Mixed Race Studies

Cedric Dover

Wasafiri
Volume 27, Issue 2 (2012)
pages 56-57
DOI: 10.1080/02690055.2012.662322

Cedric Dover was born in Calcutta in 1904. Dover’s mixed ancestry (English father, Indian mother) and his studies in zoology led to a strong interest in ethnic minorities and their marginalisation. After his studies, he joined the Zoological Survey of India as a temporary assistant entomologist. He also wrote several scientific articles and edited the Eurasian magazine New Outlook.

Dover settled in London In 1934 to continue his anthropological studies on issues of race. He published Half-Caste in 1937, followed by Hell in the Sunshine (1943). During the 1940s Dover contributed regularly to the BBC Indian Section of the Eastern Service alongside many other British-based South Asians. There he befriended George Orwell, in 1947 he published Feathers in the Arrow: An Approach for Coloured Writers and Readers. Dover moved to the United States in the same year and took up a range of visiting academic posts. He was a member of the faculty of Fisk University, as Visiting Lecturer in Anthropology. He also briefly lectured at the New School of Social Research, New York, and Howard University. Dover held a lifelong interest in African-American art, culture and literature and his influential book American Negro Art was published in 1960. Dover returned to London in the late 1950s. He continued to lecture and write on minority issues and culture until his death in 1961.

A Note on the Text

These poems were first published in Brown Phoenix (London; College Press. 1950).

Brown Phoenix

I am the brown phoenix
Fused in the flames
Of the centuries’ greed.

I am tomorrow’s man
Offering to share
Love, and the difficult quest,
In the emerging plan.

Do you see a dark man
Whose mind you shun,
Whose heart you never know,
Unable to understand
That I am the golden bird
With destiny clear?
Fools cannot destroy me
With arrogant fear.

Listen brown man, black man,
Yellow man, mongrel man,
And you white friend and comrade:
I am the brown phoenix—I am you.

‘There is my symbol for us all.’

For we are tomorrow’s men,
But not you,
Little pinkwhite man,
Not you!

Read or purchase the article here.

Playing for Malaya: A Eurasian Family and the Pacific War

University of Hawai‘i Press (Distributed for the National University of Singapore Press)
2011
208 pages
Paper ISBN: 978-9971-69-573-6

Rebecca Kenneison

Reggie, according to his niece Wendy, ‘only told what Reggie wanted you to know.’ Reggie was my father. He had honed the technique of talking with apparent openness and using that talk as a decoy duck: while you were listening to it quack around the pond, you weren’t noticing all the others hiding in the reeds. What follows includes tales that Reggie told repeatedly but, on the whole, it’s about what Reggie didn’t tell me.

So begins a stunning personal account of a Eurasian family living in Malaya. Reggie was the author’s father, and one of the many gaps in his account of his family was that his mother was Eurasian. When Rebecca Kenneison discovered this omission after his death, she set out to learn more about her extended family on the other side of the world.

Set in the 1930s and 1940s, this book recounts the experiences of an extended Eurasian family during the invasion and occupation of Malaya by the Japanese. Colonial society considered Eurasians insufficiently European to be treated as British, but during the Pacific War they seemed all too European to the Japanese, who subjected the Eurasian community to discrimination and worse. Because many Eurasians, including members of the Kenneison family, supported the Allied cause, their wartime experiences are an extraordinary account of tragedy, heroism and endurance, presented here with great eloquence and clarity.

The Cayton Legacy: An African American Family

Washington State University Press
2002
272 pages
6″ x 9″
Photographs, notes, bibliography, index
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-87422-251-7

Richard S. Hobbs

The evolution of a remarkable African American family—the Caytons—is a brilliantly told tale set primarily in Seattle and Chicago. The Caytons lived a true American saga, illuminating the black and white experience in the United States and the troubled, tortuous course of race relations.

Several generations of the Horace and Susie Cayton family spanned the period from the Civil War to the present. They were a distinguished family, conscious of their historical heritage and distinct identity. The Caytons sought to define themselves in relation to their family traditions and to society as a whole. In the process, they attained financial success and influence both nationally and regionally. They published newspapers, authored books and articles, held public office, worked for civil and human rights, and established relationships with major black and white community and cultural leaders in America.

They also faced racial discrimination and duress, business and professional failures, and even poverty. And, some struggled against the personal challenges of alcoholism, depression, and drug addiction. Yet the force of the family legacy—of being “a Cayton”— impelled most of them to make significant contributions.

They speak to us with deep insight about our society—sharpening our understanding of the past, and enhancing our sense of individual and collective identity in the modern age.

