Mixed Race Studies

Confounding Identity: Exploring the Life and Discourse of Lucy E. Parsons

Berks Conference for Women Historians
2011
29 pages

Michelle Diane Wright, Assistant Professor of History
Community College of Baltimore County

Despite the vast research conducted on radical activist history of late nineteenth century Chicago, there is very little that examines political and social ideologies that diverged from the westernized male archetype of the era. Furthermore, the contrived disciplinary divide that separates scholarly study into artificial and static compartments such as labor history, anarchist history, women’s studies or others, oversimplifies the contributions of individuals that straddle all categories of endeavor. Lucy Parsons, a woman of color, was born in Waco, Texas in 1853 but moved to Chicago in 1873 and became a pivotal figure in the labor and anarchist movements well into the early twentieth century causing the Chicago Police Department to label her “more dangerous than a thousand rioters.” Frequently overshadowed by the eminence of her husband Albert Parsons—labeled by many a Haymarket martyr—Lucy Parsons was a significant agitator in her own right and navigated a path for herself far outside the realm of the predominant thinking of other revolutionaries at that time. This paper examines the life and discourse of Lucy Parsons in an effort to contend with seemingly contradictory disciplines and perspectives in order to synthesize a holistic approach to a woman who confounds the strict identities that many have forced on her. Lucy Parsons’ impact upon concepts of injustice, governmental repression and labor inequalities come from a paradigm often marginalized and misinterpreted not only because it wasn’t derived from a source that was European or male, but also because her views came from a mind unconcerned with convention in relation to accepted societal standards. I am conducting research on the contributions of Lucy Parsons in order to write an accurate, comprehensive biography that also dissects marginalized perspectives of widely accepted historical accounts. In turn, I endeavor to provide a fuller and more holistic consideration of a historic period many assume is already understood.

Black By Default?

Lucy Parsons was born in Waco, Texas, in 1853 but moved to Chicago in 1873 where she lived until her death in 1942. She was a pivotal figure in several radical movements well into the early twentieth century causing the Chicago Police Department to label her “more dangerous than a thousand rioters.” Scholars, including biographer Carolyn Ashbaugh, have categorized Parsons solely African American although she never embraced the designation herself. Lucy Parsons publicly claimed to possess Mexican and Native American extraction. As was often the case of nineteenth century social mores, ill-informed Whites with social agendas centered on White supremacy designed racial categories employing superficial visual characteristics such as skin color, facial features and hair texture. In order to maintain White preeminence racial descriptions were dichotomous labels of White or Black, generally resulting in individuals possessing one drop of any non-European blood being deemed Black by default.

Further confounding public perception, Lucy Parsons was essentially, but not legally, married to a White man. Her husband, moreover, was one of the four men hanged following the Haymarket Massacre that occurred in Chicago in 1886, a fact that often overshadows the significant contributions of Lucy Parsons. Contrived labels such as of miscegenation or amalgamation clouded the legacy of Lucy Parsons as mainstream newspapers and other contemporaries publicly relegated her solely to the category of Black for no other reason than to discredit her efforts as well as those of her husband.

This essay analyzes the life and rhetoric of radical leftist agitator Lucy Parsons with the intention of providing a healthier understanding of the complicated world of racial identity politics during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While wider society—and even her death certificate—labeled her “Negro,” she was conversely accustomed to the concoction of nineteenth century Texas’ more complicated caste system that took into account all possible ethnic equations. Coming from a birthplace where she might have considered herself anything from Mestizo to Mulatto or any other of the dozens of categories utilized at the time, she was not culturally prepared for wider society’s monoracial designation of Black, and therefore scoffed at its validity.

In hindsight, onlookers often accuse Lucy Parsons of negating her African heritage for a seemingly more desirable ethnic identity. There is a sense, especially within the modern African American community, that a person of color self-labeling anything other than exclusively Black is virtually treasonous and committing a form of identity denial and self-hate. Criticism of notable individuals such as Barack Obama, Tiger Woods and others exemplify this sentiment of betrayal. In actuality, Lucy Parsons seemed to be holistically embracing her complete ethnic heritage, not merely a fraction of it. Therefore, the question must ultimately be posed as to how the legacy of those early externally defined racial and ethnic designations can provide a better consideration of multiracial designations in contemporary times…

Read the entire paper here.

