Mixed Race Studies

Brother Mine:  The Correspondence of Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank

University of Illinois Press
2010
208 pages
6 x 9 in.
14 black & white photographs

Edited by:

Kathleen Pfeiffer, Associate Professor of English
Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan

An extraordinary literary friendship, preserved in letters

The friendship of Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank was one of the most emotionally intense, racially complicated, and aesthetically significant relationships in the history of American literary modernism. Waldo Frank was an established white writer who advised and assisted the younger African American Jean Toomer as he pursued a literary career. They met in 1920, began corresponding regularly in 1922, and were estranged by the end of 1923, the same year that Toomer published his ambitiously modernist debut novel, Cane.

While individual letters between Frank and Toomer have been published separately on occasion, they have always been presented out of context. This volume presents for the first time their entire correspondence in chronological order, comprising 121 letters ranging from 200 to 800 words each. Kathleen Pfeiffer annotates and introduces the letters, framing the correspondence and explaining the literary and historical allusions in the letters themselves.

Reading like an epistolary novel, Brother Mine captures the sheer emotional force of the story that unfolds in these letters: two men discover an extraordinary friendship, and their intellectual and emotional intimacy takes shape before our eyes. This unprecedented collection preserves the raw honesty of their exchanges, together with the developing drama of their ambition, their disappointments, their assessment of their world, and ultimately, the betrayal that ended the friendship.

The Life of Isamu Noguchi: Journey without Borders

Princeton University Press
2004
440 pages
6 x 9
36 halftones
Paper ISBN: 9780691127828

Masayo Duus
Translated by Peter Duus

• 2005 Non-fiction Finalist for the Kiriyama Prize, Pacific Rim Voices
• One of Choice’s Outstanding Academic Titles for 2005

Isamu Noguchi, born in Los Angeles as the illegitimate son of an American mother and a Japanese poet father, was one of the most prolific yet enigmatic figures in the history of twentieth-century American art. Throughout his life, Noguchi (1904-1988) grappled with the ambiguity of his identity as an artist caught up in two cultures.

His personal struggles—as well as his many personal triumphs—are vividly chronicled in The Life of Isamu Noguchi, the first full-length biography of this remarkable artist. Published in connection with the centennial of the artist’s birth, the book draws on Noguchi’s letters, his reminiscences, and interviews with his friends and colleagues to cast new light on his youth, his creativity, and his relationships.

During his sixty-year career, there was hardly a genre that Noguchi failed to explore. He produced more than 2,500 works of sculpture, designed furniture, lamps, and stage sets, created dramatic public gardens all over the world, and pioneered the development of environmental art. After studying in Paris, where he befriended Alexander Calder and worked as an assistant to Constantin Brancusi, he became an ardent advocate for abstract sculpture.

Noguchi’s private life was no less passionate than his artistic career. The book describes his romances with many women, among them the dancer Ruth Page, the painter Frida Kahlo, and the writer Anaïs Nin.

Despite his fame, Noguchi always felt himself an outsider. “With my double nationality and my double upbringing, where was my home?” he once wrote. “Where were my affections? Where my identity?” Never entirely comfortable in the New York art world, he inevitably returned to his father’s homeland, where he had spent a troubled childhood. This prize-winning biography, first published in Japanese, traces Isamu Noguchi’s lifelong journey across these artistic and cultural borders in search of his personal identity.

Table of Contents

• Prologue
• Chapter One: Yone and Leonie
• Chapter Two: His Mother’s Child
• Chapter Three: All-American Boy
• Chapter Four: Journey of Self-Discovery
• Chapter Five: Becoming a Nisei
• Chapter Six: The Song of a Small
• Chapter Seven: Honeymoon with Japan
• Chapter Eight: The World of Dreams
• Chapter Nine: The Universe in a Garden
• Chapter Ten: Encounter with a Stonecutter
• Chapter Eleven: Farewell to s Dreamer
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• Photgraphy Credits

Missed Opportunities and the Problem of Mohawk Chief John Norton’s Cherokee Ancestry

Ethnohistory
Volume 59, Number 2 (Spring 2012)
pages 261-291
DOI: 10.1215/00141801-1536885