From Slave Ship to Harvard: Yarrow Mamout and the History of an African American Family

Fordham University Press
May 2012
310 pages
6 x 9
25 Black and White Illustrations
Hardcover ISBN: 9780823239504

James H. Johnston, Lawyer and Writer
Washington, D.C.

From Slave Ship to Harvard is the true story of an African American family in Maryland over six generations. The author has reconstructed a unique narrative of black struggle and achievement from paintings, photographs, books, diaries, court records, legal documents, and oral histories. From Slave Ship to Harvard traces the family from the colonial period and the American Revolution through the Civil War to Harvard and finally today.

Yarrow Mamout, the first of the family in America, was an educated Muslim from Guinea. He was brought to Maryland on the slave ship Elijah and gained his freedom forty-four years later. By then, Yarrow had become so well known in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C., that he attracted the attention of the eminent American portrait painter Charles Willson Peale, who captured Yarrow’s visage in the painting that appears on the cover of this book. The author here reveals that Yarrow’s immediate relatives—his sister, niece, wife, and son—were notable in their own right. His son married into the neighboring Turner family, and the farm community in western Maryland called Yarrowsburg was named for Yarrow Mamout’s daughter-in-law, Mary “Polly” Turner Yarrow. The Turner line ultimately produced Robert Turner Ford, who graduated from Harvard University in 1927.

Just as Peale painted the portrait of Yarrow, James H. Johnston’s new book puts a face on slavery and paints the history of race in Maryland. It is a different picture from what most of us imagine. Relationships between blacks and whites were far more complex, and the races more dependent on each other. Fortunately, as this one family’s experience shows, individuals of both races repeatedly stepped forward to lessen divisions and to move America toward the diverse society of today.

Contents

• Introduction
• 1. Yarrow Mamout. a West African Muslim Slave
• 2. Tobacco and the Importation of a Labor Force
• 3. Welcome to America
• 4. Slavery and Revolution
• 5. Yarrow of Georgetown
• 6. The Portraits: Peale, Yarrow, and Simpson
• 7. Free Hannah, Yarrow’s sister
• 8. Nancy Hillman, Yarrow’s Niece
• 9. Aquilla Yarrow
• 10. Mary “Polly” Turner Yarrow
• 11 Aquilla and Polly in Pleasant Valley
• 12. Traces of Yarrow
• 13. Unpleasant Valley
• 14. Freedom
• 15. From Harvard to Today
• Epilogue: Guide to the Yarrows’ and Turners’ World Today
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index

Theater; On Hearing Her Sing, Gershwin Made ‘Porgy’ ‘Porgy and Bess’

The New York Times
1998-03-29

Barry Singer

In his tragically short life, George Gershwin knew only one Bess, and this bittersweet fact has framed Anne Wiggins Brown’s life. She was that Bess in the original production of Gershwin’s operatic masterwork based on Dorothy and DuBose Heyward’s theatrical adaptation of Heyward’s novel “Porgy.”

More than 60 years have passed since Gershwin’s death in 1937 from a brain tumor. Though singers of every race and nationality have by now assayed the role, Ms. Brown will always be the first, the Bess Gershwin himself chose in 1934.

“Bess is slender but sinewy; very black,” wrote the Heywards. “She flaunts a typical but debased Negro beauty.”

At 85, Ms. Brown still possesses the vibrancy and unaffected elegance that must have first inspired Gershwin. She is not, however, “very black.” For Gershwin that was never a problem. “I don’t see why my Bess shouldn’t be cafe au lait,” he told Ms. Brown before offering her the role.

Yet color has haunted Ms. Brown’s career. In the segregated America of the 1930’s and 40’s, where could a classically trained African-American soprano hope to have a career? The only answer was abroad…

…She was born Annie Wiggins Brown in Baltimore in 1912. Her father, a doctor, was the grandson of a slave; her mother’s parents were of Scottish-Irish, black and Cherokee Indian descent. At 23, Ms. Brown was introduced to the world as an opera singer and an African-American in “Porgy and Bess.” Thirteen years later, in 1948, after more than a decade of concertizing and frustrated ambitions, she left America for Norway…

…”To put it bluntly, I was fed up with racial prejudice,” she explained, her English accented with Scandinavian inflections. “Though there is no place on earth without prejudice. In fact, a French journalist wrote an article during one of my tours there asking: ‘Why does she say she is colored? She’s as white as any singer. It’s just a trick to get people interested.’ Can you imagine? Of course I was advertised as ‘a Negro soprano.’ What is ‘a Negro soprano’?”…

…When the show’s closing notice was posted after 124 performances, the producers announced a tour with stints in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Chicago, to be followed by a week at the National Theater in Washington. Ms. Brown was livid. The National Theater, she knew, was a segregated house.

