Mixed Race Studies

Fannie’s legacy: How a mixed-race couple settled early Lake Worth

The Palm Beach Post
West Palm Beach, Florida
2013-08-06
pages D4-D5

Scott Eyman, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

They thrived until Jim Crow laws forced them from the town.

Before there was Lake Worth, there was a town called Jewell.

It wasn’t a big town — the initial population consisted of 13 people — but a town nonetheless, with those people mostly engaged in wrenching a living out of boggy soil, with a post office founded and manned by a black woman named Fannie James.

There are no extant photos of Fannie, or, for I that matter, of her husband Samuel, even though Fannie lived until 1915. But their immeasurable importance is attested to by the comments of their peers m the Jewell community as well as in the historical record. Historian Ted Brownstein reconstructs both of these lives and the town they helped found In “Pioneers of
Jewel,” recently published to celebrate the centennial of Lake Worth.

It’s a fascinating excavation of the past made possibly mainly by the profusion of on line databases that have become available in the last 20 years.

“The Post ran some articles about Fannie and Samuel in 1999, which is not that long ago,” says Brownstein. “At that time, It wasn’t known where they came from, whether they were black, Seminoles, or mulattos. There was nothing about their histories before they arrived at the Lake…

…Sam and Fannie were lightskinned, which probably worked to their advantage Sam’s death certificate states that his mother was Irish, more proof the early history of America was a place of fairly open intermarriage, far more than was acknowledged at the time, far, far more than was allowed In the 20th century, when the Jim Crow laws came down…

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Pioneers of Jewell: A Documentary History of Lake Worth’s Forgotten First Settlement (1885 – 1910)

Lake Worth Herald Publication
2013
254 pages
Paperback ISBN-10: 098326094X; ISBN-13: 978-0983260943
11 x 8.5 x 0.6 inches

Ted Brownstein

A documentary history of Jewell, Florida, a lost community of everglades pioneers founded in 1885 by Samuel and Fannie James, an African American couple, believed to be former slaves. Jewell eventually grew into the City of Lake Worth, its earliest history largely forgotten.

Pioneers of Jewell rediscovers the world of Fannie and Samuel James in the context of their neighbors and the wider context of Race and Segregation in the aftermath of the American Civil War. For the first time, groundbreaking research reveals the flight of Fannie’s family from North Carolina to Ohio during the Civil War along the track of the Underground Railroad, and traces the Jameses’ trek back south through Tallahassee and Cocoa, Florida, before taking up a homestead on the western shore of Lake Worth. Once in South Florida, the Jameses overcame many of the hindrances of race in those troubled times, and became the nucleus of a vibrant, mostly white, farming community.

Meet Dr. Harry Stites, a well-known physician who gave up a successful medical practice in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania to ‘rough it’ on the South Florida frontier. Meet Squire John C. Hoagland, the area’s first Justice of the Peace, who loved boating and spent much of his time sailing between Palm Beach and Jewell. Meet Michael Merkle, a hermit who lived an austere life in a lean-to west of Jewell, eating unseasoned fish and berries. Merkle, rumored to be a defrocked Catholic priest, was known to walk the pinewoods chanting in Latin when he thought no one was listening.

Relying upon primary historical sources, Pioneers of Jewell reveals:

• Bios of a dozen previously unknown Jewell pioneers.
• The dispute that challenged the Jameses’ land holdings.
• An in-depth look at the Jameses’ stunning financial success.
• Investigation of the Jameses’ slave background.
• The establishment of the Osborne Colored District.
• Klu Klux Klan activity in Lake Worth during the 1920s.
• The fate of Jewell and its pioneers.

In Florida, a Death Foretold

The New York Times
2012-03-31

Isabel Wilkerson

In the mid-1930s, a Yale anthropologist ventured to an unnamed town in the South to explore the feudal divisions of what we commonly call race but what he preferred to describe with the more layered language of caste. When he arrived — white, earnest and fresh from the North — white Southerners told him that a Northerner would soon enough “feel about Negroes as Southerners do.” In making that prediction, the anthropologist John Dollard wrote in his seminal study “Caste and Class in a Southern Town,” they are saying “that he joins the white caste. The solicitation is extremely active, though informal, and one must stand by one’s caste to survive.”

Americans tend to think of the rigid stratification of caste as a distant notion from feudal Europe or Victorian India. But caste is alive and well in this country, where a still unsettled multiracial society is emerging from the starkly drawn social order that Dollard described. Assumptions about one’s place in this new social order have become a muddying subtext in the case of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed black teenager slain at the hands of an overzealous neighborhood watch captain, who is the son of a white father and a Peruvian mother.

