Mixed Race Studies

The untold story of Britain’s first black school teacher

BBC News
2022-04-28

Giancarlo Rinaldi, South Scotland Reporter
BBC Scotland News Website

A small plaque marks the spot where the man believed to be Britain’s first black school teacher educated children in a Scottish village.

Now the story of Tom Jenkins‘ life is being explored as part of the area’s Alchemy Festival, and there are calls for him to receive greater recognition.

Jenkins educated dozens of children between 1814 and 1818 at Teviothead, near Hawick, in the Scottish Borders.

Artist Dr Jade Montserrat has been investigating the links between Hawick and both Jenkins and anti-slavery campaigner Frederick Douglass, who visited the town in 1846.

“I focused in on the significant black presence in Hawick and, more loosely, Hawick’s liberal abolitionist identity as a town,” she said…

…When he was six years old his father, a slave trading chief, handed him to Capt James Swanson.

The son of a waiter from Hawick, Capt Swanson was in command of the slave ship Prudence.

The intention was that Tom Jenkins would be educated in Britain before returning to West Africa…

Read the entire article here.

Merle Oberon: India’s forgotten Hollywood star

BBC News
2022-04-16

Meryl Sebastian, BBC News, Delhi

Merle Oberon, a Hollywood star of the black and white era, is a forgotten icon in India, the country of her birth.

Best-known for playing the lead in the classic Wuthering Heights, Oberon was an Anglo-Indian born in Bombay in 1911. But as a star in Hollywood’s Golden Age, she kept her background a secret – passing herself off as white – throughout her life.

Mayukh Sen, a US-based writer and academic, first stumbled across her name in 2009 when he found out that Oberon was the first actor of South Asian origin to be nominated for an Oscar.

His fascination grew as he saw her films and dug deeper into her past. “As a queer person, I empathise with this feeling that you must hide a part of your identity to survive in a hostile society that isn’t really ready to accept who you are,” he says. Sen is now working on a biography to tell Oberon’s story from a South Asian perspective…

Read the entire article here.

What happened to the British children born to black GIs?

BBC News
2022-01-29

Eighty years ago, US soldiers began arriving in the UK to help in the fight against Hitler’s Nazi Germany. In a small sleepy village in Suffolk, life was about to change forever.

Best friends Eldridge Marriot and Trevor Everett grew up together in Tostock, where they still live today.

As the pair, now aged in their 70s, reminisce over summers spent playing on the village green, it is clear they have a deep connection.

They were two of 14 children in the village, and about 2,000 across the UK, born to white British mothers and black American soldiers during World War Two.

“We definitely stood out with our curly hair,” Eldridge laughs. “But we didn’t have any racial problems; we were never treated differently.”

“We had some good times and I’ve had a brilliant life, I wouldn’t change it for nothing,” Trevor adds…

Read the entire article here.

Homer Plessy: Pardon for ‘separate but equal’ civil rights figure

BBC News
2022-01-05

The governor of Louisiana has pardoned Homer Plessy, a 19th century black activist whose arrest 130 years ago led to one of the most criticised Supreme Court decisions in US history.

Plessy was arrested in 1892 after he purchased a ticket and refused to leave a whites-only train car in New Orleans.

In 1896, the top US court ruled against Plessy, clearing the way for Jim Crow segregation laws in the American South.

The pardon was spearheaded by the very office that sought charges against him.

After Plessy was removed from the train, his case – Plessy v Ferguson – wound up in front of the Supreme Court. The court ruled that accommodations can exist for different races – a doctrine dubbed “separate but equal“.

Their decision stood for decades, until the landmark 1954 Brown v Board of Education case helped begin to dismantle racial segregation laws..

Read the entire article here.

Ruth Negga on her latest role – as a black woman passing as white

BBC News
2021-10-27

Ruth Negga stars in Passing, a film which follows two black women living in 1920s New York.

One of them, Clare Kendry played by Negga, “passes” for white and has a white husband who doesn’t know she’s black.

Based on the 1929 book by Nella Larsen, the film received rave reviews at the Sundance Film Festival.

The film’s director Rebecca Hall and star Ruth Negga, tell BBC News why their film feels so relevant for today’s audiences.

Phil Wang: I wouldn’t be a comic if I weren’t mixed-race

BBC News
2021-09-11

Helen Bushby, Entertainment and arts reporter

Phil Wang says the face of “every Eurasian person I’ve ever seen sings with loneliness”

Phil Wang, the stand-up comic you may recall for his viral video spoofing a Tom Hiddleston advert, has been baring his soul, or at least some of it, in his new book Sidesplitter.

