Mixed Race Studies

Movie of the Week: Lost Boundaries

LIFE
1949-07-04
pages 64-66

THE DOCTOR’S SON, who has just learned he is part Negro looks at the half-moons on his nails for telltale shadows–a widely believed but completely inaccurate test of Negro blood.

Film tells real-life story of Negroes “passing” as whites

Dr. Albert Johnston (below) of Keene, N.H. is a prosperous New England physician who was a Negro for the first 28 years of his life, lived as a white man for 20 more and became a Negro again when the U.S. Navy, having investigated his past, refused him a commission for “inability to meet physical requirements.” The story of what Negroes call his “passing” is not too different from that of thousands of other technically “colored” Americans who have passed over the invisible boundary to the white race. Told by William L. White in a widely read Reader’s Digest article in 1947,  it has now been made into an honest and affecting movie by Louis de Rochemont. Using the documentary technique he popularized in Hollywood (The House on 92nd Street, Boomerang!), De Rochemont filmed Lost Boundaries against the real background of New England towns. As fictionalized for the screen, it tells of a light-skinned Negro couple (played by white actors) driven to cross the color line by poverty and the advice of friends, and of the vexations of discrimination. They build a happy but insecure life in a small town, gaining the respect and friendship of their neighbors and bringing up children in ignorance of their past. Their lives are disrupted when they have to admit the truth, but finally patched together again by tolerance and courage and good sense. Related without melodrama, acted with conviction and force, Lost Boundaries is a direct and honest account of one shadowy sector of American life where unknown thousands live today in secret conflict of loyalties and fears…

Read the entire article here.

An Heir to a Tribe’s Culture Ensures Its Language Is Not Forgotten

The Saturday Profile
The New York Times
2016-04-08

Michelle Innis

Stan Grant, a Wiradjuri elder, at his home in Narrandera, Australia. Mr. Grant was an author of “A New Wiradjuri Dictionary,” after years of advocating to preserve the Wiradjuri language. Credit Adam Ferguson for The New York Times

NARRANDERA, Australia — Stan Grant, crudely tattooed in a way that hints at the petty crime and drunken brawls of his youth, clasped gnarly hands across his round belly and murmured: “birrangbirrang, birrangbirrang.”

Mr. Grant had spotted a small kingfisher, or birrangbirrang in Wiradjuri, as it swooped low over the Murrumbidgee River in the oppressive summer heat, calling to its mate.

Slipping back into English, he spoke over the whirring of cicadas in the river red gum trees that line the sandy banks: “It is smaller than a kookaburra. Its mate will be nearby.”

Mr. Grant, 75, is an elder of Australia’s second-largest Aboriginal tribe, the Wiradjuri, who roamed most of central New South Wales before white farmers surged inland in the early 1800s.

Until recently, he was one of only a handful of people still speaking the tribal language, also called Wiradjuri (pronounced wi-RAD-jury), which nearly died out in the 20th century, when Aboriginals could be jailed for speaking their native tongue in public.

“You are nobody without language,” Mr. Grant said. “The world does not respect a person who does not have language.”…

…Mr. Grant was probably 8 or 9 years old the night a local policeman heard his grandfather, Wilfred Johnson, and locked him up. But he does not recall a sense of alarm.

“He was an elegant man,” he said of Mr. Johnson. “He was beautifully dressed, usually in a coat and hat. But he was black. So it wasn’t the first time he had spent the night in jail.”

After the arrest, Mr. Johnson, who spoke seven languages, refused to speak Wiradjuri in public…

Read the entire article here.

The ‘Human Computer’ Behind the Moon Landing Was a Black Woman

The Daily Beast
2016-04-07

Nathan Place

Image of Katherine Johnson at NASA Langley Research Center in 1971.

In an age of racism and sexism, Katherine Johnson broke both barriers at NASA.

She calculated the trajectory of man’s first trip to the moon, and was such an accurate mathematician that John Glenn asked her to double-check NASA’s computers. To top it off, she did it all as a black woman in the 1950s and ’60s, when women at NASA were not even invited to meetings.

And you’ve probably never heard of her.

Meet Katherine Johnson, the African-American woman who earned the nickname “the human computer” at NASA during its space race golden age…

Read the entire article here.

