{"id":13891,"date":"2011-05-21T01:27:10","date_gmt":"2011-05-21T01:27:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=13891"},"modified":"2013-08-16T02:07:08","modified_gmt":"2013-08-16T02:07:08","slug":"black-or-white","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=13891","title":{"rendered":"Black or White?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Black or White?<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/a>
\n2011-05-14<\/p>\n

Daniel J. Sharfstein<\/a><\/strong>, Professor of Law
\nVanderbilt University<\/em><\/p>\n

Daniel J. Sharfstein is the author of \u201cThe Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White<\/a>.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

In February 1861, just weeks after Louisiana<\/a> seceded from the Union<\/a>, Randall Lee Gibson<\/a> enlisted as a private in a state army regiment. The son of a wealthy sugar planter and valedictorian of Yale\u2019s Class of 1853, Gibson had long supported secession. Conflict was inevitable, he believed, not because of states\u2019 rights or the propriety or necessity of slavery. Rather, a war would be fought over the inexorable gulf between whites and blacks, or what he called \u201cthe most enlightened race\u201d and \u201cthe most degraded of all the races of men.\u201d Because Northern abolitionists were forcing the South to recognize \u201cthe political, civil, and social equality of all the races of men,\u201d Gibson wrote, the South was compelled to enjoy \u201cindependence out of the Union.\u201d (Read Randall Lee Gibson\u2019s article, \u201cOur Federal Union<\/a>.\u201d)<\/p>\n

The notion that war turned on a question of black and white as opposed to slavery and freedom was hardly an intuitive position for Gibson or for the South. Although Southern society was premised on slavery, the line between black and white had always been permeable. Since the 17th century, people descended from African slaves had been assimilating into white communities. It was a great migration that was covered up even as it was happening, its reach extending into the most unlikely corners of the South: although Randall Gibson was committed to a hardline ideology of racial difference, this secret narrative of the American experience was his family\u2019s story.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Gibson\u2019s siblings proudly traced their ancestry to a prosperous farmer in the South Carolina<\/a> backcountry named Gideon Gibson. What they didn\u2019t know was that when he first arrived in the colony in the 1730s, he was a free man of color.<\/strong> At the time the legislature thought he had come there to plot a slave revolt. The governor demanded a personal audience with him and learned that he was a skilled tradesman, had a white wife and had owned land and slaves in Virginia and North Carolina. Declaring the Gibsons to be \u201cnot Negroes nor Slaves but Free people,\u201d the governor granted them hundreds of acres of land. The Gibsons soon married into their Welsh and Scots-Irish community along the frontier separating South Carolina\u2019s coastal plantations from Indian country. It did not matter if the Gibsons were black or white\u2014they were planters…<\/p>\n

Read the entire opinion piece here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Black or White? The New York Times 2011-05-14 Daniel J. Sharfstein, Professor of Law Vanderbilt University Daniel J. Sharfstein is the author of \u201cThe Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White.\u201d In February 1861, just weeks after Louisiana seceded from the Union, Randall Lee Gibson enlisted as a private […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1245,459,1467,8,6462,6940,20],"tags":[2766,2767,6388,6387,2327],"class_list":["post-13891","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-biography","category-history","category-law","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-slavery","category-usa","tag-daniel-j-sharfstein","tag-daniel-sharfstein","tag-randall-gibson","tag-randall-lee-gibson","tag-the-new-york-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13891","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13891"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13891\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13891"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13891"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13891"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}