Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.
Yet, just as Douglass had done in his own time, the multiracial movement exaggerates the extent to which the post-civil rights increase of interracial marriages and their mixed-race offspring constitutes a solution to the problem of racism. As critics of multiracial ideology have noted, positive perceptions of mixed-race people as less threatening are often rooted in pejorative assumptions about blacks as angry or inferior. In other words, this idealised view of ‘bi-racial’ people reinforces, rather than challenges, prevailing notions of racial difference, of white superiority and black inferiority. The fascination with Obama as a seemingly ‘raceless’ mediator, once praised by a news presenter who gushed after a major presidential speech, “For an hour, I forgot he was black,” is a far cry from the resentful perception in some quarters of his wife, Michelle, as an “angry black woman.” The belief that a mixed race president heralds an era of racial harmony seems not just naïve, but misguided…
The history covered in this exhibit spans from 1851 to 1973 and takes the viewer from the antebellum time through the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow and the modern Civil Rights eras. It tells stories about over 30 people along with photographs and text. Four women are featured, as well as business people, farmers, carpenters, educators, church leaders, soldiers (Civil War and WWII), Civil Rights activists and organizations. One building included among the thirty 20”x30” panels is the exhibit’s first venue, the C.S. Brown Auditorium in Winton, NC…
University of Georgia Press
2022-05-01
224 pages
Illustrations: 11 b&w
Trim size: 6.000in x 9.000in
Hardcover ISBN: 9-780-8203-6192-5
Paperback ISBN: 9-780-8203-6193-2
Virginia L. Summey, Historian, Author, and Faculty Fellow Lloyd International Honors College, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
This book explores the life and contributions of groundbreaking attorney, Elreta Melton Alexander Ralston (1919-98). In 1945 Alexander became the first African American woman to graduate from Columbia Law School. In 1947 she was the first African American woman to practice law in the state of North Carolina, and in 1968 she became the first African American woman to become an elected district court judge. Despite her accomplishments, Alexander is little known to scholars outside of her hometown of Greensboro, North Carolina. Her life and career deserve recognition, however, not just because of her impressive lists of “firsts,” but also owing to her accomplishments during the civil rights movement in the U.S. South.
While Alexander did not actively participate in civil rights marches and demonstrations, she used her professional achievements and middle-class status to advocate for individuals who lacked a voice in the southern legal system. Virginia L. Summey argues that Alexander was integral to the civil rights movement in North Carolina as she, and women like her, worked to change discriminatory laws while opening professional doors for other minority women. Using her professional status, Alexander combatted segregation by demonstrating that Black women were worthy and capable of achieving careers alongside white men, thereby creating environments in which other African Americans could succeed. Her legal expertise and ability to reach across racial boundaries made her an important figure in Greensboro history.
Michele Reid-Vazquez, Host and Associate Professor
Department of Africana Studies University of Pittsburgh
Dialogues in Afrolatinidad explores history, culture, and contemporary issues in Afro-Latin America and U.S.-Afro-Latinx communities. The podcast features interviews with scholars, writers, educators, artists, and community leaders who share their passion for Afro-Latin American and Afro-Latinx Studies, the significance of their intellectual, creative, or community engagement, and resources for learning more.
This episode features Dr. Jennifer A. Jones, a native of Chicago and a sociologist specializing in contemporary transnational Afro-Mexican studies. She discusses the way race is made in Latin America through her experiences in both Cuba and Mexico, as well as the broader impact of space, politics, and mobility on racial constructions throughout the U.S. She also highlights her recent book, The Browning of the New South, which explores blackness and anti-blackness in Mexico, the current migration of Afro-Mexicans to North Carolina, and their reformulations of race in the U.S. South.
Listen to the episode (00:34:06) here. Download the episode here.
Now, 123 years later, descendants of Manly are still trying to piece together what happened on November 10, 1898.
“The real, real granular details, the real truth of it — it’s been an ongoing experience and process,” said Alex Manly’s great-great-grandson Kieran Haile.
Haile has had a vague understanding of the 1898 Massacre since he was a teenager, but it wasn’t until about five years ago when he was nearing his 30′s that he really started to take a deep dive into history and learn more about this horrific day…
Engraved portrait of Abraham Galloway from William Still’sThe Underground Railroad, published in 1872. William Still’s ‘The Underground Railroad,’ 1872
He has been compared to James Bond and Malcolm X, though his name has largely been left out of the history books.
Abraham Galloway was an African American who escaped enslavement in North Carolina, became a Union spy during the Civil War and recruited Black soldiers to fight with the North. That’s the short version. The fuller picture would include his work as a revolutionary and being one of the first African Americans elected to the North Carolina Senate.