Meet Yosif Stalin, The Soviet-Born Black American From Kremlin, Virginia

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
2016-04-08

Carl Schrek

KREMLIN, Virginia — Yosif Stalin stood before his Kremlin home on a windswept afternoon this spring, his weathered hands gripping his walker. “I still own it,” he said of the white, two-story house off a lonely country road.

It’s no coincidence that this octogenarian was named after one of the 20th century’s bloodiest dictators, but it’s just half of his name. His full name is Yosif Stalin Kim Roane, and he was the first child of African-American parents ever born in the Soviet Union.

“Didn’t nobody pay that no mind,” Roane said of his notorious namesake in a recent interview with RFE/RL. “They mostly called me Joe.”

Roane, 84, is among the few living offspring of African-Americans who traveled to the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s to seek a better life in the nascent communist state.

Most of these voyagers were driven by political convictions or economic hardship amid the Great Depression and pernicious racism in the United States, including the segregationist Jim Crow laws of the American South.

That Roane was born in an empire run from the Kremlin and grew up in this tiny Virginia hamlet of the same name is a coincidence that inspired the title of a recent documentary, Kremlin To Kremlin, aimed at preserving the record of his family’s remarkable journey for future generations…

Read the entire article here.

‘The Firebrand and the First Lady,’ by Patricia Bell-Scott

Sunday Book Review
The New York Times
2016-02-19

Irin Carmon

Pauli Murray, in 1946, and Eleanor Roosevelt, circa 1943. Credit Left, Bettmann/Corbis; right, Stock Montage/Getty Images

Patricia Bell-Scott, The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016)

The February 1953 issue of Ebony included an article entitled “Some of My Best Friends Are Negroes.” The byline was Eleanor Roosevelt’s, though the headline, apparently, was not. “One of my finest young friends is a charming woman lawyer — Pauli Murray, who has been quite a firebrand at times but of whom I am very fond,” Roosevelt wrote. “She is a lovely person who has struggled and come through very well.” Indeed, nothing was ever easy for Murray, a black woman born in 1910, a woman attracted to women and also a poet, memoirist, lawyer, activist and Episcopal priest. But her tender friendship with Roosevelt, sustained over nearly a quarter-century and more than 300 cards and letters, helped. It is the rich earth Patricia Bell-Scott tills for “The Firebrand and the First Lady,” a tremendous book that has been 20 years in the making.

You could say Pauli Murray was born too soon, and saying so captures the essential injustice of her life, but it would also rob her of credit for making her own time the best she could. “I’m really a submerged writer,” Murray once told her friends, “but the exigencies of the period have driven me into social action.” The granddaughter of a woman born into slavery and a mixed-race Union soldier, Murray was arrested for refusing to sit in the colored section of a bus 15 years before the Montgomery bus boycott and for participating in restaurant sit-ins in the early 1940s, long before the 1960 sit-ins at Woolworth’s lunch counter. She led a national campaign on behalf of a black sharecropper on death row…

Read the entire review here.

Britain’s first black female High Court judge opens up about racism at the bar

Legal Cheek
London, United Kingdom
2016-03-30

Katie King, Reporter

Clerks would Tippex out her name on briefs and write in the name of male pupil they wanted to be the tenant

Dame Linda Dobbs has exposed shameful incidents of racism and sexism at the bar, particularly from her own clerks, in a revealing interview for the First 100 Years project — an ambitious video history which aims to highlight and celebrate the achievements of female lawyers in a profession long dominated by men. The extent of that domination is starkly revealed by the project’s timeline:…

…In the video the Sierra Leone born judge, and University of Surrey grad, recalls that attitudes to women in the profession were very different when she was called to the bar in 1981. One major hurdle for the now 65 year-old was the attitude of the many solicitors who did not want to instruct a woman, either because they, or, more likely, their client, considered them to be inferior…

Read the entire article here.

On Jerusalem Walls, Artist Memorializes Hebrew Israelite Rabbi from Harlem

The Assimilator: Intermarrying high and low culture
Forward
2016-03-31

Sam Kestenbaum, Staff Writer

Wikicommons / Solomon Souza / YouTube

When Rabbi Mordecai Herman would visit the Lower East Side of the 1920s, then teeming with Jewish immigrants from Europe, he cut an intriguing figure.

