Mixed Race Studies

GIs and Fräuleins: The German-American Encounter in 1950s West Germany

University of North Carolina Press
December 2001
360 pages
6.125 x 9.25, 13 photos, 1 map, notes, bibl., index
Paper ISBN  978-0-8078-5375-7

Maria Höhn, Professor of History
Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York

With the outbreak of the Korean War, the poor, rural West German state of Rhineland-Palatinate became home to some of the largest American military installations outside the United States. In GIs and Frauleins, Maria Hohn offers a rich social history of this German-American encounter and provides new insights into how West Germans negotiated their transition from National Socialism to a consumer democracy during the 1950s.

Focusing on the conservative reaction to the American military presence, Hohn shows that Germany’s Christian Democrats, though eager to be allied politically and militarily with the United States, were appalled by the apparent Americanization of daily life and the decline in morality that accompanied the troops to the provinces. Conservatives condemned the jazz clubs and striptease parlors that Holocaust survivors from Eastern Europe opened to cater to the troops, and they expressed scorn toward the German women who eagerly pursued white and black American GIs. While most Germans rejected the conservative effort to punish as prostitutes all women who associated with American GIs, they vilified the sexual relationships between African American men and German women. Hohn demonstrates that German anxieties over widespread Americanization were always debates about proper gender norms and racial boundaries, and that while the American military brought democracy with them to Germany, it also brought Jim Crow.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 “… And Then the Americans Came Again”
• 2 Living with the New Neighbors
• 3 When Jim Crow Came to the German Heimat
• 4 Heimat in Turmoil
• 5 Controlling the “Veronikas” and “Soldiers’ Brides”
• 6 Keeping America at Bay
• 7 Punishing the “Veronikas”
• 8 The Kaiserslautern Steinstrasse Affair
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Introduction

In October 1952, the German Bundestag declared a large stretch of Rhineland-Palatinate—a poor, rural state in the southwest of Germany—to be a moral disaster area.  The legislators resorted to this dramatic step because the buildup of American military personnel in West Germany in the wake of the Korean War had allegedly wrecked havoc in the provinces. The American troop deployment, they complained, instead of creating a bulwark against Soviet expansionism, had brought striptease parlors, prostitution, common-law marriages, and unprecedented levels of illegitimacy. The Christian Democratic legislators, who dominated the debate, were equally distressed to report that in one small town alone, 343 German women were neglecting their children because they were in the employ of the American occupation power. The counties of Birkenfeld and Kaiserslautern, home to the garrison communities Baumholder and Kaiserslautern, were identified as the key trouble spots. Convinced that the American-induced economic boom had rendered the rural population oblivious to the moral emergency, the conservative Christian Democrats demanded federal intervention. With great dismay, the Bundestag resolved that West Germany’s military rearmament underway in Rhineland-Palatinate needed to be accompanied by a moral rearmament of the state’s population.

Discovering this anxious Bundestag debate during the preliminary stages of my research significantly changed the direction of this book. When I first began my project on the American military in Rhineland-Palatinate, I set out to explore how West Germans had negotiated their transition from Nazism into consumer democracy during the 1950s. I had chosen my topic because I speculated that the extensive presence of American military personnel and their injection of the “American way of life” would produce a rich collection of sources to comment on those crucial founding years of the Federal Republic. My exploration of the German-American encounter was to provide insights into how economic, social, and cultural changes after 1945 played out in the everyday life of people. How did Germans, after the experience of Nazism, manage to establish a successful democracy in West Germany? Moreover, I hoped that the German-American encounter would reveal how Germans assessed the transformations in their lives. Would they agree with those historians who dismiss “Americanization” as an explanatory model by insisting that the transformation of German society after 1945 was part of a larger process of modernization that had been long underway and was merely disrupted by World War II and the postwar suffering? What would Germans living in close proximity to the American military bases have to say to the Westernization scholars who do not ignore America’s impact on postwar Germany but nonetheless stress that the Bonn Republic succeeded because West Germany’s political and cultural élites abandoned their resistance to the “Western” liberal tradition?…

