{"id":53219,"date":"2017-04-03T02:27:18","date_gmt":"2017-04-03T02:27:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=53219"},"modified":"2017-04-03T02:27:18","modified_gmt":"2017-04-03T02:27:18","slug":"free-people-of-color-in-slaveholding-north-carolina-the-andersons-of-granville-county","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=53219","title":{"rendered":"Free People of Color in Slaveholding North Carolina: The Andersons of Granville County"},"content":{"rendered":"

Free People of Color in Slaveholding North Carolina: The Andersons of Granville County<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Renegade South: Histories of Unconventional Southerners<\/a>
\n2017-04-01<\/p>\n

Vikki Bynum<\/strong><\/a>, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History
\nTexas State University, San Marcos<\/em><\/p>\n


\nMap courtesy of Kianga Lucas.<\/small><\/p>\n

Late last year, I was contacted by Raymont Hawkins-Jones, a descendant of a family I\u2019d written about many years earlier: the Andersons of Granville County, North Carolina<\/a>. The Andersons were one of the many fascinating free families of color that I\u2019ve studied over the years, and I enjoyed learning more about their history from Raymont. Back in pre-internet 1992, pretty much everything I knew about my subjects was what I\u2019d learned from records held at the North Carolina State Archives<\/a>. Today, social media has enabled me to meet many of their descendants and to access additional records posted on the internet. The same digital revolution that stimulated me to create this blog also allows me to revisit my early topics of research and bring their stories up to date! (1)<\/p>\n

The Andersons and the families with whom they intermarried belonged to a community of people defined by society as non-white, but who rarely appeared as slaves in North Carolina\u2019s<\/a> state and court records. As I\u2019ve noted in earlier Renegade South<\/em> essays about the mixed heritage communities of Gloucester County, Virginia<\/a>, and the \u201cWinton Triangle<\/a>\u201d of North Carolina, the lives of free people of color reveal far more complicated histories of racial identity and race relations than the broad images of \u201cwhite freedom\u201d and \u201cblack slavery\u201d would suggest.<\/p>\n

In fact, families such as the Andersons are central to understanding historical events that preceded and followed the institution of slavery, including colonization, the American Revolution<\/a>, the Civil War<\/a> and Reconstruction<\/a>, the postwar rise of the Ku Klux Klan<\/a>, and the New South <\/a>era of white supremacy.<\/p>\n

The very existence of free<\/em> people of color, especially those in the South, threatened the growing institution of slavery. Southern whites especially feared their influence on slaves as the United States<\/a> moved toward a Civil War generated by national conflicts over slavery. Determined to prevent free people of color from exercising full rights of citizenship and mobility, lawmakers increasingly policed their behavior through oppressive laws and customs…<\/p>\n

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

Late last year, I was contacted by Raymont Hawkins-Jones, a descendant of a family I\u2019d written about many years earlier: the Andersons of Granville County, North Carolina. The Andersons were one of the many fascinating free families of color that I\u2019ve studied over the years, and I enjoyed learning more about their history from Raymont.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,459,8,6940,20],"tags":[26778,879,26779,13966,2317,1453,1454,14118],"class_list":["post-53219","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-history","category-media-archive","category-slavery","category-usa","tag-granville-county","tag-north-carolina","tag-raymont-hawkins-jones","tag-renegade-south","tag-renegade-south-histories-of-unconventional-southerners","tag-victoria-bynum","tag-victoria-e-bynum","tag-vikki-bynum"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53219","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=53219"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53219\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53220,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53219\/revisions\/53220"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=53219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=53219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=53219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}