams refuses to condemn any of her father’s conduct.

…Despite family difficulties, Washington-Williams led a productive and successful life. She married an African-American man she met in college, who became a civil rights lawyer and died prematurely. Washington-Williams completed her undergraduate studies and later earned a master’s degree. Settling in the Los Angeles area, she was a school teacher and guidance counselor and raised a family. By all accounts, Washington-Williams self-identified as African American, growing up and living in African-American communities throughout her life. Though half-white, she suffered no burning ambiguity about her racial identity, showing again that race is a social, not a biological, construct. In this way, Washington-Williams self-identified as did many mixed-race African Americans, including W.E.B. DuBois and Frederick Douglass.

At the individual level, the painful experiences of Washington-Williams show an extreme example of the racial identity issues mixed-race people in the United States face. Importantly, she went public after Thurmond’s death to clear the air and end the years of media speculation about whether Strom Thurmond was her father. Now claiming to feel “completely free,” Washington-Williams is exploring her white roots and has gone so far as to seek membership in the National Society Daughters of the American Revolution and the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

It was the cruelest of ironies that not only was Essie Mae Washington-Williams’s father white, but he was also one of the most well-known segregationists of his generation. Strom Thurmond, along with many other Southern politicians, used segregation for political gain in post-World War II America. The despised race mixing was the evil thrown out like meat to the dogs when the issue of African-American civil rights was raised; campaign promises to attack this evil won many votes. Thurmond embraced racist views in spite of his long-time relationship with a black woman, thus himself engaging in race-mixing by fathering a child and maintaining a relationship with his half-black daughter. The inconsistencies between Thurmond’s personal and professional lives, of course, are in no way unheard of in U.S. history.

Racial mixture is part of this nation’s heritage. However, U.S. society historically went to great lengths to keep it underground. But when social norms failed to maintain the public separation of the races, law intervened with a vengeance, as it did in Jack Johnson’s life…

Read the entire article here.

Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany

HarperCollins
480 pages
2001
ISBN: 9780060959616

Hans J. Massaquoi (1926-2013)

This is a story of the unexpected. In Destined to Witness, Hans Massaquoi has crafted a beautifully rendered memoir—an astonishing true tale of how he came of age as a black child in Nazi Germany. The son of a prominent African and a German nurse, Hans remained behind with his mother when Hitler came to power, due to concerns about his fragile health, after his father returned to Liberia. Like other German boys, Hans went to school; like other German boys, he swiftly fell under the Fuhrer’s spell. So he was crushed to learn that, as a black child, he was ineligible for the Hitler Youth. His path to a secondary education and an eventual profession was blocked. He now lived in fear that, at any moment, he might hear the Gestapo banging on the door—or Allied bombs falling on his home. Ironic, moving, and deeply human, Massaquoi’s account of this lonely struggle for survival brims with courage and intelligence.

Prologue

To write of ones self, in such a manner as not to incur the imputation of weakness, vanity, and egotism, is a work within the ability of hut few; and I have little reason to believe that I belong to that fortunate few.
—Frederick Douglass

I could not agree more wich the above sentiments, expressed so eloquently over a century ago by the great abolitionist in the preface to his autobiography, My Bondage, My Freedom. If, like Mr. Douglass, I nonetheless decided to risk being thought of as weak, vain, and egocentric by making public the story of my life, it was mainly because of the persistent urging of persons whose literary judgment I felt was above reproach, such as my longtime friends Alex Haley, the author of Roots; Ralph Giordano, of Cologne, Germany, author of Die Bertinis; and my former employer and mentor. Ebony publisher John H. Johnson. Each convinced me that my experiences as a black youngster growing into manhood and surviving in Nazi Germany—an eyewitness to, and frequent victim of, both Nazi racial madness and Allied bombings—followed by my years in Africa were so unique that it was my duty as a journalist to share this rather different perspective on the Holocaust. Alex felt that because I was both an insider in Nazi Germany and, paradoxically, an endangered outsider, I had a rare perspective on some of the Third Reich’s major catastrophic events. He also urged me to record my equally unique experience of finding my own African roots.

Four fundamental aspects set the private hell I endured under the Nazis apart from both the pogroms suffered by my Jewish compatriots in Germany and from the racial persecution inflicted on my African-American brothers and sisters in the United States.