…By exploring local reactions to the conservative project, I show that the moral rearmament of German society is only one aspect, albeit an important one, of the 1950s. By the second part of the decade, conservative observers in Rhineland-Palatinate provided exasperated accounts of their failure to keep the population from eagerly embracing the prosperity and social mobility that the American-induced economic boom entailed. Their accounts also bemoan the fact that the strict morality that the deeply conservative Christian Democratic state and federal governments were trying to enforce through the Christian welfare agencies, the police, and the courts did not play well in the provinces. Most Germans were unwilling to return to the rigid pre-Weimar sexual norms that conservatives wanted to reimpose. The unprecedented prosperity of the Korea Boom convinced all too many that the era of deprivation and self-sacrifice was over; indeed, the time had come to “live for once.” In light of their experience with Nazism, many Germans also found the conservative program intrusive and inappropriate for the new democracy. Consequently, the population rejected the conservative effort to stigmatize and punish as prostitutes all women who associated with American GIs. Notwithstanding the concerted efforts of the chruches and of state and federal ministries, even in the deepest provinces, attitudes toward premarital sexuality and women’s sexual expressiveness outside of marriage relaxed considerably by the later part of the decade.

However, this greater tolerance in sexual matters tells only part of the story. Germans negotiated this overall relaxation of sexual mores by vilifying as unacceptable the sexual relationships between African American men and German women. When Germans, in both East and West, read about the American garrison communities during the 1950s, the focus was increasingly on the “many” black GIs who met “sexually unrestrained” women in the bars that Eastern European Jews made available to them. The prostitution records of Baumholder and the press coverage of the garrison communities reveal that attitudes toward such relationships hardened considerably, especially after Germany regained sovereignty in 1955.

Historians of postwar Germany have only recently begun to explore how racial hierarchies continued to inform notions of German identity. Exciting new scholarship on German reactions to American popular culture and German policies toward the children born of German mothers and African American fathers make important contributions to the field. That scholarship also shows that it would be too simple to assume a straightforward continuity from Nazi racism to racial attitudes in the 1950s. A process of negotiation was at work as liberal policy makers, influenced by social science research in the United States, distanced themselves from the biologically based racial hierarchies of the past. While the language of eugenics disappeared, this did not mean that racial hierarchies ceased to matter. German policy makers, for example, drew on this psychologically based language of difference to condemn jazz and rock and roll for undermining proper class, race, and gender boundaries.

My book contributes to this work by expanding the exploration of German racial attitudes beyond those of politicians and policy makers to include such debates at the grassroots level. The fact that millions of black GIs have spent time in Germany since 1945 makes it clear that German racial debates after 1945 did not take place in a vacuum. Because of the national attention the garrison communities received throughout the 1950s—not just in Germany’s tabloid press—these debates on race also did not remain just local affairs but engaged the country as a whole.

We know from Heide Fehrenbach’s important work that during the late 1940s and the 1950s the German liberal discourse on race shifted from a preoccupation with Jews to an overwhelming concern with blacks. However, in the garrison towns, that shift is less manifest for a number of reasons. Most importantly, debates on race are not driven by the self-conscious efforts of national policy makers to overcome the shameful Nazi past. Just the same, despite the murderous rage of the Nazi regime, Jews were not “absent” from German communities or German consciousness during the 1950s. Germans in these communities encountered Eastern European Jews and American blacks simultaneously and on a daily basis. Consequently, German debates on race were marked by the coexistence of separate but also overlapping discourses on “racial others.”

This study is also a first attempt to argue that German racial attitudes after 1945 can be understood only if they are examined in light of their face-to-face interaction with those of the American military. Black GIs, and not just those from the Jim Crow South, experienced in Germany a tolerance and acceptance unknown to them in their own country. Their status, first as conquerors and then as occupation soldiers, made possible unprecedented encounters with white Germans. In My American Journey, General Colin Powell gave voice to that experience when he recalled his service in Germany in 1958: “[For] black GIs, especially those out of the South, Germany was a breath of freedom—they could go where they wanted, eat where they wanted, and date whom they wanted, just like other people. The dollar was strong, the beer good, and the German people friendly, since we were all that stood between them and the Red hordes. War, at least the Cold War in Germany, was not hell.” Yet the record also shows that side-by-side with this tolerance existed a profound unease and often even resentment over the presence of black GIs. Nowhere were the limits of German racial tolerance more forcefully expressed than in the condemnation evoked by the relationships between black GIs and white German women.