Carl Benn, Professor of History
Ryerson University

John Norton (1770–1831?) was one of the most important Iroquois leaders in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and the author of a thousand-page manuscript on First Nations history, a journey he made to the Cherokee country, and his adventures in the War of 1812. However, that text and his other writings have received comparatively little attention from scholars despite the rich opportunities these documents hold for exploring the indigenous world of his day. Much of the neglect stems from a reluctance to accept him as a “real” native person because he was born in Scotland and was an adopted Mohawk and because people have doubted his claim that his father was a Cherokee. This article clarifies Norton’s claim to a Cherokee connection and concludes that the evidence overwhelmingly supports the probability that his father was a Cherokee; thus it invites scholars to look at Norton’s work anew in their quest to understand the First Nations world of the latter 1700s and early 1800s.

Read or purchase the article here.

Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance: A Woman’s Life Unveiled

Louisiana State University Press
1994
496 pages
6.00 x 9.00 inches
12 halftones
Paperback ISBN: 9780807120705

Thadious M. Davis, Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought; Professor of English
University of Pennsylvania

Nella Larsen (1891–1964) is recognized as one of the most influential, and certainly one of the most enigmatic, writers of the Harlem Renaissance. With the instant success of her two novels, Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), she became a bright light in New York’s literary firmament. But her meteoric rise was followed by a surprising fall: In 1930 she was accused of plagiarizing a short story, and soon thereafter she disappeared from both the literary and African American worlds of New York. She lived the rest of her life—more than three decades—out of the public eye, working primarily as a nurse. In a remarkable achievement, Thadious Davis has penetrated the fog of mystery that has surrounded Larsen to present a detailed and fascinating account of the life and work of this gifted, determined, yet vulnerable artist. Davis deftly situates the writer within the broader politics and aesthetics of the Harlem Renaissance and analyzes her life and work in terms of the current literature on race and gender.

Race and History in Brazil (Denying Brazil / Aleijadinho: Passion, Glory and Torment)

Facets Multi-Media
2000 (Release date 2011-02-22)
192 minutes
Brazil
Product Code: DV100942 (2-DVD set)

Joel Zito Araújo
Geraldo Santos Pereira
 

Race and its impact on the art and history of Brazil are highlighted in this two-disc set. Joel Zito Araújo’s documentary Denying Brazil (A Negacao do Brasil, 92 mins.) analyzes contemporary Brazilian soap operas, calling attention to the ways archetypes and stereotypes influence identity in the Afro-Brazilian community. Well-known soap actors Milton Gonzalvez, Zeze Mota, and Maria Ceica offer provocative comments about their experiences. This is joined by Geraldo Santos Pereira’s Aleijadinho: Passion, Glory and Torment (Aleijadinho: Paixao, Gloria e Suplicio, 100 mins.) a fictionalized drama about the life of 18th century sculptor Antonio Francisco Lisboa, also known as Aleijadinho. Born the son of a slave, Lisboa struggles with prejudice, mental illness, and disease, but never stops expressing himself through his art. The story unfolds in flashback as a professor investigates the tragic life of the artist. In Portuguese with English subtitles.

Authors Probe Roots of U.S. Far Right

Southern Poverty Law Center
Intelligence Report
Winter 2009, Issue Number: 136

Heidi Beirich

Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant
By Jonathan Peter Spiro
Burlington, Vt.: University of Vermont Press, 2009
$39.95 (hardback)

The Color of Fascism: Lawrence Dennis, Racial Passing, and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism in the United States
By Gerald Horne
New York: New York University Press, 2009
$22.00 (hardback)

A bumper crop of works on influential early 20th century American racists, fascists and eugenicists has been hitting the bookshelves in 2009. Two of the most interesting are on Madison Grant (1865-1937), perhaps the most important conservationist of his time and so pernicious a racist and anti-Semite that he helped inspire Hitler’s policies, and Lawrence Dennis (1893-1977), the biggest defender of fascism in the 1930s, who was, surprisingly, a black man passing for white.