When Cecelski was doing research for another book about maritime slavery, he kept coming across Galloway’s name. “And the stories were sort of so different than what I had been taught about slavery or the Civil War, or the role of African Americans in the Civil War,” he says…
University of North Carolina Press
September 2012
352 pages
17 halftones, 4 maps, notes, bibl., index
6.125 x 9.25
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-2190-6
eBook ISBN: 978-0-8078-3812-9
2012 North Caroliniana Book Award, The North Caroliniana Society
Ragan Old North State Award, North Carolina Literary and Historical Association
Abraham H. Galloway (1837-1870) was a fiery young slave rebel, radical abolitionist, and Union spy who rose out of bondage to become one of the most significant and stirring black leaders in the South during the Civil War. Throughout his brief, mercurial life, Galloway fought against slavery and injustice. He risked his life behind enemy lines, recruited black soldiers for the North, and fought racism in the Union army’s ranks. He also stood at the forefront of an African American political movement that flourished in the Union-occupied parts of North Carolina, even leading a historic delegation of black southerners to the White House to meet with President Lincoln and to demand the full rights of citizenship. He later became one of the first black men elected to the North Carolina legislature.
Long hidden from history, Galloway’s story reveals a war unfamiliar to most of us. As David Cecelski writes, “Galloway’s Civil War was a slave insurgency, a war of liberation that was the culmination of generations of perseverance and faith.” This riveting portrait illuminates Galloway’s life and deepens our insight into the Civil War and Reconstruction as experienced by African Americans in the South.
GREENSBORO — Former attorney and District Court Judge Elreta Alexander-Ralston was known for the sheer force of her personality and style.
Outspoken. Flamboyant. Fierce. Unforgettable. Bold. She had an air of authority about her that left no doubt who was in charge.
And oh the stories, said historian and UNCG fellow Virginia Summey, the author of a new biography of the history-making judge.
“I can’t imagine I will have as much fun on another book,” Summey said.
Summey was watching an oral-history interview with Alexander-Ralston when she heard the judge say she hired legendary attorney F. Lee Bailey to defend her over a judicial complaint.
“She would say something in her oral history and I could say, that could not be true,” Summey said. “But it was.”
With Bailey, it was the drama of her driving to Massachusetts and showing up at his front door, Summey said.
“I called him right before he died and he was like, ‘Oh yeah, Elreta…,” Summey said, of the story he would go on to tell about her hiring him.
Alexander-Ralston died in 1998 and is remembered for an unusual career pioneering legal reform among an impressive list of firsts, including the first Black woman in the nation to sit on the bench who was elected by voters…
University of North Carolina Press
October 2021
76 pages
6.125 x 9.25
14 halftones, notes, bibl., index
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-6439-2
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-6438-5
On the eve of the Civil War, most people of color in the United States toiled in bondage. Yet nearly half a million of these individuals, including over 250,000 in the South, were free. In Beyond Slavery’s Shadow, Warren Eugene Milteer Jr. draws from a wide array of sources to demonstrate that from the colonial period through the Civil War, the growing influence of white supremacy and proslavery extremism created serious challenges for free persons categorized as “negroes,” “mulattoes,” “mustees,” “Indians,” or simply “free people of color” in the South. Segregation, exclusion, disfranchisement, and discriminatory punishment were ingrained in their collective experiences. Nevertheless, in the face of attempts to deny them the most basic privileges and rights, free people of color defended their families and established organizations and businesses.
These people were both privileged and victimized, both celebrated and despised, in a region characterized by social inconsistency. Milteer’s analysis of the way wealth, gender, and occupation intersected with ideas promoting white supremacy and discrimination reveals a wide range of social interactions and life outcomes for the South’s free people of color and helps to explain societal contradictions that continue to appear in the modern United States.
Virginia L. Summey, Historian, Author, and Faculty Fellow Lloyd International Honors College, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Elreta Melton Alexander was a pioneering African-American attorney from Greensboro, North Carolina. Born in Smithfield, North Carolina, she was the daughter of a Baptist minister and a teacher, and grew up comfortably as a part of the black middle class. Coming of age during the Jim Crow period of the South, she was raised by her educated, middle-class parents to be a leader in the community. The descendant of two white grandparents, her bi-racialism formed her early awareness of colorism within the African-American community…
Too often we relegate the lives of our ancestors to the basket of nostalgia. We think that because our modern times have dressed us up in different clothes and surrounded us with technology that the lives and struggles of our ancestors can’t speak with any real directness to ours. It is easy in the rush and rattle of the present to allow seasoned historians to define us in macrocosm while overlooking the importance of our own more granular history; a thread waiting to be pulled in the warp and woof of who we think we are. Libraries and historical archives exist to help us pull that thread and expand our understanding of history and our place in it.
Eight years ago, I was chosen by the Durham Colored Library board of directors, led by chairperson C. Eileen Watts Welch, to follow my own ancestral thread and write a biography of my great- great-grandfather, Dr. Aaron McDuffie Moore. The dream of this historical biography of Durham’s first Black physician far predates my involvement; it actually predates me. Dr. Moore’s daughter, my great-grandmother, Lyda Moore Merrick, dreamed of a book about her Papa. My grandfather, Dr. Charles DeWitt Watts, a legendary surgeon and healthcare activist in his own right, also dreamed of this book. His dream inspired his daughter, C. Eileen Watts Welch, to make this biography a reality. The Durham Colored Library, an organization founded by Dr. Moore himself in 1913 and now a non-profit focused on uplifting Black narratives, sponsored the project…
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