“I told them: ‘I will not sing at the National. If my mother, my father, my friends, if black people cannot come hear me sing, then count me out.’ I remember Gershwin saying to me, ‘You’re not going to sing?’ And I said to him, ‘I can’t sing!’ ”

After protracted negotiations, the National, for one week only, became an integrated house. When the curtain came down on the final performance of “Porgy and Bess,” segregation was reinstated…

Read the entire article here.

Jemmy Jock Bird: Marginal Man on the Blackfoot Frontier

University of Calgary Press
2004
205 pages
16 b/w illustrations, 1 b/w photo, index
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-55238-111-3

John C. Jackson

Jemmy Jock Bird, the son of a Cree woman and a mixed-blood trader employed by the Hudson’s Bay Company, has become part of the mythology of the mountain man era. In this creative non-fiction account, Jackson meticulously reconstructs the life of this intriguing individual who was caught between opposing sides of a dual Métis heritage. Closely identified with the Cree and the Peigan, Bird’s trading activities and undercover work as a “confidential servant” of the Hudson’s Bay Company during the competitive period of the fur trade are explored using materials from the Hudson’s Bay Company Archives, the Montana Historical Society, and Bird’s descendants living on the American Blackfeet Reserve in Browning. As an interpreter, Bird was later instrumental in negotiating the 1855 Blackfoot peace treaty and the 1877 Canadian Treaty 7. Jackson steeps himself in the sparse documentation of the fur trade era to shed some much-needed light on Jemmy Jock Bird’s adventurous career – one that straddled the international borders of the northern plains and mountain west and touched upon many aspects of western development.

Anne Brown, Soprano Who Was Gershwin’s Bess, Is Dead at 96

The New York Times
2009-03-16

Douglas Martin

Anne Brown, a penetratingly pure soprano who literally put the Bess in “Porgy and Bess” by inspiring George Gershwin to expand the character’s part in a folk opera that was originally to be called “Porgy,” died Friday in Oslo. She was 96.

Her daughter Paula Schjelderup announced the death.

“Porgy and Bess” burst onto the American scene in 1935 as a sophisticated musical treatment of poor blacks. Critics could not make out whether it was a musical comedy, a jazz drama, a folk opera or something quite different. Time told: it became part of the standard operatic repertory, including that of the Metropolitan Opera.

Drawing from the gritty experiences of South Carolina blacks, “Porgy and Bess” introduced songs that came to be lodged in American culture. Ms. Brown was the first person Gershwin heard singing the part of Bess, a morally challenged but achingly human character who was relatively minor in the original 1925 DuBose Heyward novel and the 1927 hit stage play by DuBose and Dorothy Heyward.

As he composed the opera, often with Ms. Brown at his side, Gershwin added more and more music for her. Her voice was also the first he heard singing several other parts in the opera…

Read the entire obituary here.

Anne Wiggins Brown (1912-2009)

Afrocentric Voices in Classical Music
2012-01-29

Randye Jones

Soprano Anne Wiggins Brown was born on August 9, 1912, in Baltimore, Maryland. (This year, rather than 1915, was confirmed by the singer herself.) Her father, Dr. Harry F. Brown, was a prominent physician and grandson of a slave. Her mother, Mary Wiggins Brown, was of African, Cherokee and Scottish-Irish ancestry. She and her three sisters were active in the musical and theatrical life of the racially segregated community. Brown described her early musical training:

I was always with music. My mother played and sang and she taught her four daughters very much about music. She was my first vocal teacher. In those days there was not much that an African-American could do in the theatre, except roles as a servant or something. I thought about being an opera singer but there also was the same difficulty. In those days the Metropolitan didn’t have any African-American singers.