One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life—A Story of Race and Family Secrets

Little, Brown and Company
2007
544 pages
5-1/2″ x 8-1/4″
ISBN: 9780316008068

Bliss Broyard

Ever since renowned literary critic Anatole Broyard’s own parents, New Orleans Creoles, had moved to Brooklyn and began to “pass” in order to get work, he had learned to conceal his racial identity. As he grew older and entered the ranks of the New York literary elite, he maintained the façade. Now his daughter Bliss tries to make sense of his choices and the impact of this revelation on her own life. She searches out the family she never knew in New York and New Orleans, and considers the profound consequences of racial identity.

Read an excerpt here.

Picturing Black New Orleans: A Creole Photographer’s View of the Early Twentieth Century

University Press of Florida
2012-09-02
152 pages
7×10
Cloth ISBN 13: 978-0-8130-4187-2

Arthé A. Anthony, Professor of American Studies, Emeritus
Occidental College, Los Angeles, California

Florestine Perrault Collins (1895-1988) lived a fascinating and singular life. She came from a Creole family that had known privileges before the Civil War, privileges that largely disappeared in the Jim Crow South. She learned photographic techniques while passing for white. She opened her first studio in her home, and later moved her business to New Orleans’s black business district. Fiercely independent, she ignored convention by moving out of her parents’ house before marriage and, later, by divorcing her first husband.

Between 1920 and 1949, Collins documented African American life, capturing images of graduations, communions, and recitals, and allowing her subjects to help craft their images. She supported herself and her family throughout the Great Depression and in the process created an enduring pictorial record of her particular time and place. Collins left behind a visual legacy that taps into the social and cultural history of New Orleans and the South.

It is this legacy that Arthé Anthony, Collins’s great-niece, explores in Picturing Black New Orleans. Anthony blends Collins’s story with those of the individuals she photographed, documenting the profound changes in the lives of Louisiana Creoles and African Americans. Balancing art, social theory, and history and drawing from family records, oral histories, and photographs rescued from New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Anthony gives us a rich look at the cultural landscape of New Orleans nearly a century ago.

James Douglas: Father of British Columbia

Dundurn Press
October 2009
240 pages
5.5 in x 8.5 in
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-55488-409-4
eBook ISBN: 978-1-77070-564-7

Julia H. Ferguson

James Douglas’s story is one of high adventure in pre-Confederation Canada. It weaves through the heart of Canadian and Pacific Northwest history when British Columbia was a wild land, Vancouver didn’t exist, and Victoria was a muddy village. Part black and illegitimate, Douglas was born in British Guiana (now Guyana) in 1803 to a Scottish plantation owner and a mixed-race woman. After schooling in Scotland, the fifteen-year-old Douglas sailed to Canada in 1819 to join the fur trade. With roads non-existent, he travelled thousands of miles each year, using the rivers and lakes as his highways. He paddled canoes, drove dogsleds, and snowshoed to his destinations. Douglas became a hard-nosed fur trader, married a part-Cree wife, and nearly provoked a war between Britain and the United States over the San Juan Islands on the West Coast. When he was in his prime, he established Victoria and secured the western region of British North America from the Russian Empire and the expansionist Americans. Eventually, Douglas became the controversial governor of the Colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia and oversaw the frenzied Fraser and Cariboo gold rushes.

Love in black and white

Princeton Alumni Weekly
2009-04-22

Lawrence Otis Graham ’83

Martha Sandweiss examines racial passing in America

Clarence King, a celebrated explorer, geologist, and surveyor in 19th-century America, chose to set that identity aside — and live as a working-class black man during a time of harsh racial segregation in the United States. He did it for love.

King moved back and forth between two sides of the color line: as the very public white, Newport-born, Yale-educated cartographer and researcher of the American West, and at other times as the strangely private man pretending to be a black Pullman train porter and itinerant steelworker (using the alias “James Todd”) who married an African-American woman. Martha Sandweiss, who joined Princeton’s history department this semester, explores King’s double life in her book Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line, published by Penguin Press in February. 

“While racial passing was surely attempted by some light-skinned blacks who wanted to escape the economic disadvantages tied to black life at the time,” explains Sandweiss, “it was virtually unheard-of for whites to voluntarily choose to face social and economic discrimination and live as black people.” But after falling in love with a black nursemaid, Ada Copeland, in 1888, that is what Clarence King did for 13 years. His wife and their five children had no idea that he was, in fact, white, and that he was the famous Clarence King, until he confessed it on his deathbed in 1901…

Read the entire article here.

Woman finds out famous relative was black

The Toronto Star
2011-02-23

Megan Ogilvie, Health Reporter

Growing up in Georgetown, Catherine Slaney knew her great-grandfather had an important and interesting past.

She knew he was a respected doctor and a surgeon in the American Civil War. She knew he was a friend of Abraham Lincoln and had received a gift — the shawl Lincoln wore to his first inauguration — from his widow after the president was killed. She knew he was a coroner in Kent County, Ont., and that he was involved in politics.

