Tag: Harry S. Murphy

  • While more and more celebrities like Halle Berry, Mariah Carey, Alicia Keys, Sade, Drake, Vin Diesel, and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson are celebrating their multicultural heritage today, this was not always the case — particularly those black celebrities who could “pass” for white.

  • On the surface, race appears as a simple category to quantify—the color of one’s skin, the box one circles on the census, even the percentage that appears on an at-home DNA testing kit. But the reality of one’s racial identity is hardly objective.

  • Rachel Dolezal’s Unintended Gift to America The New York Times 2015-06-17 Allyson Hobbs, Assistant Professor of History Stanford University Allyson Hobbs is the author of “A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life.” In James Baldwin’s 1968 novel “Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone,” a child points to his light-skinned…

  • The ‘white’ student who integrated Ole Miss Cable News Network (CNN) 2014-02-05 Allyson Hobbs, Assistant Professor of American History Stanford University (CNN) — When Harry S. Murphy arrived at the University of Mississippi in the fall of 1945, he was nervous. He landed at Ole Miss by way of the Navy’s V-12 program, a wartime…