Mixed Race Studies

The legend of Lone Star Dietz: Redskins namesake, coach — and possible impostor?

The Washington Post
2013-11-06

Richard Leiby

Reading, Pa. — Here lies the celebrated Lone Star Dietz — in a donated cemetery plot, aside a back road, under a drooping evergreen. A simple marker, paid for by friends, bears only one word that hints at his legend: “Coach.”

Finally, we have found him, the Washington Redskins’ namesake. Dietz coached the inaugural Boston Redskins team 80 years ago, before it moved to Washington. He was a Sioux Indian, and the team was named in his honor, “out of respect for Native American heritage and tradition.”

That is what the team’s attorneys have said, anyway, in court filings battling an effort by Native Americans to cancel the Redskins trademark as disparaging — a campaign more than two decades old. Now the objections to the name are reaching an unprecedented volume, including Tuesday’s D.C. Council vote condemning the team name as “racist and derogatory.”

In the midst of this criticism, team owner Dan Snyder wrote a letter to season-ticket holders last month in which he mentioned the team’s former Native American head coach and called the name “a badge of honor.”

But what if Coach Lone Star Dietz wasn’t an Indian?…

…A half-century after his death, it seems that no one has decisively pinned down the heritage of William Henry “Lone Star” Dietz. This makes the Redskins’ flat-out assertions that the First Coach was an Indian even more problematic for some…

…Dietz’s claims about his Sioux origins were accepted and repeated for decades by researchers and credulous reporters.

I was one of them. Ninety years after The Post first took note of Dietz and his artistry at the 1904 World’s Fair, I wrote about him. “His father was German, his mother Sioux,” I said in a story about how the Redskins got their name.

At the time, my understanding of Dietz’s heritage was based on the available scholarship and a number of interviews. Indians I talked to did not raise questions about his self-proclaimed Sioux identity…

Read the entire article here.

Black Beethoven and the Racial Politics of Music History

Transition
Issue 112, 2013
pages 117-130
DOI: 10.1353/tra.2013.0056

Nicholas T. Rinehart
Harvard University

Nicholas T. Rinehart debunks theories of Beethoven’s blackness and calls for a reimagining of the classical canon.

The Question

Was Beethoven Black? He surely wasn’t, but some insist otherwise. The question is not a new one—it has been rehashed over the course of several decades, although it never seems to have caused much of a stir in any public intellectual debates. Indeed, what is perhaps most fascinating about this question is that is has remained somewhat under the radar despite its stubbornness. Nobody really thinks Beethoven was black. And only a few have even stumbled upon the possibility. That Beethoven may have been black is pure trivia—a did-you-know factoid for the classical music enthusiast. The composer ranks with Alexanders Pushkin and Dumas as one of history’s great ethnic surprises, with the obvious exception that Beethoven wasn’t ethnic. He was simply swarthy.

The logic goes something like this: Beethoven’s family, by way of his mother, traced its foots to Flanders, which was for sometime under Spanish monarchical rule, and because Spain maintained a longstanding historical connection to North Africa through the Moors, somehow a single germ of blackness trickled down to our beloved Ludwig. This very theory—that Beethoven was descended from the Moors—has reappeared in several works throughout the twentieth century. Jamaican historian Joel Augustus Rogers (1880-1966) popularized this theory in several writings around midcentury, but the birth of the myth can be traced back further to approximately 1915 or even earlier according to music historian Dominique-René de Lerma, the world’s leading scholar on classical composers of color. Rogers assented in his provocative and controversial works such as the three-volume Sex and Race (1941-44), the two-volume World’s Great Men of Color (1946-47), 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro (1934), Five Negro Presidents (1965), and Nature Knows No Color Line (1952), that Beethoven—in addition to Thomas Jefferson, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Robert Browning, and several popes, among others—was genealogically African and thus black. Musicologist Donald Macardle and de Lerma both refuted this possibility with several decades between them. De Lerma also authored a brief account…

Read or purchase the article here.

