Mixed Race Studies

Author Brit Bennett Based Her Hit Novel The Vanishing Half On A Town Near Her Mother’s Home: “Everyone was Obsessed with Color”

PEOPLE
2021-05-10

HBO plans to produce a limited series adaptation of the novel for the screen.

Mothers know best — and sometimes, they know the idea to a best selling novel.

Brit Bennett author of the hit book The Vanishing Half spoke with PEOPLE Every Day host Janine Rubenstein about the inspiration behind the story book clubs can’t stop talking about.

The Vanishing Half tells the story of two twin sisters who grow up to “live their lives off the color line“, one living as a White woman and one as a Black woman. Bennett’s mother, who is originally from Louisiana, once told her a story from her childhood about a nearby town where people were “obsessed with color”, in regards to the color of their skin.

“And, that immediately struck me as, ‘Oh, this is the setting for a novel’,” said Bennett…

Read the entire interview here.

Historian Martha S. Jones on the Power of Black Women That Led to Kamala Harris’ Nod for VP

People Magazine
2020-10-26

People Staff

Professor Martha S. Jones | CREDIT: BASIC BOOKS

PEOPLE’s Voices from the Fight Against Racism will amplify Black perspectives on the push for equality and justice

Americans are taught that the fight for women’s suffrage ended with the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920. In actuality, another battle against voter suppression was just beginning for Black American women. In her new book, Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All, Martha S. Jones, Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and professor of history at Johns Hopkins University, explains how Black women campaigned for voting equality for all people, from the beginning of U.S. history, through the passing of the 19th Amendment and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, to the Black Lives Matter movement of today.

Here, Jones, a prize-winning historian, tells PEOPLE what she’s learned from the long line of brave Black suffragists in her own family — and how the history of such activists can guide modern-day Americans as they confront voter suppression in the Nov. 3 presidential election. She also explains how Black women have become one of the most powerful forces in U.S. elections. (“Black American women vote as a bloc,” says Jones, “and that’s part of what makes their vote so dangerous.”)

I write in an office where portraits of the women in my family hang on the wall. They are there because they inspire me, but they’re also there because I am accountable to them. When I write a history about women and the vote, I know that they want me to write a history that is true to the archives. But they also want me to write a history that has meaning in our own time, because I think they would recognize the urgency around voting rights that we are confronting in the 21st century and how it is not so different from the challenges that they faced a hundred years ago…

Read the entire article here.

98-Year-Old NASA Mathematician Katherine Johnson: ‘If You Like What You’re Doing, You Will Do Well’

People
2016-11-04

Caitlin Keating

Katherine Johnson thinks all of her accomplishments over the 98 years she’s been alive are “ordinary.”

But to the rest of the world, they’re anything but.

Johnson, a physicist, space scientist and mathematician graduated from high school at 14-years-old, attended college the very next year and was the first African-American woman to desegregate the graduate school at West Virginia University…

…In 1953, after years of being a teacher, she began working for NASA where she was nicknamed the “human computer.”

Johnson was able to calculate the trajectory for numerous space missions, including for the space flight of Alan Shepard, the first American in space and the trajectory for the 1969 Apollo 11 flight to the Moon…

Read the entire interview here.

Free State of Jones: The Incredible True Story of Newton Knight and His Private Rebellion Against the Confederacy

People Magazine
2016-06-24

Michael Miller

Free State of Jones brings to life one of the Civil War’s most extraordinary and counterintuitive episodes, in which a Confederate deserter overthrew his former commanders and established a free “state” in his native corner of southeast Mississippi.

Newton Knight, played by a ragged, yellow-toothed Matthew McConaughey, was a poor farmer who, incensed by a new law that allowed landowners to swap 20 slaves for their military service, abandoned his company to lead his own rebellion.

“He looked around at all of his yeoman farmer buddies and said, ‘Do you own any slaves?’ They were like, ‘No.’ He goes, ‘Me neither. I’m not fighting this war. It’s a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight. I’m out of here,’ ” McConaughey tells PEOPLE of his character…

Read the entire article here.