Jonathan Peter Spiro’s biography of Grant, a very rich member of the American WASP elite, is eye opening. It is astonishing to realize how many major American figures of the early 1900s were so rabidly racist and anti-Semitic — and perfectly willing to use the power of the state to sterilize those they saw as lesser beings. Spiro’s book is fundamental to understanding how profoundly our nation has been shaped by racist and anti-Semitic ideas…

…Grant’s most important work, The Passing of the Great Race, was first published in 1916 by the elite Charles Scribner’s Sons. Its basic thesis, still popular among American white supremacists today, is that miscegenation and immigration were destroying America’s superior “Nordic” race. In their time, Grant’s beliefs were popular, even meriting a mention in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (the celebrated author and Grant shared the same Scribner editor).

Presaging Hitler’s infamous words, Grant called Nordics “the Master Race.” To protect that race, Grant was quite clear that restrictions curtailing Jewish and Southern European immigration were necessary. Eugenics, too, were required. He wrote that the effort should begin by sterilizing the “criminals,” the “insane” and the “diseased,” followed by the “weaklings” and, ultimately, all “worthless race types.”…

…American Fascist

Gerald Horne’s The Color of Fascism is a much slimmer volume on the unlikely career as an American fascist of Lawrence Dennis, a far-right thinker who passed as white and whose ideas are still prized today by radical right activists, including veteran anti-Semite Willis Carto.

Dennis was an interesting character. He was born in Atlanta of a black mother and white father in 1893 and was a child prodigy. Before the age of 10, Dennis wrote a book on his Christian beliefs and preached his religion to massive crowds in the U.S. and Europe—never hiding his black mother, who shepherded him around the world. But as he grew older, the light-skinned Dennis made a decision to leave his far darker-skinned mother behind and to begin to pass for white. By the 1920s, he had achieved the unthinkable for a black man of the time, graduating from Exeter and then Harvard and going on to make careers for himself in the State Department and on Wall Street, where he was one of the few who predicted the 1929 stock market crash. That prediction led to a profitable run of speaking engagements for Dennis in the 1930s and vaulted him into the upper-class social circles of the far right, where he became particularly close to Charles and Anne Lindbergh.

By the 1930s, Dennis had evolved into the public face of American fascism, making connections with American extremists and traveling to Europe to meet with Mussolini, whom he later said he was “less impressed with” than Hitler. In 1941, Dennis was named “America’s No. 1 Intellectual Fascist” by Life.

So what made Dennis an adherent of an ideology that most certainly would have oppressed him and other African Americans? Horne theorizes that Dennis may well have been attracted to fascism simply because it stood starkly opposed to American “democracy,” which then so openly oppressed blacks living under Jim Crow. He wrote often and eloquently of the impending ascendancy of the fascist model, and regularly ascribed America’s decay to its racist policies — a point that oddly seemed missed by his many racist allies…

Read the entire review here.

Frau Doktor Nancy Stafford of Georgia: From Slave to Physician

The African Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter
March 2009
ISSN: 1933-8651
95 pages

Mary R. Bullard

Tracy Moxhay Castle

Chapter 1

In 1850 a cotton planter named Robert Stafford fathered a daughter (later named Cornelia) by a woman named “Juda.” Three years later Juda bore him a second daughter (later named Nancy). On an inventory made for Stafford’s tax records they were simply young females, listed only by age, not by name or family. One was six years old, the other was nine years old. They were the only female mulattos in their age group. All the others in their age group were black. “Mulatto” indicated to the county tax assessor that, in this case, their father was a white man.

Their first appearance in the historical record was in an 1860 inventory in Camden County, Georgia. It was a slave inventory. They were slaves because Juda was a slave.

These events were not so unusual on the southern plantations of the United States, but ensuing developments were remarkable. This paper focuses upon Nancy’s life, for she grew up to follow a career. It was an unusual one for an African-American girl born before the Civil War. Considering that she was born of a slave mother, her choice of career was downright incredible. The child grew up to became a physician, to practice in Europe. She died in 1933. The location of her grave is unknown. Although her descendants told us she was buried in London, no confirming evidence has appeared.