Observing the deep reluctance, if not outright opposition, in the American military toward the relationships between German women and black American soldiers convinced many Germans, and not just conservatives, that their own racial prejudices should not mark them as Nazis. Thus, when Germans during the 1950s condemned the relationships between German women and African American soldiers, they cited the model of racial segregation of their American mentor as informing their own convictions. Germans were able to do so with ease because American opposition to interracial sexuality and interracial marriage was so similar to their own pre-Nazi models of racial exclusion. Thus Germans could reject the racial excesses of Nazism while at the same time invoking racial hierarchies of exclusion that were based in timeless laws of nature and tied firmly to the Western liberal tradition…

Read the entire Introduction here.

Whiting Up: Whiteface Minstrels and Stage Europeans in African American Performance

University of North Carolina Press
December 2011
336 pages
6.125 x 9.25, 15 illus., notes, bibl., index
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8078-3508-1

Marvin McAllister, Assistant Professor of English
University of South Carolina

In the early 1890s, black performer Bob Cole turned blackface minstrelsy on its head with his nationally recognized whiteface creation, a character he called Willie Wayside. Just over a century later, hiphop star Busta Rhymes performed a whiteface supercop in his hit music video “Dangerous.” In this sweeping work, Marvin McAllister explores the enduring tradition of “whiting up,” in which African American actors, comics, musicians, and even everyday people have studied and assumed white racial identities.

Not to be confused with racial “passing” or derogatory notions of “acting white,” whiting up is a deliberate performance strategy designed to challenge America’s racial and political hierarchies by transferring supposed markers of whiteness to black bodies—creating unexpected intercultural alliances even as it sharply critiques racial stereotypes. Along with theater, McAllister considers a variety of other live performance modes, including antebellum cakewalks and contemporary stand-up comedy by solo artists such as Dave Chappelle. For over three centuries and in today’s supposedly “postracial” America, McAllister argues, whiting up has allowed African American performers first to appropriate artistic products of a white imagination and then to fashion new black identities through these “white” forms, therefore enhancing our collective understanding of self and other.

African Cherokees in Indian Territory: From Chattel to Citizens

University of North Carolina Press
July 2008
376 pages
5.5 x 8.5, 6 illus., 8 maps
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8078-3203-5
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8078-5883-7

Celia E. Naylor, Associate Professor of History
Dartmouth College

Forcibly removed from their homes in the late 1830s, Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, and Chickasaw Indians brought their African-descended slaves with them along the Trail of Tears and resettled in Indian Territory, present-day Oklahoma. Celia E. Naylor vividly charts the experiences of enslaved and free African Cherokees from the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma’s entry into the Union in 1907. Carefully extracting the voices of former slaves from interviews and mining a range of sources in Oklahoma, she creates an engaging narrative of the composite lives of African Cherokees. Naylor explores how slaves connected with Indian communities not only through Indian customs—language, clothing, and food—but also through bonds of kinship.

Examining this intricate and emotionally charged history, Naylor demonstrates that the “red over black” relationship was no more benign than “white over black.” She presents new angles to traditional understandings of slave resistance and counters previous romanticized ideas of slavery in the Cherokee Nation. She also challenges contemporary racial and cultural conceptions of African-descended people in the United States. Naylor reveals how black Cherokee identities evolved reflecting complex notions about race, culture, “blood,” kinship, and nationality. Indeed, Cherokee freedpeople’s struggle for recognition and equal rights that began in the nineteenth century continues even today in Oklahoma.

White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812

University of North Carolina Press
1968-09-25 (Republished: September 1995)
671 pages
8.9 x 6 x 1.4 inches
ISBN: 978-0-8078-4550-9
Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia

Winthrop D. Jordan (1931-2007)

• Winner of the 1968 Francis Parkman Prize, Society of American Historians
• Winner of the 1969 National Book Award
• Winner of the 1969 Bancroft Prize, Columbia University
• Winner of the 1968 Ralph Waldo Emerson Award, Phi Beta Kappa

The paperback edition of Jordan’s classic and award-winning work on the history of American race relations.