Mary Seacole: The Charismatic Black Nurse Who Became a Heroine of the Crimea [new edition]

Constable & Robinson
2006-11-16
288 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9781845294977

Jane Robinson

The ‘Greatest Black Briton in History’ triumphed over the Crimea and Victorian England. She became an independent ‘doctress’ combining the herbal remedies of her African ancestry with sound surgical techniques. This biography of a Victorian celebrity, voted the greatest black Briton in history, brings Mary Seacole centre stage.

The ‘Greatest Black Briton in History’ triumphed over the Crimea and Victorian England. ‘The Times’ called her a heroine, Florence Nightingale called her a brothel-keeping quack, and Queen Victoria’s nephew called her, simply, ‘Mammy’—Mary Seacole was one of the most eccentric and charismatic women of her era. Born at her mother’s hotel in Jamaica in 1805, she became an independent ‘doctress’ combining the herbal remedies of her African ancestry with sound surgical techniques.

On the outbreak of the Crimean War, she arrived in London desperate to join Florence Nightingale at the Front, but the authorities refused to see her. Being black, nearly 50, rather stout, and gloriously loud in every way, she was obviously unsuitable. Undaunted, Mary travelled to Balaklava under her own steam to build the ‘British Hotel’, just behind the lines. It was an outrageous venture, and a huge success – she became known and loved by everyone from the rank and file to the royal family.

For more than a century after her death this remarkable woman was all but forgotten. This, the first full-length biography of a Victorian celebrity recently voted the greatest black Briton in history, brings Mary Seacole centre stage at last.

Racial Identity and the Shadow of Jim Crow in the Black Community

(1)ne Drop Project
2013-10-07

Kimberly Bernita Ross
Michigan State University

My grandmother Bernice was born in New Orleans in 1918 to a Black mother and a White father at a time when interracial marriage was illegal. Her mother, Roseanna, a maid in a White home, had a relationship with her employer’s son. Grandma Bernice was born with blue eyes, straight hair, and white skin, and was raised by a brown-skinned mother in the Jim Crow south. Her life was marred with instances of social confusion, isolation and abuse from others because society was not prepared to handle racial ambiguity. To say however, that Grandma Bernice was merely the iconic tragic mulatto, as depicted in 19th century American literature, like Nella Larsen’s novels, Quicksand and Passing, would simplify her experience and bypass an opportunity to analyze racial identity. These depictions, at times, reduce struggles with racial identity to individual human drama, divorcing this inner conflict, from the racist society that created it. Today, at a time when some people seem to have race fatigue, the truth is, as we continue to become a more cosmopolitan world, it would be to our collective advantage to become more race savvy, beginning by looking at the past. My grandmother’s story reveals the impact of state imposed identity and how in the Black community, racism and Jim Crow still overshadow our relationships and perceptions of racial identity…

Read the entire essay here.

New recognition for first black U.S. doctor with medical degree

American Medical News
2010-11-08

Kevin B. O’Reilly

Dr. James McCune Smith’s descendants unveiled a new headstone in a ceremony to commemorate his achievements as a physician, essayist and abolitionist.

The New York City burial site of the nation’s first black medical degree-holder received a new headstone—one provided by his white descendants in a recent public ceremony.

Dr. James McCune Smith received his medical degree at the University of Glasgow in Scotland in 1837, forced to go overseas for his education due to U.S. colleges’ racist admissions policies. Historians say the training provided at European medical schools at that time was, ironically, superior to that offered in the U.S.

Greta Blau, Dr. Smith’s great-great-great-granddaughter, learned that she was descended from the doctor after finding his name inscribed in a family Bible. She recognized the name from a history paper she had written years earlier in college.

After confirming the family connection through genealogical research, Blau learned that Dr. Smith’s five surviving children passed, lived and identified as white in society after he died in 1865.

Dr. Smith treated both black and white patients in New York City. He was the first black doctor to write a medical case report—presented to the New York Medical and Surgical Society in 1840.