Wang, 31, whose TV duties include Live at the Apollo, 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown and Taskmaster, insists it’s not a memoir, as his life doesn’t merit one.

“I haven’t escaped a gulag or revolutionised an industry,” he explains, adding memoirs are a “saturated market” anyway.

What he really talks about in his book of essays is the impact of being mixed-race, of being “from two worlds at once”.

But although it has its serious moments, Sidesplitter is eloquently laced with laughs and bittersweet observations…

Read the entire article here.

How one woman discovered her true cultural heritage

BBC News
2021-04-06

What would you do if you discovered one of your parents wasn’t who they said they were?

That’s what happened to Gail Lukasik who found out her mother had ‘passed’ as white to escape racial segregation in the US, in the early 20th Century.

She was, in fact, mixed race but had kept it secret all her life and made Gail promise to keep the secret until after she died.

Gail has turned her story into a book called White Like Her.

Video produced by Trystan Young.

Watch the video here.

The hidden story of African-Irish children

BBC News
2020-12-03

Deirdre Finnerty

In the middle of the last century, thousands of students from African countries were studying at Irish universities. Some had children outside marriage, who were then placed in one of Ireland’s notorious mother and baby homes. Today these children, now adults, are searching for their families.

As a child, Conrad Bryan wondered if his father was a king. He was from Nigeria – or so he had been told – a place Conrad imagined was far more exciting than the orphanage outside Dublin where he lived.

“When you want something and you can’t have it, your imagination takes over,” he says…

Read the entire article here.

Biden’s VP pick: Why Kamala Harris embraces her biracial roots

BBC News
2020-08-11

Soutik Biswas, India correspondent

Getty Images

US Senator Kamala Harris – chosen by Joe Biden as his Democratic vice-presidential candidate – is known as a prominent black politician. But she has also embraced her Indian roots.

“My name is pronounced “Comma-la”, like the punctuation mark,” Kamala Harris writes in her 2018 autobiography, The Truths We Hold.

The California senator, daughter of an Indian-born mother and Jamaican-born father, then explains the meaning of her Indian name.

“It means ‘lotus flower’, which is a symbol of significance in Indian culture. A lotus grows underwater, its flowers rising above the surface while the roots are planted firmly in the river bottom.”

Early in life, young Kamala and her sister Maya grew up in a house filled with music by black American artists. Her mother would sing along to Aretha Franklin’s early gospel, and her jazz-loving father, who taught economics at Stanford University, would play Thelonius Monk and John Coltrane on the turntable.

Shyamala Gopalan and Donald Harris separated when Ms Harris was five. Raised primarily by her Hindu single mother, a cancer researcher and a civil rights activist, Kamala, Maya and Shyamala were known as “Shyamala and the girls”.

Her mother made sure her two daughters were aware of their background.

“My mother understood very well she was raising two black daughters. She knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as black girls, and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident black women,” she wrote…

Read the entire article here.

Separated at birth: Was my mother given away because she looked white?

Stories
BBC News
2019-12-01

Vibeke Venema, Senior Broadcast Journalist

Nathan Romburgh

When a health emergency prompted Nathan Romburgh and his sisters to look into their family history, decades after the end of apartheid, they uncovered a closely guarded secret that made them question their own identity.

Cape Town, 29 September 1969 – at 10pm the city is rocked by a huge earthquake. Margaret Buirski is working as a First Aid nurse in the Alhambra cinema and, for once, her medical skills are really needed. A woman has fallen from the balcony and Margaret is tending to her injuries in the chaos.

A young man walks past, very drunk, and notices the nurse’s shapely legs. Despite his inebriation, he offers to drive the women to hospital. This is the start of the romance between Margaret and Derek Romburgh…

…”Then there was this big question – what would make someone give away only one of her twins? It just didn’t make sense,” says Nathan.

He soon formed a theory – it was based on photographs Alan had shared, which showed that Margaret was fairer than her sister Norma.

“My mother had olive skin, but she passed for white in apartheid South Africa,” says Nathan. “I don’t think Norma could have.”

Although Mary Francis, Nathan’s grandmother, was registered as “European”, she was in fact mixed-race. Mary’s father, James Francis, was British, and her mother, Christina, was of Malaysian origin, from the island of St Helena. Mary was the youngest of their six children…

Read the entire article here.