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments

Part One. GENESIS 1550-1700

I. First Impressions: Initial English Confrontation with Africans

1. The Blackness Without
2. The Causes of Complexion
3. Defective Religion
4. Savage Behavior
5. The Apes of Africa
6. The Blackness Within

II. Unthinking Decision: Enslavement of Negroes in America to 1700

1. The Necessities of a New World
2. Freedom and Bondage in the English Tradition
3. The Concept of Slavery
4. The Practices of Portingals and Spanyards
5. Enslavement: The West Indies
6. Enslavement: New England
7. Enslavement: Virginia and Maryland
8. Enslavement: New York and the Carolinas
9. The Un-English: Scots, Irish, and Indians
10. Racial Slavery: From Reasons to Rational

Part Two. PROVINCIAL DECADES 1700-1755
III. Anxious Oppressors: Freedom and Control in a Slave Society

1. Demographic Configurations in the Colonies
2. Slavery and the Senses of the Laws
3. Slave Rebelliousness and the White Mastery
4. Free Negroes and Fears of Freedom
5. Racial Slavery in a Free Society

IV. Fruits of Passion: The Dynamics of Interracial Sex

1. Regional Styles in Racial Intermixture
2. Masculine and Feminine Modes in Carolina and America
3. Negro Sexuality and Slave Insurrection
4. Dismemberment, Physiology, and Sexual Perceptions
5. The Secularization of Reproduction
6. Mulatto Offspring in a Biracial Society

V. The Souls of Men: The Negro’s Spiritual Nature

1. Christian Principles and the Failure of Conversion
2. The Question of Negro Capacity
3. Spiritual Equality and Temporal Subordination
4. The Thin Edge of Antislavery
5. Inclusion and Exclusion in the Protestant Churches
6. Religious Revivial and the Impact of Conversion

VI. The Bodies of Men: The Negro’s Physical Nature

1. Confusion, Order and Hierarchy
2. Negroes, Apes, and Beasts
3. Rational Science and Irrational Logic
4. Indians, Africans, and the Complexion of Man
5. The Valuation of Color
6. Negroes Under the Skin

Part Three. THE REVOLUTIONARY ERA 1755-1783
VII. Self-Scrutiny in the Revolutionary Era

1. Quaker Conscience and Consciousness
2. The Discovery of Prejudice
3. Assertions of Sameness
4. Environmentalism and Revolutionary Ideology
5. The Secularization of Equality
6. The Proslavery Case of Negro Inferiority
7. The Revolution as Turning Point

Pt. 4 SOCIETY AND THOUGHT 1783-1812
VIII. The Imperatives of Economic Interest and National Identity

1. The Economics of Slavery
2. Union and Sectionalism
3. A National Forum for Debate
4. Nationhood and Identity
5. Non-English Englishment

IX. The Limitations of Antislavery

1. The Pattern of Antislavry
2. The Failings of Revolutionary Ideology
3. The Quaker View Beyond Emancipation
4. Religious Equalitarianism
5. Humanitarianism and Sentimentality
6. The Success and Failure of Antislavery

X. The Cancer of Revolution

1. St. Domingo
2. Non-Importation of Rebellion
3. The Contagion of Liberty
4. Slave Disobedience in America
5. The Impact of Negro Revolt

XI. The Resulting Pattern of Separation

1. The Hardening of Slavery
2. Restraint of Free Negroes
3. The Walls of Separation
4. Negro Churches

Part Five THOUGH AND SOCIETY 1783-1812
XII. Thomas Jefferson: Self and Society

1. Jefferson: The Tyranny of Slavery
2. Jefferson: The Assertion of Negro Inferiority
3. The Issue of Intellect
4. The Acclaim of Talented Negroes
5. Jefferson: Passionate Realities
6. Jefferson: White Women and Black
7. Interracial Sex: The Individual and His Society
8. Jefferson: A Dichotomous View of Triracial America

XIII. The Negro Bound by the Chain of Being

1. Linnaean Categories and the Chain of Being
2. Two Modes of Equality
3. The Hierarchies of Men
4. Anatomical Investigations
5. Unlinking and Linking the Chain
6. Faithful Philosophy in Defense of Human Unity
7. The Study of Man in the Republic