Brown’s parents tried to enroll her in an area Catholic school, where they hoped to foster her musical talents. However, the school refused to admit an African American. After confronting similar discrimination years later when she applied to the Peabody School of Music, Brown was admitted to Morgan State College in Baltimore and attended Teachers’ College, Columbia University. She continued her classical vocal studies with Lucia Dunham at the Institute of Musical Art at the Juilliard School. Brown became the first African American to win Juilliard’s prestigious Margaret McGill scholarship…

…The song Anne Brown sang for Gershwin, “City Called Heaven,” became a standard of the soprano’s concert repertoire. Gershwin, hearing Brown’s performance of the spiritual, decided that she should be his Bess. The composer often invited Brown to sing not only Bess’s lines as they were written, but other characters’ parts. As work on the opera progressed, Bess’s role grew to the point that Brown suggested to Gershwin that the character’s name be added to the title  [“Porgy and Bess”]…

…Brown discussed the effects her skintone had on her career:

“We tough girls tough it out,” she said with a wry grin. “I’ve lived a strange kind of life—half black, half white, half isolated, half in the spotlight. Many things that I wanted as a young person for my career were denied to me because of my color. On the other hand, many black folks have said, ‘Well, she’s not really black.’ … Only when I went on a train or into a theater did I think about passing, and even then I didn’t consider it passing. I figured if I simply asked for a ticket it was their problem. Onstage, though, it they couldn’t take me as I was—the hell with them.”

Determined to escape the racism so prevalent in America, Brown travelled overseas in 1946…

Read the entire article here.

‘I don’t believe in Negro symphony conductors’

On An Overgrown Path
2011-07-25

John McLaughlin Williams

‘Oh, come in, young man. I’m reading these reviews. They are out of this world. You really have something. But I might as well tell you, right now, I don’t believe in Negro symphony conductors. No, you may play solo with our symphonies, all over this country. You can dance with them, sing with them. But a Negro, standing in front of a white symphony group? No. I’m sorry.’

That is the impresario Arthur Judson discussing career opportunities with African American conductor Everett Lee, seen above, [also here (1948)] in the early 1950s. Judson headed Columbia Artists Management Inc and for twenty-five years was the power broker of musical America with a stable of artists that included Eugene Ormandy, Jascha Heifetz and African American contralto Marian Anderson, and at the time of the discussion he also managed the New York Philharmonic Orchestra.

In 1940, together with fellow African American Dean Dixon and Canadian Benjamin Steinberg, Everett Lee attempted to circumvent the institutionalised racism in American classical music by forming an orchestra of black musicians. But the project failed for financial reasons and both Lee and Dixon went on to pursue their careers outside America, although Steinberg succeeded in establishing an orchestra of predominantly black players when he formed the New World Symphony in 1964…

…History was made in 1953 when Lee became the first black musician to conduct a white symphony orchestra in the south of the States, this happened at the concert in Louisville, Kentucky see in the photo below. There was another milestone in April 1955 when he became the first musician of colour to conduct a major opera company in the US with a performance of La Traviata at the New York City Opera in April 1955…

Read the entire article here.

The Third Musketeer

The New York Times
2012-09-14
 
Leo Damrosch, Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature, Emeritus
Harvard University

The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal,and the Real Count of Monte Cristo. By Tom Reiss, 432 pp. Crown Publishers. Hardback ISBN: 978-0-307-38246-7.

In the 1790s, the son of an aristocratic white father and a black slave woman became a charismatic French general who for a time rivaled Napoleon himself, and afterward languished in an Italian dungeon. His story inspired the novel “The Count of Monte Cristo,” written by his son, Alexandre Dumas, who also drew upon his father’s adventures in “The Three Musketeers.” Posterity remembers this son as Dumas père, to distinguish him from Alexandre Dumas fils, also a writer, whose novel “La Dame aux Camélias” was the source for Verdi’s “La Traviata.” But the general was the first of the three Alexandres (he preferred to be known as Alex), and in “The Black Count,” Tom ­Reiss, the author of “The Orientalist,” has recovered this fascinating story with a richly imaginative biography.

Despite Reiss’s extensive research, the count remains a somewhat remote figure, since his contemporaries usually described him in conventional superlatives. The chief source of information is a highly romanticized memoir by his son, who was not yet 4 when he died, and who idealized him, in Reiss’s words, as “the purest, noblest man who ever lived.” Still, such language seems deserved. General Dumas was majestically tall (“his proportions were those of a Greek hero”), a crack swordsman and horseman (“looking like a centaur”), utterly fearless, generous to subordinates and a loving husband and father. He was also exceptionally good-looking, though the portraits that survive are less spectacular than the majestic Adonis depicted in the book’s cover illustration.

Dumas was born in 1762 at the western end of Saint-Domingue, the colony that is now Haiti. Remarkably, the French Empire guaranteed protection and opportunities to people of mixed race, and when the boy’s father brought him to France at the age of 14 he was able to receive a first-rate education and later to join the army. He never cared much for his feckless father, however, and took the name Dumas from his slave mother, about whom very little is known…

Read the entire review here.