{"id":31411,"date":"2013-05-31T03:25:57","date_gmt":"2013-05-31T03:25:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=31411"},"modified":"2013-05-31T03:25:57","modified_gmt":"2013-05-31T03:25:57","slug":"black-woman-rises-to-leadership-in-daughters-of-the-american-revolution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=31411","title":{"rendered":"Black woman rises to leadership in Daughters of the American Revolution"},"content":{"rendered":"

Black woman rises to leadership in Daughters of the American Revolution<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

theGrio<\/a>
\n2013-05-26<\/p>\n

Donovan X. Ramsey<\/strong><\/p>\n

This month, Autier Allen-Craft was elected to the position of regent in the Norwalk\u2013Village Green chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution<\/a> (DAR) in Connecticut. Allen-Craft, a black woman, says the organization has come a long way since its years of controversy related to racial exclusion.<\/p>\n

Allen-Craft rose up the ranks in the organization, serving as vice regent of her Connecticut chapter two years ago before being elected to her current, high-level position. Just a few decades prior, she began the search into her family tree that would eventually lead her to membership in DAR.<\/p>\n

\u201cI attended Benedict College in South Carolina and I while I was there I lived with my maternal grandmother,\u201d Allen-Craft told theGrio<\/em>. \u201cI was always interested in why my older ancestors looked they way they did. They were very fair.<\/strong> So I began to ask her questions about who her parents were, and who her grandparents were, and she would tell me as far back as she could remember.\u201d<\/p>\n

Before long, Allen-Craft\u2019s curiosity led her to the South Carolina archives in Columbia.<\/p>\n

An amazing ancestral discovery<\/strong><\/p>\n

After years of research, in about 1990, she stumbled upon records of her great-great grandfather \u2014 a white plantation owner, who was her third-great grandfather.<\/strong> She says after getting over the initial shock, she looked deeper into his ancestry and found that his grandfather, her fifth-great grandfather, had fought in the American Revolution. \u201cHe was one of the few plantation owners that would claim his offspring with a black woman,\u201d she said of her great-great grandfather. \u201cBecause of that, I\u2019ve been able to trace back as far as I have.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to historical record, blacks played a significant role the American Revolution<\/a>. One of the first \u201cmartyrs\u201d of the American Revolution was Crispus Attucks<\/a>, a man of African Descent who was killed in the Boston Massacre<\/a>. Black Minutemen<\/a> fought at the battles of Lexington and Concord<\/a> as early as April 1775. And when Rhode Island needed soldiers, the state legislature passed a law in 1778 that said \u201cevery able-bodied Negro, mulatto<\/a>, or Indian man-slave\u201d could fight. An estimated 200 men enlisted with the promise of freedom as a reward…<\/p>\n

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

Black woman rises to leadership in Daughters of the American Revolution theGrio 2013-05-26 Donovan X. Ramsey This month, Autier Allen-Craft was elected to the position of regent in the Norwalk\u2013Village Green chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) in Connecticut. Allen-Craft, a black woman, says the organization has come a long way since […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,459,8,20],"tags":[14808,11185,11179,14807,3999,12771],"class_list":["post-31411","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-history","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-autier-allen-craft","tag-dar","tag-daughters-of-the-american-revolution","tag-donovan-x-ramsey","tag-the-grio","tag-thegrio"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31411","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=31411"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31411\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31411"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31411"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31411"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}