We do not know what George Zimmerman was thinking as he watched Mr. Martin from afar, told a 911 dispatcher that he looked suspicious and ultimately shot him. But we do know that it happened in central Florida, a region whose demographic landscape is rapidly changing, where unprecedented numbers of Latino immigrants have arrived at a place still scarred by the history of a vigilante-enforced caste system and the stereotypes that linger from it. In this context, newcomers — like previous waves of immigrants in the past — may feel pressed to identify with the dominant caste and distance themselves from blacks, in order to survive…

…On the other hand, almost three-quarters of blacks felt that Latinos were hard-working or could be trusted. Black Americans appear to view Latinos as more like themselves. “Blacks are not as negative toward Latinos as Latinos are toward blacks because blacks see them as another nonwhite group that will be treated as they have been,” said Paula D. McClain, the lead author on the study. Even as blacks worry about losing jobs to new immigrants, they are less supportive of harsh anti-immigration laws, she said, “because they know what laws have done to them.”

But shared hardships don’t necessarily make allies. “As linked fate rises, so does competition,” said Michael Jones-Correa, a professor of government at Cornell who specializes in immigration and interethnic relations. “It’s like a sibling rivalry,” he said. “This is not a painless relationship.” And, of course, Latino immigrants don’t just enter a pre-existing racial hierarchy; they bring with them their own assumptions based on the hierarchies in their home countries. “When we come to the U.S.,” Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, a professor of sociology at Duke, who is Puerto Rican, said, “we immediately recognize whites on top and blacks on the bottom and say, ‘My job is to be anything but black.’ ”…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

The Story of Fort Mosé

Freedom Road Productions
2013

Derek Hankerson, Director

Francisco Menendez (played by James Bullock)

This is the story of Fort Mosé and Francisco Menendez in St. Augustine, Florida.

Recent Decisions: Constitutional Law: Miscegenation Laws

Marquette Law Review
Volume 48, Issue 4 (Spring 1965)
pages 616-620

C. Michael Conter

Constitutional Law: Miscegenation Laws: The defendants were convicted under section 798.05 of the Florida statutes, which prohibited nighttime cohabitation of the same room by a Negro and a white of different sexes.

On appeal, their conviction was affirmed by the Florida Supreme Court in McLaughlin v. Florida because it felt bound by the decision of the United States Supreme Court in Pace v. Alabama and the decisions of many state courts upholding similar statutes. Both Pace and McLaughlin involve nearly corresponding statutory schemes. The Alabama statutes applicable in the Pace decision not only contained a statute which prohibited fornication by persons of different races, but also a general non-racial fornication statute. Similarly, the Florida statutes, aside from prohibiting interracial cohabitation, held adultery and fornication by people of the same race a crime.

Due to the established precedent and the similarities of the two situations, the Florida court adopted the Pace reasoning that the statute, although it contained racial classifications, was not discriminatory because both the Negro and the white received the same punishment. Secondly, the court viewed the offense committed by persons of different racial descent as an entirely distinct offense from one committed by persons of the same race, and one to which the general sections of the statutes are applicable. Therefore, the Florida court found that both the statutes are necessary in order to enforce the legislative purposes involved…

..The validity of the antimiscegenation law itself could also be questioned under the fourteenth amendment by requiring the showing of a reasonable legislative purpose for its enactment. There is serious doubt that any valid reason could be shown for this type of statute. In fact, the three basic arguments which are often advanced to support these statutes; namely, that the children of these marriages would be inferior, that social tensions and domestic problems are lessened, and that psychological hardships to the offspring are avoided, have been discredited. Therefore the application of a reasonable legislative purpose test would most likely lead to a finding of unconstitutionality under the equal protection clause of the fourteenth amendment, especially since the usual presumption of a valid legislative purpose is not applied to cases dealing with racial classifications.

However, a better approach might be to recognize that the right of the individual to marry is a fundamental right, protected under the clear and present danger test. Surely it is a right which can be considered as important to the individual as is his right to own property or his freedom of speech. The United States Supreme Court has acknowledged that marriage and procreation are fundamental to the very existence and survival of the race.