As a black person in white Nazi Germany, I was highly visible and thus could neither run nor hide, to paraphrase my childhood idol Joe Louis. Unlike African-Americans, I did not have the benefit of inherited survival techniques created and perfected by countless ancestors and passed down from generation to generation of oppressed people. Instead, I was forced to traverse a minefield of potential disasters and to develop my own instincts to tell me how best to survive physically and psychologically in a country consumed by racial arrogance and racial hatred and openly committed to the destruction of all “non-Aryans.”

Nazi racists, unlike their white American counterparts, did not commit their atrocities anonymously, disguised in white sheets and under the protection of night. Nor did they operate like some contemporary American politicians who advance their racist agendas by dividing black and white Americans with cleverly disguised code words about “unfair quotas,” “reverse discrimination,” and “states’ rights.” Racists in Nazi Germany did their dirty work openly and brazenly with the full protection, cooperation, and encouragement of the government, which had declared the pollution of Aryan blood with “inferior” non-Aryan blood the nation’s cardinal sin. For all practical purposes—except for the courageous and unflagging support I received from my German mother, who taught me to believe in myself by believing in me and my potential—I faced the constant threat that Nazi ethnic-cleansing policies posed to my safety alone. I faced this threat without the sense of security and reeling of belonging that humans derive from being members of a group, even an embattled one. Because of the absence of black females and the government-imposed taboo of race mixing, I had no legal social outlet when I reached puberty. Unlike the thousands of Africans and so-called “brown babies”—children of black GI fathers and German mothers—who reside in the Federal Republic of Germany today, there simply was no black population to speak of in Germany during the Hitler years, certainly none that I encountered. Not until long after the war did I learn that a small number of black Germans—the tragic so-called “Rhineland bastards” fathered by World War I French and Belgian colonial occupation troops—were exterminated in Hitler’s death camps.

Because Germans of my generation were expected to be fair skinned and of Aryan stock, it became my lot in life to explain ad nauseam why someone who had a brown complexion and black, kinky hair spoke accent-free German and claimed Germany as his place of birth. So let me state here once again, for the record, that I was born in 1926 in Hamburg, Germany’s second-largest city, because my grandfather, then consul general of Liberia to Hamburg, had brought with him his sizable family. His oldest son became my father after an intense courtship with my mother, a German nurse. Shortly before Hitler’s rise to power, my grandfather and father returned to Liberia, leaving my mother and me to fend for ourselves in an increasingly hostile racist environment…

Lest we forget: the children they left behind: the life experience of adults born to black GIs and British women during the Second World War

The University of Melbourne
1999
177 pages

Janet Baker

An estimated 22,000 children were born in England during the Second World War as a result of relationships between British women and American GIs. Of these children, around 1,200-1,700 were born to African American servicemen. These figures are estimates only; the actual number of births will never be known.

The research study is based on personal interviews with eleven members of this cohort. The interviews explore their life experience and examines their sense of identity as ex-nuptial children, of mixed-race parentage, who had no contact with and usually little information about their GI fathers. Of the eleven mothers, over half were married with at least one other child at the time of the birth. Nine participants/respondents were raised by their mother or her extended family. Two were institutionalised. At the time of the interviews all of the respondents were either searching for, or had found, their black GI fathers.

This is a qualitative study which aims to bear witness to the lived experience of this cohort and to analyse the meaning individuals gave to their experience. Data collection involved personal interviews with the eleven participants. The data was then subject to a thematic analysis and the major themes and issues identified. Content analysis was undertaken using a constructivist approach.

The interviews are presented as elicited narrative relayed through an interpretive summary. Consistency was maintained by using common questions organised within a loose interview framework. The findings were organised around the major conceptual issues and themes that emerged from the case summaries. Common themes, including resilience, racial identity, self esteem and stress were identified.

The researcher has professional qualifications as a social worker and clinical family therapist. She has ten years experience in the field of adoption, including the transracial placement of Aboriginal and overseas children in Australian families. She is also a member of the researched cohort. Issues arising when the researcher is also a member of the researched cohort are discussed in the methodology.