But Slaney did not know Dr. Anderson Ruffin Abbott was black…

…The uncle — Slaney’s mother’s brother — knew Abbott was black. His youngest sister, however, had no idea previous generations of her family had passed as white. Or that some family members still kept the secret.

“The family my mother and father knew was white-haired and pale-skinned,” Slaney says. “The question of race just never came up.”

Slaney says finding out Abbott was black cast a new importance on the pieces of history she did know about him. Abbott wasn’t just a doctor — he was the first black Canadian to be a licensed physician. He wasn’t just a coroner — he was the first the first black Canadian to hold the office…

..Slaney turned her research and personal experience into a book, Family Secrets: Crossing the Colour Line, which was published in 2000. She also completed a PhD at the University of Toronto, focusing on racial identity and the practice of passing.

By exploring her past, and finding her black heritage, Slaney says her outlook on the world has expanded…

Read the entire article here.

Family Secrets: Crossing the Colour Line

Dundurn Publishing
February 2003
264 pages
6 x 9 in
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-89621-982-0
eBook (PDF) ISBN: 978-1-55488-161-1
eBook (EPUB) ISBN: 978-1-45971-478-6

Catherine Slaney

Foreword by:

Daniel G. Hill, III (1923-2003)

Catherine Slaney grew into womanhood unaware of her celebrated Black ancestors. An unanticipated meeting was to change her life. Her great-grandfather was Dr. Anderson Abbott, the first Canadian-born Black to graduate from medical school in Toronto in 1861. In Family Secrets Catherine Slaney narrates her journey along the trail of her family tree, back through the era of slavery and the plight of fugitive slaves, the Civil War, the Elgin settlement near Chatham, Ontario, and the Chicago years. Why did some of her family identify with the Black Community while others did not? What role did “passing” play? Personal anecdotes and excerpts from archival Abbott family papers enliven the historical context of this compelling account of a family dealing with an unknown past. A welcome addition to African-Canadian history, this moving and uplifting story demonstrates that understanding one’s identity requires first the embracing of the past.

Why did some of her family identify with the Black Community while others did not? What role did “passing” play? Personal anecdotes and excerpts from archival Abbott family papers enliven the historical context of this compelling account of a family dealing with an unknown past. A welcome addition to African-Canadian history, this moving and uplifting story demonstrates that understanding one’s identity requires first the embracing of the past.

Race: A Philosophical Introduction, 2nd Edition

Polity Press
February 2013
240 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-7456-4965-8
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-7456-4966-5

Paul C. Taylor, Associate Professor of Philosophy
Pennsylvania State University

In Race: A Philosophical Introduction, Second Edition, Paul C. Taylor provides an accessible guide to a well-travelled but still-mysterious area of the contemporary social landscape. As in the first edition, the book blends metaphysics and social philosophy, analytic philosophy and pragmatic philosophy of experience. In this thoroughly updated and revised volume, Taylor outlines the main features and implications of race-thinking, while engaging the ideas of such important figures as Linda Alcoff, K. Anthony Appiah, W. E. B. Du Bois, Michel Foucault, Sally Haslanger, and Howard Winant. The result is a comprehensive but accessible introduction to philosophical race theory and to a non-biological and situational notion of race.

The book unfolds in a sequence of five chapters, each devoted to one of the following questions: What is race-thinking? Don’t we know better than to talk about race now? Are there any races? What is it like to have a racial identity? And how important, ethically, is colorblindness? On the way to answering these questions, Race takes up topics like mixed-race identity, white supremacy, the relationship between the race concept and other social identity categories and the impact of race-thinking on our erotic and romantic lives. The second edition’s new concluding chapter explores the racially fraught issues of policing, immigration, and global justice, and interrogates the thought that Barack Obama has ushered in a post-racial age. This volume is suitable for the educated general reader as well as for students and scholars in ethnic studies, philosophy, sociology, and other related fields.

Features

• Fully updated and revised edition of this comprehensive but accessible introduction to philosophical race theory.
• Blends metaphysics and social philosophy, analytic philosophy and pragmatic philosophy of experience and engages the ideas of such important figures as Linda Alcoff, K. Anthony Appiah, W. E. B. Du Bois, Michel Foucault, Sally Haslanger, and Howard Winant.
• Taylor examines key topics such as mixed-race identity and white supremacy as well as timely examinations of racially fraught issues of policing, immigration, and global justice.
• This compelling volume will appeal to students and scholars in ethnic studies, philosophy, sociology, and other related fields.

