My Heritage Is Mixed Race. Chances Are Decent That Yours Is, TooPosted in Articles, History, Media Archive, United States on 2022-02-21 18:43Z by Steven |
My Heritage Is Mixed Race. Chances Are Decent That Yours Is, Too
The Daily Beast
2019-09-09
Many African-Americans like me have some white blood in our veins. And of course it stands to reason that the opposite is true. We must tell these stories.
My great grandfathers were white men. Both of them loved and married black women at great peril to themselves and all they possessed. Miscegenation laws in America forbade interracial marriage until the landmark Loving vs. Virginia case of 1967 (the year I was born). So, if they wanted to marry the women they loved, they could not remain in the deep South. They had to flee to border states or free states in order to marry and survive.
My paternal great grandfather, Joseph Bardsley Nelson, was an Irishman from North Carolina. He met and fell in love with a mixed race (African American and Cherokee) woman named Ida from South Carolina. How they crossed paths is unknown, but “pop,” as we called him, was a soldier in World War I, and likely underwent basic training in South Carolina. Word of their forbidden relationship spread in the community, and family oral history says they had to flee in the night and make their way to Philadelphia and then to New Jersey, where they lived until they died.
Pop worked along with his brother Elliot as a bricklayer for the famous Kelly family in Philadelphia. Yes, that Kelly family (as in Grace Kelly). Great grandmother Ida was a seamstress and homemaker. She had two children, my paternal grandmother Dora and her brother, Bardsley. Nana, as we called her, could “pass” for white; her brother Joe looked more Indian and could not…
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