This test has been applied to the right of the individual to own property, mentioned in the first part of the fourteenth amendment. Another right mentioned in this part of the amendment is the right to liberty, to which the clear and present danger test has also been applied. The right to marry has been recognized as being embodied in the concept of liberty under the fourteenth amendment…

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Constitutionality Of Miscegenation Statutes: McLaughlin v. Florida

Maryland Law Review
Volume 25, Issue 1 (1965)
pages 41-48

Lee M. Miller

The appellants, a Negro man and a white woman, were convicted of violating a Florida statute which proscribed cohabitation between Negro and white persons who are not married to each other. The Florida Supreme Court upheld the conviction. On appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States, the appellants claimed: (1) The statute was invalid as a denial of equal protection of the laws since it applied only to members of certain races, and (2) they were denied due process and equal protection of the laws because a Florida law prohibiting interracial marriage prevented them from establishing the defense of common law marriage. The appellants thus hoped to reach the issue of whether the state’s prohibition of interracial marriage contravened the fourteenth amendment. The Supreme Court, basing its decision on the single issue of equal protection (appellants’ first claim), set aside the conviction and invalidated the cohabitation statute. Finding this claim to be dispositive of the case, the Court refrained from expressing any view as to the constitutionality of the law prohibiting interracial marriages.

The provisions of state statutes banning interracial marriage, often called miscegenation statutes, vary considerably, but today all states which have such statutes ban Negro-white marriages, and all declare the proscribed interracial marriages void. Most statutes provide criminal penalties, thus making race an element of a crime. The Maryland statute, for example, proscribes Negro-white and Malay-white marriages and has a mandatory penitentiary sentence.

At one time or another, over half the states had miscegenation statutes. Although these statutes have been repealed by twenty state legislatures, they remain in effect in nineteen other states. Six states have included miscegenation prohibitions in their state constitutions. The highest courts of only two states have held their miscegenationn statutes unconstitutional. Alabama declared its statute unconstitutional in 1872 but reversed itself five years later; California declared its statute unconstitutional in 1948. State courts and lower federal courts have upheld the constitutionality of such statutes. The Supreme Court of the United States has never ruled on the issue. In two cases reaching that Court in recent years, certiorari was denied in one and the issue bypassed in the other.”…

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Mixed-race teen in the middle: who will she choose?

Tampa Bay Times
St. Petersburg, Florida
2012-09-23

Leonora LaPeter Anton, Times Staff Writer

Her dark eyes scanned the fluorescent-lit lunchroom, locking onto her friends in the center of the chaos. Her thoughts sprayed in many directions: the upcoming eighth-grade formal, a surprisingly bad grade she recently got on an English paper, her role in the school play.

She passed a table full of white girls and one of them high-fived her. She passed a table full of white boys and one of them called her name. She arrived at a table full of black girls — the table where she sits almost every day. As she set her notebook down, one of her best girlfriends ignored her and moved to another table.

Asianna Williams, 14, wanted to ignore the drama. She is a light-skinned mixed-race girl trying to discover who she is in a society that still carves up territory by race. Nowhere was this more evident than in the lunchroom at Thurgood Marshall Fundamental Middle School. Table after table, as far as the eye could see, white faces congregated around one table, black faces around another.

Asianna’s father is black and her mother is white. Years ago, this might have relegated her to a no-man’s land, not fully welcomed by either blacks or whites. Now, thanks in part to sheer numbers (last year, there were 42 other mixed-race students at Thurgood Marshall), Asianna doesn’t feel ostracism. But she does feel pressure.

Pressure to choose black kids. Pressure to choose white kids. Like the tables in the lunchroom, nearly everything Asianna does — and she does a lot of things — comes with an overlay of race.

But what if you were someone who didn’t want to choose?…

…There have always been people of mixed race in American society. Cultural taboos and prejudice often meant they simply identified themselves as black, or if their skin was sufficiently light-colored, tried to pass as white…

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Freedom Road Spotlights St. Augustine History

VisitFlorida.com
2012-06-29

Amy Wimmer Schwarb

Derek Hankerson wanted to help educate people not only about Spanish Florida, but about the diverse groups who contributed to the country’s founding.

A St. Augustine company is trying to reshape the American story – not to rewrite history, but to retell it.

Derek Hankerson, the man at the helm of Freedom Road, grew up in suburban Washington, D.C., learning the same tales of America’s birthplace that are told in children’s textbooks throughout the United States. But he often visited relatives in St. Augustine  and could never reconcile the history he found there with what he learned in school.

“The sign in St. Augustine said, ‘Established in 1565,’ and then I go back to school, and I don’t see a thing about Florida. I don’t see a thing about blacks,” Hankerson said. “All I see is 1776.”

Hankerson spotted that disparity when he was about 10 years old, and announced to his family that he planned to correct it. He wanted to help educate people not only about Spanish Florida, but about the diverse groups who contributed to the country’s founding.