He was a wizened black rabbi and former sailor from Harlem who spoke Hebrew, some Yiddish, and was a pioneering spiritual leader of the early black Hebrew Israelite movement.

Now, nearly a century after his life’s work, Herman has been memorialized on the streets of Jerusalem — a Jewish homecoming for a forgotten religious figure.

This is thanks to Solomon Souza, an Israeli artist who has transformed Jerusalem’s central Mehane Yehudah market into a pop-up art gallery, emblazoning the enclosed market’s shuttered metal doors with over 150 graffiti portraits of iconic figures like Albert Einstein, Golda Meir, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef and the biblical prophet Moses…

Read the entire article here.

W.T. Jones — Carthage’s best-kept secret: From slave to industrialist in the South

The Courier-Tribune
Ashboro, North Carolina
2016-03-15

Judi Brinegar

(Contributed photo)

He was born the son of a slave and her white owner in 1833. By time time of his death in 1910, William T. Jones was one of the prominent business owners in Carthage. He rubbed elbows with the elite, white, upper class in Moore County during the 1880s, dined with them, threw elaborate holiday parties where most of the guests were white, and even attended church with them. Both of his wives, Sophia Isabella McLean and Florence Dockery were white. Dockery was the daughter of a well-to-do Apex family.

Yet, until a decade ago, few in this small Moore County town acknowledged out loud that Jones was not a white man.

Then, Pat Motz-Frazier entered the scene in 2005. She purchased Jones home, built in 1880 for his wife, Florence, and today runs it as a bed and breakfast, aptly named “The Old Buggy Inn.”

“He built this huge elaborate house because he and his wife wanted to fill it with children,” Motz-Frazier says. “Unfortunately, they never had any.”

Motz-Frazier ran into many brick walls while trying to research the history of her historic Victorian home. Many of those she asked, declined to acknowledge that Jones, president of the Tyson & Jones Buggy Company, was anything but a white man, she says. Slowly and methodically, she finally put together the pieces of the puzzle of what was a remarkable story of Jones, one man who, in the 19th century, never let the color of his skin define him…

Read the entire article here.

WELL! WELL!

Goldsboro Weekly Argus
Goldsboro, North Carolina
Thursday, 1895-02-28 (Volume XVI, Number 67)
page 1, column 3
Source: Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. United States Library of Congress.

Well, well, well!

“Where are we at?”

The sudden death of Frederick Douglas, the foremost negro in America, not by deserts but by the combination of fortuitous circumstances, occurred at his home in Washington, D. C., Wednesday night, and yesterday the Rep-Pop-Fusion House of Representatives of the General Assembly of North Carolina adjourned in his honor.

Fred Douglas as every one knows, was a mulatto, who was born a slave, but ran away at the age of 21 and made good his escape to New York. He had acquired a pretty fair education in his slavery days, which aided him in engineering his escape and helped him in his thus acquired freedom to gain notoriety. He leaped into prominence at one bound—at an anti-slavery meeting in Nantucket in 1841, where he made a speech, and delivered himself with such force and venom against the South that he was at once employed by the “Massachusetts Anti-Slavery League” to take the lecture field m behalf of the emancipation movement, that culminated in the war between the States.

After the war Douglas pressed himself into the field of politics, with his past prestige to give him force, and was made secretary of the San Domingo Commission, in 1871, under President Grant; and in 1872 he was one of the Republican Presidential electors of New York.

Subsequently he was for a number of years, until the Republicans went out of power, Register of Deeds for the District of Columbia, and while incumbent of that office married a white woman.

When President Harrison came into power he made Douglas U.S. Minister to Hayti.

This is the record in brief of the man who, though a negro himself, eschewed his own race and attempted to promulgate amalgamation, by marrying a white wife:—this is the man, “neither fish nor fowl,” as to race, but very foul always in his abuse of the South, in whose “honor” the lower House of the General Assembly of North Carolina, by the majority vote of its Rep-Pop fusion contingent, adjourned yesterday.

Wonder what Senator Marion Butler’s Etheopean will have to say about this action of his Russell-Pearson-Skinner Butler-Kitchen-ridden “Co-operative” Legislature.

Truly are we fallen on strange times in North Carolina.

Miscegenation Endorsed.