He also was the first black physician to have a medical scientific paper published, in the New York Journal of Medicine in 1844, and was a prominent essayist who attacked slavery and racial theories positing blacks’ inferiority. He was a friend of Frederick Douglass and wrote the introduction to his 1855 autobiography…

Read the entire article here.

What’s Purity Got to Do with It? Searching Family History and Genealogy

Brooklyn Historical Society
Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations
Othmer Library
Saturday, 2013-12-07, 15:00-18:00 EST (Local Time)

Part Two of the reading series Quantifying Bloodlines

How do stories help us to understand the ways in which we dissect lineage?

Bring in your own family tree, genealogical research, family photos, or family name origins, while we take a close look at The Fiddler on Pantico Run: An African Warrior, His White Descendants, A Search for Family by Joe Mozingo.  Short multi-media pieces will be screened detailing more about Joe Mozingo’s search for family history through a surname that both haunts, confuses and intrigues him, and unlocks hidden histories about migration and genealogy.

If you are just beginning a search for your family history or have searched for many years, this discussion session with Jennifer Scott, anthropologist and public historian at the New School, will help to illuminate the discovery process about lineage, identity and race.

Please plan to have read the book prior to our meeting.

Session is limited to 15 participants. Active participation is key.

This reading and discussion group is co-sponsored by MixedRaceStudies.org

For more information, click here.

Bringing Black History Home

CUNY Newswire
The City University of New York
2011-04-15

Antoinette Martignoni, left, and her granddaughter Greta Blau hold a family Bible that contains the name of their ancestor, Dr. James McCune Smith, the nation’s first African American physician at Martignoni’s home in Fairfield, Conn., Thursday, Sept. 23, 2010. (AP Photo/Jessica Hill)

The name James McCune Smith meant little to Greta Blau in 1996, when she briefly mentioned him in a research paper she wrote for a History of Blacks in New York City course designed and taught by Joanne Edey-Rhodes.

Blau’s paper for the Hunter College class focused on the Colored Orphan Asylum, founded on Fifth Avenue to assist homeless and destitute African-American children. She noted that Smith, the asylum’s doctor, was the nation’s first professionally trained African-American physician — as well as an eminent 19th century abolitionist and author whose friends included antislavery movement leader Frederick Douglass.

Little did Blau know that the assignment would years later lead her on an engrossing journey into her own family’s roots.

It began one day in 2003, at her grandmother’s house in Connecticut, when she was looking through the family Bible that an Irish relative had. “The name was in there as the father of my great-grandmother’s second husband,” she said. “I knew I had heard that name before. I went home and Googled the name, and he came up. I said, ‘That can’t be the right person, because I’m white.’”…

Read the entire article here.

In‐and‐out‐of‐race: The story of Noble Johnson

Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory
Volume 15, Issue 1, 2005
pages 33-52
DOI: 10.1080/07407700508571487

Jane Gaines, Professor of Film Studies
Columbia University School of the Arts

Noble Johnson’s story is a very American story, a story more typical than we have historically wanted to admit. It is the story of race loyalty and race betrayal, of family belonging and disconnection. It is a mysterious story of disappearance, a chronicle of the way a public person became a “missing person.” His is also the story of someone who was more than one—a sort of man with a thousand faces and a range of identities. We claim him as an important African American while acknowledging that he chose to think of himself and to live in terms of other equally raced categories during different portions of his long life.

The case for owning his African American heritage was continually made to Johnson by his brother George in correspondence during the later years of his life. George’s history is one of deep affiliation with the African American community. A booster for black enterprise from his years as a real estate agent in the all-black town of Muskogee, Oklahoma, in his later years George started a black entertainment clippings service in Los Angeles, where he moved from Omaha, Nebraska, in 1926. But the glory for George was in the formation, in 1916, of the Lincoln Motion Picture Company, a business made possible by Noble Johnson’s Los Angeles connections but also George’s industrious work building a distribution…

Read or purchase the article here.

Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance

HarperCollins Publishers
2013-09-10
544 pages
Trimsize: 6 x 9
Hardcover ISBN: 9780060882389; ISBN10: 0060882387
eBook ISBN: 9780062199126; ISBN10: 0062199129

Carla Kaplan, Stanton W. and Elisabeth K. Davis Distinguished Professor of American Literature
Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts

New York City in the Jazz Age was host to a pulsating artistic and social revolution. Uptown, an unprecedented explosion in black music, literature, dance, and art sparked the Harlem Renaissance. While the history of this African-American awakening has been widely explored, one chapter remains untold: the story of a group of women collectively dubbed “Miss Anne.”

Sexualized and sensationalized in the mainstream press—portrayed as monstrous or insane—Miss Anne was sometimes derided within her chosen community of Harlem as well. While it was socially acceptable for white men to head uptown for “exotic” dancers and “hot” jazz, white women who were enthralled by life on West 125th Street took chances. Miss Anne in Harlem introduces these women—many from New York’s wealthiest social echelons—who became patrons of, and romantic participants in, the Harlem Renaissance. They include Barnard College founder Annie Nathan Meyer, Texas heiress Josephine Cogdell Schuyler, British activist Nancy Cunard, philanthropist Charlotte Osgood Mason, educator Lillian E. Wood, and novelist Fannie Hurst—all women of accomplishment and renown in their day. Yet their contributions as hostesses, editors, activists, patrons, writers, friends, and lovers often went unacknowledged and have been lost to history until now.

In a vibrant blend of social history and biography, award-winning writer Carla Kaplan offers a joint portrait of six iconoclastic women who risked ostracism to follow their inclinations—and raised hot-button issues of race, gender, class, and sexuality in the bargain. Returning Miss Anne to her rightful place in the interracial history of the Harlem Renaissance, Kaplan’s formidable work remaps the landscape of the 1920s, alters our perception of this historical moment, and brings Miss Anne to vivid life.

Penny Marshall Directing A Dennis Rodman Documentary + Effa Manley Project In Development

Shadow and Act: On Cinema of the African Diaspora
2012-09-25

Courtney Singer

Lately, she has been working on a documentary about the basketball player Dennis Rodman, some of which she has been shooting via Skype. That came up because a) Ms. Marshall is a big sports fan. (“You can yell and scream at a game and no one’s taking you away in a white coat.”) And b) “I have a little radar to the insane,” she said. “They seek me out. Dennis and his agent asked if I would do a documentary.”

That was from a recent Wall Street Journal profile of actress/producer/director Penny Marshall, on account of the publication of her book My Mother Was Nuts.

I must admit that Penny Marshall’s name probably won’t be the first one I’d think of if I were to come up with a short list of directors for a Dennis Rodman documentary. But as the director of memorable films like Big, Awakenings, A League Of Their Own, The Preacher’s Wife (and several others) says of herself, she’s drawn to the *insane;* or rather, the *insane* are drawn to her – the supposition there being that Dennis Rodman is *insane.*…

But what I did find there was a project she has in development to direct titled Effa. I almost ignored it when I looked closer, and read the project’s synopsis which reads:

Effa Manley is a white woman “passing” as black during segregation. Outspoken, dynamic and beautiful, she crashes through barriers in the male-dominated world of sports as the first woman to own and manage a professional sports team.

The name didn’t immediately ring the bell, so I looked up Effa Manley to learn that she was also the first woman inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame; She co-owned the Newark Eagles baseball franchise in the Negro leagues with her husband Abe Manley from 1935 to 1946, and was sole owner through 1948 after his death.

She was also active during the America civil rights movement and was a social activist. She died in 1981 at 84 years old.

It’s said that Manley’s racial background is not fully known. Her biological parents may have been white, but she was reportedly raised by her black stepfather and white mother, which lead to assumptions that her stepfather was her biological father and therefore many thought she was black—or at least, bi-racial.

This calls for further research…

Read the entire article here.