Today, Hankerson is the managing partner of Freedom Road, which offers in-depth bus tours of northeast Florida that give visitors insight into an early American story that might be new to many of them.

“Our tours deal with five centuries of history,” Hankerson said. “This is history related to the New World. I say ‘the New World’ because that’s different than the United States of America. We’re talking pre-United States of America.”…

…James Bullock, the creative director for Freedom Road, is typically the guide for the tours. Dressed in period costume, he walks guests through how different cultures – Spanish, African, Native American, German, Irish, Greek – made their lives in the New World…

And Bullock and Hankerson stress that while much of U.S. history has focused on the separation of races, Spanish Florida brought a different culture to the New World. Even the geography of the Old World played a role: Only 11 miles separate Spain from Africa at their closest point, so trade, relationships and inter-marrying were common even before the groups came across the Atlantic...

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“A Class of People Neither Freemen nor Slaves”: From Spanish to American Race Relations in Florida, 1821-1861

Journal of Social History
Volume 26, Number 3 (Spring, 1993)
pages 587-609

Daniel L. Schafer, Professor of History emeritus
University of North Florida

This essay examines the status of free blacks in Florida, focusing on the transition from mild and flexible three-caste race policies under the Spanish prior to their departure in 1821 to the harsh and rigid two-caste policies brought by the Americans. Comparison of Cuba and East Florida shows that Spain followed parallel policies in these two colonies, yet the status of free blacks in Cuba plummeted after 1800 while their counterparts in East Florida retained their places in a seignorial caste system. Local conditions rather than metropolitan laws, institutions, and religions explain these divergences. Free blacks who remained in Florida after 1821 saw their rights decline sharply. By 1829 a rigidly discriminatory two-caste policy was in place that severely restricted future manumissions. Implementation of the new laws was effectively circumvented until the 1850s, however, as the local plantation elites, mostly holdovers from the Spanish era and fathers of free mulatto children, monopolized political offices and ignored two-caste race policies in favor of their older traditions. Case studies drawn from local records explore the fate of free blacks caught in this transition. In the 1850s cotton and lumber prices escalated along with political controversies; white supremacist attitudes and policies became the general will. Were elderly women in the past by definition dependent on their family and on charity, or was it possible for these women to build up an independent living to some extent? Research into the place of women within the household is one of the methods to gain insight into the degree of independence of elderly women. Research has shown that the elderly (women and men) did not necessarily have a dependent position within the household. A large proportion of the elderly headed their own households. This article deals with the composition of households of elderly women in the Dutch capital Amsterdam in the second half of the nineteenth century. It analyses whether elderly women could retain their independence within the household to some extent. The degree of independence is related to the position within the household, i.e. whether these women were members or heads of a household. The main source used to reconstitute the households of elderly women is the population register of Amsterdam of the period 1851-1892.

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A Seminole Warrior Cloaked in Defiance

Smithsonian Magazine
October 2010

Owen Edwards

A pair of woven, beaded garters reflects the spirit of Seminole warrior Osceola

Infinity of nations,” a new permanent exhibition encompassing nearly 700 works of indigenous art from North, Central and South America, opens October 23 at the George Gustav Heye Center in New York City, part of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). The objects include a pair of woven, beaded garters worn by Billy Powell of the Florida Seminole tribe.
 
Billy Powell is hardly a household name. But his Seminole designation—Osceola—resonates in the annals of Native American history and the nation’s folklore. Celebrated by writers, studied by scholars, he was a charismatic war leader who staunchly resisted the uprooting of the Seminoles by the U.S. government; the garters testify to his sartorial style.
 
Born in Tallassee, Alabama, in 1804, Powell (hereafter Osceola) was of mixed blood. His father is thought to have been an English trader named William Powell, though his­torian Patricia R. Wickman, author of Osceola’s Legacy, believes he may have been a Creek Indian who died soon after Osceola was born. His mother was part Muscogee and part Caucasian. At some point, likely around 1814, when he and his mother moved to Florida to live among Creeks and Seminoles, Osceola began to insist he was a pure-blood Indian.
 
“He identified himself as an Indian,” says Cécile Ganteaume, an NMAI curator and organizer of the “Infinity of Nations” exhibition…

…“He was a bit flamboyant,” says historian Donald L. Fixico of Arizona State University, who is working on a book about Osceola. “Someone in his situation—a man of mixed blood living among pure-blood Seminoles—would have to try hard to prove himself as a leader and a warrior. He wanted to draw attention to himself by dressing in a finer way.”…

Read the entire article here.