Several weeks ago a proposition was made in the General Assembly to adjourn in honor of Robert E. Lee, on the occasion of his birthday. This resolution was voted down, although by enactment of a prior Legislature Gen. Lee’s birthday is a public holiday in the State, and the public buildings are closed on that day.

Yesterday a resolution was introduced to adjourn until 10 o’clock on Saturday in order to pay respect to the memory of George Washington, whose birthday is also a legal holiday. This was voted down.

At the same session that the resolution to adjourn in honor of Washington was voted down, the following resolution, introduced by Crews, colored, of Granville, was adopted:

Whereas, The late Frederick Douglass departed this life on the 20 inst.; and whereas, we greatly deplore the same; now, therefore,

Resolved, That when this House adjourn, it adjourn in respect to the memory of the deceased.

These three dates—the birth of Lee, the birth of Washington, and the death of Douglass are compassed in one month. This General Assembly, deliberately and after debate, voted down the resolutions to honor the memory of the Father of his country, and Robt. E. Lee, who, with Grant, was among the heroes of Chepultapec, and the commander of the armies of the South, but put on record, in the journals of the House, a resolution of adjournment “in respect to the memory of Frederick Douglass.”

This action is equivalent to saying:

“Washington—
Lee—
Douglas—
these three, but the greatest of these is Douglas.”

This action, more correctly than any other official proceeding of this Legislature, shows the spirit of this body.

Fusion is a marriage of two parties having no principles in common.

The endorsement of the miscegenation leader is the legitimate heir of this union. —Raleigh News & Observer

Fr. Virgilio Elizondo Takes His Own Life

The Rivard Report: Urban. Independent. All About San Antonio.
San Antonio, Texas
2016-03-14

Robert Rivard, Director

Fr. Virgilio Elizondo, one of San Antonio’s most accomplished and beloved Catholic priests whose work brought him recognition in Latin America and Europe and an esteemed faculty position at the University of Notre Dame, died of a self-inflicted gunshot at his home Monday afternoon, according to sources in the Catholic community.

The Bexar County Medical Examiner ruled Elizondo’s death a suicide on Tuesday.

Friends spoke of being devastated and in disbelief as the news made its way through Elizondo’s large circle in the city. Elizondo, 80, a Westside native and the son of Mexican immigrants, became a beacon for Catholics and non-Catholics inspired by his deep appreciation of mestizo history, culture and spirituality. His own roots gave him a grounded understanding as a theologian of what the poor and oppressed throughout Latin America were experiencing under the rule and repression of military dictatorships in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. For Elizondo, liberation theology that swept the continent in those decades was one and the same with his mestizo-rooted theology…

…He served as rector of San Fernando Cathedral in the late 1980s and early 1990s and was credited with resurrecting the parish community there. His understanding of the power of media led him to do extensive work with the archdiocese’s television station, and his Spanish-language Mass at San Fernando was broadcast each Sunday to more than one million people throughout Latin America. He was a co-founder with then-Archbishop Patrick Flores of the Mexican American Cultural Center in San Antonio and a strong advocate for the city and region’s working poor. He was fond of telling stories about his own happy childhood and close-knit family, poor in material goods, rich in spirit and faith.

Elizondo was named secondarily in a May 2015 lawsuit filed by a John Doe in Bexar County that accused Jesus Armando Dominguez, then a student at Assumption Seminary here, of sexually molesting him from 1980-83 while the boy lived at a local orphanage and was mentored by Dominguez. In the lawsuit, the John Doe claims he approached Elizondo to report the molestation, only to be kissed and fondled by him while the two were in a vehicle together. Elizondo vigorously denied the charges in a public statement and in conversations with friends, and said he was prepared to fight the allegation legally…

…Woodward, a Notre dame graduate, was a friend of Elizondo and Fr. Theodore Hesburgh, who served as president of Notre Dame from 1952-1987. He said it was a world that welcomed Elizondo. Despite his own humble beginnings, Elizondo learned to speak multiple languages and lectured widely on three continents. He authored numerous books, including “The Future is Mestizo” in 1992; “Guadalupe: Mother of the New Creation” in 1997; and “Galilean Journey: The Mexican American Promise” in 2000. His books remain in print, often assigned by theology professors at other major universities…

Read the entire article here.