XIV. Erasing Nature’s Stamp of Color

1. Nature’s Blackball
2. The Effects of Climate and Civilization
3. The Disease of Color
4. White Negroes
5. The Logic of Blackness and Inner Similarity
6. The Winds of Change
7. An End of Environmentalism
8. Persistent Themes

XV. Toward a White Man’s Country

1. The Emancipation and Intermixture
2. The Beginning of Colonization
3. The Virginia Program
4. Insurrection and Expatriation in Virginia
5. The Meaning of Negro Removal

XVI. Exodus

Note on the Concept of Race
Essay on Sources
Select List of Full Titles
Map: Percentage of Negroes in Total Non-Aboriginal Population, 1790
Index

A conversation with Victoria E. Bynum, author of The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies

University of North Carolina Press
April 2010

Victoria E. Bynum, author of The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies, discusses three Unionist strongholds in the South,

Q: There seems no end to books about the American Civil War. What does The Long Shadow of the Civil War offer that is new?

A: Although Civil War books about the home front are not new, this is a new sort of home front study that focuses on three communities from three different states. Rather than close with the war and Reconstruction, The Long Shadow of the Civil War follows individual Unionists and multiracial families into the New South era and, in some cases, into the twentieth century. This historical sweep allows the reader to understand the ongoing effects of the war at its most personal levels…

…Q: Newt Knight, the controversial “captain” of the Knight Company, is a polarizing figure who even today evokes heated arguments among readers. Why is this so, and how did it affect your historical treatment of him?

A: As long as we continue to debate the causes, meanings, and effects of the Civil War, Newt Knight’s motives and character will also be debated. We know that he defied Confederate authority during the war, supported Republican Reconstruction afterward, and openly crossed the color line to found a mixed-race community. To neo-Confederates, such facts make Newt a scoundrel and a traitor to his country and his race. To neo-abolitionists, he is a backwoods Mississippi hero who defended his nation and struggled to uplift the black race. My response to such powerful and emotional narratives is to examine critically not only the documentary evidence, but also the mountain of published opinions about Newt Knight that have too often functioned as “evidence” for both sides of the debate.

Q: Newt Knight, his white wife Serena, and former family slave, Rachel, were the founding parents of a multiracial community. What sort of a community was it in terms of racial identity? How did members of the community identify themselves racially, as opposed to how the larger white society defined them?

A: As segregation took hold in New South Mississippi (1880-1900), the descendants of Newt, Serena, and Rachel were increasingly defined by white society as black, i.e. as “Negroes,” despite being of European, African, and Native American ancestry. Before the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s, however, few of these descendants identified themselves as “black.” Depending on their physical appearance, including skin shade and hair texture, descendants of Newt and Rachel variously defined themselves as white, Indian, or colored. Whereas white society applied a “one drop rule” that grouped together all people of African ancestry, these descendants self-identified in ways that reflected their multiracial heritage.

There is no direct evidence of how Newt, Serena, or Rachel racially identified their multiracial descendants. Descendant Yvonne Bivins, the most thorough Knight researcher, was told by her elders that Newt Knight actively encouraged his descendants to identify as white. All that is certain — but nonetheless remarkable — is that they economically supported, nurtured, and lived openly among both white and multiracial kinfolk all their lives.

Q: By crossing the color line, Newt Knight deviated from the norm by acknowledging and supporting his multiracial descendants. What may we deduce from those facts about his political views on race relations in the era of segregation?

A: Since we don’t know that Newt Knight identified his multiracial descendants as “black,” we can’t deduce from his intimate relationships with them, or by his efforts to enroll them in a local school (one that he helped create) alongside his white descendants, that he supported equality for all people of African ancestry — that is, for people classed as “Negroes.” Only if we adhere to the “one drop rule” — and assume that Newt Knight did, too — can we conclude that Newt’s protection of his own kinfolk extended to all Americans of African ancestry.

Newt’s efforts on behalf of freedpeople as a Republican appointee during Reconstruction do not necessarily make him an advocate of black equality, as some historians have argued. There were many Reconstruction Republicans who supported the same basic rights of marriage and military service that Newt upheld for freedpeople, while supporting segregation and opposing black voting rights. We simply don’t know Newt’s political position on these issues…

Read the entire interview here.