Table of Contents

• Preface.
• Part I: Theory:.
  • 1. What Race-Thinking Is:.
    • The Language Of Race.
    • What We Mean By ‘Race’: What Do You Mean, ‘We’?.
    • Modern Racialism: Prehistory And Background.
    • Power, Racial Formation, And Method.
    • Conclusion.
  • 2. Three Challenges To Race-Thinking:.
    • Introduction.
    • The Anti-Racist Challenge, Take 1: Isn’t Race-Thinking Unethical?.
    • What Racism Is.
    • Classical Racialism: History And Background.
    • Early Modern Racialism.
    • High Modern, Or Classical, Racialism.
    • The Concept Of Classical Racialism.
    • The Challenge Of Human Variation: Isn’t Racial Biology False?.
    • What’s Wrong With Race.
    • The Challenge Of Social Differentiation: Isn’t The Race Concept Just In The Way?.
    • Ethnicity.
    • Nation.
    • Class.
    • Caste.
    • Intersecting Principles: Gender.
    • Conclusion.
  • 3. What Races Are:.
    • Introduction.
    • After Classical Racialism.
    • The U.S. Racial Terrain Today.
    • Varieties Of Racialism: Four Accounts And Ten Questions.
    • What Races Are – A Radical Constructionist’s Story.
    • Ten Questions.
    • Conclusion.
• Part II: Practice:.
  • 4. Existence, Experience, Elisions:.
    • Introduction.
    • Ethical Eliminativism, For And Against; Or, The Anti-Racist Challenge, Take 2.
    • The Slippery Slope And The Argument From Political Realism.
    • The Argument From Self-Realization.
    • Existence, Identity, And Despair.
    • The Basics.
    • Despair And Terror.
    • Double-Consciousness.
    • Micro-Diversity, Part I.
    • Microdiversity, Part II.
    • In-Between: Illusions Of Purity And Interstitial Peoples.
    • Experience, Invisibility, And Embodiment.
    • The Basics.
    • Invisibility And The Other Mind-Body Problem.
    • From The Ontic To The Ontological.
    • Conclusion.
  • 5. The Color Question:.
    • Introduction.
    • Color And ‘Courting’: The Ethics Of Miscegenation.
    • Colorblindness And Affirmative Action.
    • Conclusion.
• A Note On Further Reading.
• Endnotes

Chick

Bloodaxe Books
2013-01-24
64 pages
Paperback ISBN-10: 1852249609; ISBN-13: 978-1852249601

Hannah Lowe

Hannah Lowe’s first book of poems takes you on a journey round her father, a Chinese-black Jamaican migrant who disappeared at night to play cards or dice in London’s old East End to support his family, an unstable and dangerous existence that took its toll on his physical and mental health. ‘Chick’ was his gambling nickname. A shadowy figure in her childhood, Chick was only half known to her until she entered the night world of the old man as a young woman. The name is the key to poems concerned with Chick’s death, the secret history of his life in London, and her perceptions of him as a father. With London as their backdrop, Hannah Lowe’s deeply personal narrative poems are often filmic in effect and brimming with sensory detail in their evocations of childhood and coming-of-age, love and loss of love, grief and regret.

Essie Mae Washington-Williams dies at 87; black daughter of segregationist Strom Thurmond

The Los Angeles Times
2013-02-04

Elaine Woo

In 2003 the retired L.A. schoolteacher unburdened herself of a secret: Her father was Sen. Strom Thurmond, the legendary South Carolina politician who had built a career as a champion of segregation.

A week before Christmas in 2003, a retired Los Angeles schoolteacher stood before a phalanx of news cameras and 250 reporters in a South Carolina ballroom and declared, “I am Essie Mae Washington-Williams, and at last I am completely free.”
 
After more than 60 years, Washington-Williams had chosen to unburden herself of a secret: that she, a black woman, had been fathered by a white man — Sen. Strom Thurmond, the legendary South Carolina politician who had built a long Washington career as a champion of segregation.
 
Thurmond had died five months earlier at age 100, having never acknowledged that his liaison with a family maid when he was 22 had produced a daughter. At 78, Washington-Williams decided she owed it to history to speak up.

“My children ultimately convinced me that history needed to know about Thurmond and that I should set the record straight,” she wrote in the Los Angeles Times in 2003. “I am not doing this for money. I am not suing his estate. I just want to tell the truth.”
 
Washington-Williams, 87, died Monday of natural causes in Columbia, S.C., said her attorney, Frank K. Wheaton. After more than 40 years in Los Angeles, she moved back to South Carolina a few years ago when her health began to deteriorate…

Read the entire obituary here.