The experience of this cohort suggests that despite the disadvantages of their birth, they fared better than expected. The majority demonstrated high levels of resilience, successfully developing a sense of identity that incorporated both the black and white aspects of their racial heritage. However, for some this success was only achieved at considerable personal cost, with several participants reporting relatively high levels of stress and/or stress related symptoms, such as anxiety, mental illness and heart disease.

A thesis submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Social Work in the School of Social Work, Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne

Table of Contents

• Declaration of Authorship
• Acknowledgments
• Some Wartime Quotations
• 1. Introduction
  • 1.1 Historical Context
    • 1.1.1 Segregation
    • 1.1.2 Tensions Between Black and White Americans
    • 1.1.3 Sex between Black and White
    • 1.1.4 ‘Brown babies’
  • 1.2 Links to Contemporary Welfare Issues
    • 1.2.1 Transracial Child Placement
    • 1.2.2 Rights of Access to Birth Information
  • 1.3 Aims of the Research
• 2. Research Design and Methodology
  • 2.1 Introduction
  • 2.2 Logic of the Approach
  • 2.3 The participants
  • 2.4 Data Collection
  • 2.5 Analysis and Interpretation of the Data
    • 2.5.1 Analysis
    • 2.5.2 The place of the literature review
  • 2.6 Role of the Researcher
  • 2.7 Validity
  • 2.8 Ethical Issues
    • 2.8.1 Assistance with Searches
• 3. Review of the Literature
  • 3.1 Introduction
    • 3.1.1 Sexual relationships between black men and white women
    • 3.1.2 Race and illegitimacy as stigma
    • 3.1.3 Identity Formation
    • 3.1.4 Stress, resilience and coping
  • 3.2 Conclusion
• 4. Findings
  • 4.1 Introduction
  • 4.2 Case studies
    • 4.2.1 Participant 1
    • 4.2.2 Participant 2
    • 4.2.3 Participant 3
    • 4.2.4 Participant 4
    • 4.2.5 Participant 5
    • 4.2.6 Participant 6
  • 4.3 Participant Summaries
• 5. Summary and Discussion of Findings
  • 5.1 Themes and Issues:
    • 5.1.1 Sex between black and white
    • 5.1.2 Race and Illegitimacy as Stigma
    • 5.1.3 Identity Formation and Children of Mixed-race
    • 5.1.4 Grief and Loss
    • 5.1.5 Stress, Resilience and Coping
    • 5.1.6 Impact of search for birth father on identity formation
  • 5.2 Implications for Social Work Practice
  • 5.3 Conclusion
• 6. Bibliography
  • Appendix 1: Glossary of Terms
  • Appendix 2: Participant’s Stories (continued)
    • 6.1.1 Participant 7
    • 6.1.2 Participant 8
    • 6.1.3 Participant 9
    • 6.1.4 Participant 10
    • 6.1.5 Participant 11
  • 6.2 Summary
• Appendix 3: Interview Schedule
• Appendix 4: Letter to Tracing Services
• Appendix 5: Letter of Support from TRACE.
• Appendix 6: Letter of Support From ‘War Babes’ (UK)
• Appendix 7: Letter to Participants (1)
• Appendix 8: Letter to Participants (2)
• Appendix 9: Letter to Participants (3)
• Appendix 10: Consent to Take Part in Research Project
• Appendix 11: Letter to Post Adoption Resource Centre
• Appendix 12: Response from Post Adoption Resource Centre

Introduction

The following study provides an account of the lived experience of the adult children of wartime relationships between British women and African American servicemen during the Second World War. It is a qualitative study that seeks to explore the meaning of that experience and in particular how the research participants see themselves—as black, white or mixed-race.

The exploration of these issues took place in the context of a personal interview with each of eleven respondents, which explored the meaning they gave to their life experience as children of black GI fathers raised with no contact, until they reached middle-age, with their birth fathers or their African American heritage. A particular focus of the interviews was the extent to which this experience impacted on their sense of self-identity as children of mixed British and African American parentage. As all of the participants were searching for, or had found their birth fathers the significance of their search, in terms of its impact on their sense of personal identity, was also explored.

The experience of this cohort can only be clearly understood in the historical context of the Second World War and in particular the impact of the decision by America to send black troops to England. An overview of the major social and historical issues impacting on the life experience of this cohort follows…

Read the entire dissertation here.