The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies

University of North Carolina Press
April 2010
240 pp.
6.125 x 9.25, 9 illus.
1 map, notes, bibl., index
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8078-3381-0
Large Print ISBN: 978-0-8078-7909-2

Victoria E. Bynum, Emeritus Professor of History
Texas State University, San Marcos

In The Long Shadow of the Civil War, Victoria Bynum relates uncommon narratives about common Southern folks who fought not with the Confederacy, but against it. Focusing on regions in three Southern states–North Carolina, Mississippi, and Texas—Bynum introduces Unionist supporters, guerrilla soldiers, defiant women, socialists, populists, free blacks, and large interracial kin groups that belie stereotypes of the South and of Southerners as uniformly supportive of the Confederate cause.

Examining regions within the South where the inner civil wars of deadly physical conflict and intense political debate continued well into the era of Reconstruction and beyond, Bynum explores three central questions. How prevalent was support for the Union among ordinary Southerners during the Civil War? How did Southern Unionists and freed people experience both the Union’s victory and the emancipation of slaves during and after Reconstruction? And what were the legacies of the Civil War–and Reconstruction–for relations among classes and races and between the sexes, both then and now?

Centered on the concepts of place, family, and community, Bynum’s insightful and carefully documented work effectively counters the idea of a unified South caught in the grip of the Lost Cause.

Visit Dr. Bynum’s blog Renegade South here.

Unnatural Selections: Eugenics in American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance

University of North Carolina Press
April 2004
288 pages
6.125 x 9.25, 19 illus., 2 charts, notes, bibl., index
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8078-2868-7
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8078-5531-7

Daylanne K. English, Associate Professor of English & Chair
Macalester College

Challenging conventional constructions of the Harlem Renaissance and American modernism, Daylanne English links writers from both movements to debates about eugenics in the Progressive Era. She argues that, in the 1920s, the form and content of writings by figures as disparate as W. E. B. Du Bois, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and Nella Larsen were shaped by anxieties regarding immigration, migration, and intraracial breeding.

English’s interdisciplinary approach brings together the work of those canonical writers with relatively neglected literary, social scientific, and visual texts. She examines antilynching plays by Angelina Weld Grimké as well as the provocative writings of white female eugenics field workers. English also analyzes the Crisis magazine as a family album filtering uplift through eugenics by means of photographic documentation of an ever-improving black race.

English suggests that current scholarship often misreads early-twentieth-century visual, literary, and political culture by applying contemporary social and moral standards to the past. Du Bois, she argues, was actually more of a eugenicist than Eliot. Through such reconfiguration of the modern period, English creates an allegory for the American present: because eugenics was, in its time, widely accepted as a reasonable, progressive ideology, we need to consider the long-term implications of contemporary genetic engineering, fertility enhancement and control, and legislation promoting or discouraging family growth.

Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction

University of North Carolina Press
December 2004
416 pages
6.125 x 9.25, 22 illus., notes, bibl., index
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8078-2902-8
Paper ISBN  978-0-8078-5567-6

Michele Mitchell, Associate Professor of History
New York University

Between 1877 and 1930–years rife with tensions over citizenship, suffrage, immigration, and “the Negro problem”–African American activists promoted an array of strategies for progress and power built around “racial destiny,” the idea that black Americans formed a collective whose future existence would be determined by the actions of its members. In Righteous Propagation, Michele Mitchell examines the reproductive implications of racial destiny, demonstrating how it forcefully linked particular visions of gender, conduct, and sexuality to collective well-being.

Mitchell argues that while African Americans did not agree on specific ways to bolster their collective prospects, ideas about racial destiny and progress generally shifted from outward-looking remedies such as emigration to inward-focused debates about intraracial relationships, thereby politicizing the most private aspects of black life and spurring race activists to calcify gender roles, monitor intraracial sexual practices, and promote moral purity. Examining the ideas of well-known elite reformers such as Mary Church Terrell and W. E. B. DuBois, as well as unknown members of the working and aspiring classes, such as James Dubose and Josie Briggs Hall, Mitchell reinterprets black protest and politics and recasts the way we think about black sexuality and progress after Reconstruction.

Read the prologue here.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Usage and Terminology
• Prologue. To Better Our Condition One Way or Another: African Americans and the Concept of Racial Destiny
• 1. A Great, Grand & All Important Question: African American Emigration to Liberia
• 2. A Black Man’s Burden: Imperialism and Racial Manhood
• 3. The Strongest, Most Intimate Hope of the Race: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Afro-American Vitality
• 4. The Righteous Propagation of the Nation: Conduct, Conflict and Sexuality
• 5. Making the Home Life Measure Up: Environment, Class and The Healthy Race Household
• 6. The Colored Doll Is a Live One: Material Culture, Black Consciousness, and Cultivation of Interracial Desire
• 7. A Burden of Responsibility: Gender, “Miscegenation,” and Race Type
• 8. What a Pure, Healthy, Unified Race Can Accomplish: Collection Reproduction and the Sexual Politics of Black Nationalism
• Epilogue. The Crossroads of Destiny
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Reconstructing the Household: Families, Sex, and the Law in the Nineteenth-Century South

University of North Carolina Press
March 1998
382 pages
6.125 x 9.25
8 tables, notes, bibl., index
Paper ISBN  978-0-8078-4712-1

Peter W. Bardaglio, Associate Professor of History
Goucher College, Baltimore, Maryland

Winner of the 1996 James A. Rawley Prize, Organization of American Historians

In Reconstructing the Household, Peter Bardaglio examines the connections between race, gender, sexuality, and the law in the nineteenth-century South. He focuses on miscegenation, rape, incest, child custody, and adoption laws to show how southerners struggled with the conflicts and stresses that surfaced within their own households and in the larger society during the Civil War era. Based on literary as well as legal sources, Bardaglio’s analysis reveals how legal contests involving African Americans, women, children, and the poor led to a rethinking of families, sexuality, and the social order. Before the Civil War, a distinctive variation of republicanism, based primarily on hierarchy and dependence, characterized southern domestic relations. This organic ideal of the household and its power structure differed significantly from domestic law in the North, which tended to emphasize individual rights and contractual obligations. The defeat of the Confederacy, emancipation, and economic change transformed family law and the governance of sexuality in the South and allowed an unprecedented intrusion of the state into private life. But Bardaglio argues that despite these profound social changes, a preoccupation with traditional notions of gender and race continued to shape southern legal attitudes.

Read the preface here.

Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation

University of North Carolina Press
April 2010
368 pages
6.125 x 9.25
12 illus., 3 tables, 5 genealogical charts, 3 maps, appends., notes, index
Cloth ISBN:  978-0-8078-3368-1
Paper ISBN:  978-0-8078-7111-9

Malinda Maynor Lowery, Assistant Professor of History
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Awards & Distinctions

• 2010 Labriola Center American Indian National Book Award
• 2010 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title

With more than 50,000 enrolled members, North Carolina‘s Lumbee Indians are the largest Native American tribe east of the Mississippi River. Malinda Maynor Lowery, a Lumbee herself, describes how, between Reconstruction and the 1950s, the Lumbee crafted and maintained a distinct identity in an era defined by racial segregation in the South and paternalistic policies for Indians throughout the nation. They did so against the backdrop of some of the central issues in American history, including race, class, politics, and citizenship.

Lowery argues that “Indian” is a dynamic identity that, for outsiders, sometimes hinged on the presence of “Indian blood” (for federal New Deal policy makers) and sometimes on the absence of “black blood” (for southern white segregationists). Lumbee people themselves have constructed their identity in layers that tie together kin and place, race and class, tribe and nation; however, Indians have not always agreed on how to weave this fabric into a whole. Using photographs, letters, genealogy, federal and state records, and first-person family history, Lowery narrates this compelling conversation between insiders and outsiders, demonstrating how the Lumbee People challenged the boundaries of Indian, southern, and American identities

Table of Contents

• Preface: Telling Our Own Stories
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Terms
• Introduction: Coming Together
• 1 ADAPTING TO SEGREGATION
• 2 MAKING HOME AND MAKING LEADERS
• 3 TAKING SIDES
• 4 CONFRONTING THE NEW DEAL
• 5 Pembroke Farms: Gaining Economic Autonomy
• 6 MEASURING IDENTITY
• 7 RECOGNIZING THE LUMBEE
• Conclusion: Creating a Lumbee and Tuscarora Future
• Appendix
• Notes
• Index