The story is also one of Robert Stafford, an independent thinker, who did not follow the usual pattern of slave master. Nonetheless, he was a southerner and a Georgian. The location of his plantation is important for it throws some light upon the special circumstances of Nancy Stafford’s life. The people with whom Robert Stafford grew up were unenthusiastic about slave ownership, although its usefulness for them was absolute…

Read the entire article here.

Finding Grace: Two Sisters and the Search for Meaning Beyond the Color Line

Simon & Schuster
July 2007
296 pages
Paperback ISBN-10: 0743200543; ISBN-13: 9780743200547

Shirlee Taylor Haizlip

In her widely acclaimed, bestselling memoir, The Sweeter the Juice, Shirlee Taylor Haizlip asked us to redefine our concepts of race and family by examining her biracial heritage—how different gradations of dark and light skin led to a split in her mother’s nuclear family, and how various relatives have been reunited many years later, some of them previously unaware of their layered racial makeup. In this eloquent, moving, and eagerly awaited continuation of her story, Haizlip pushes further into the fascinating terrain of family, race, and racial passing. Just over ten years ago, Haizlip’s African American mother was reunited with her sister, who had spent her whole life passing for white; both women were in their eighties and had not seen or heard anything about each other since early childhood. Now Haizlip answers the many questions that linger from the previous book: What happened between these long-separated sisters after their reunion? What did they learn about each other, and about themselves? Is it possible to heal the wounds caused by such a rift?

In rich, elegant prose, Haizlip contrasts her mother’s fulfilling adult life with her aunt’s solitary white existence. They lived on opposite sides of the race line, but both women, says Haizlip, were plagued by “America’s twin demons: a paranoia about purity and an anxiety about authenticity.” These women and other members of the author’s extended family come vividly, achingly to life in these pages, turning this astute cultural investigation into a poignant, delightful, and highly personal narrative. Haizlip deftly, fluidly conveys the complexities of this story—the sadness, comedy, danger, anger, confusion, shame, fear, longing, excitement, and joy of her family’s rupture and reunion. We learn how Haizlip’s mother’s abandonment by members of her immediate family affected her daily life; we learn about the lives of relatives who left her behind, and of the members of succeeding generations who knew of the rift, and of those who did not.

Haizlip’s readers, too, appear here—after The Sweeter the Juice, Haizlip was flooded by letters in which people shared similar family stories of bi-racial heritage, passing, and the eventual revelation of an extended racial makeup. She includes some of these letters here, affirming that her own seemingly unusual tale is actually a very familiar, very American story: of the tumultuous, complicated interactions between black and white communities and individuals—interactions marked by fear and distrust, but also by camaraderie, ardor, and love. In sharing her own and her readers’ stories, Haizlip forges a new picture of America’s hidden racial past and its multihued future. Passionate, indomitable, and always generous toward her subjects, Haizlip explores what happens when the race divide exists within one family, and the effect of secret racial histories and their revelation on individuals and America at large.

Contents

• Part I When the Rainbow Is Not Enough
  • Prologue
  • 1. A Twice-Told Tale
  • 2. The Gift
  • 3. The Etiology of Passing
  • 4. Visible and Invisible
  • 5. Passport to Privilege
  • 6. A Place Beyond Loss
  • 7. Creating a New Vocabulary
  • 8. In the Best of Families
  • 9. A Whiter Shade of White
  • 10. The Indian Who Wasn’t
  • 11. Tracking Will
  • 12. Life Review
  • 13. Eyes Other than Our Own
  • 14. Unexpected Encounters of Kith and Kin
• Part II Relativity
  • 15. In Their Own Voices
• Part III The Color of Letters
  • 16. Open Hearts, Open Minds
  • 17. The Last Word
• Epilogue

Norbert Rillieux and a Revolution in Sugar Processing

American Chemical Society
National Historic Chemical Landmarks: Norbert Rillieux and a Revolution in Sugar Processing
2002

Judah Ginsberg

Portrait of Norbert Rillieux (undated).

Dedicated April 18, 2002 at Dillard University in New Orleans, Louisiana

Norbert Rillieux: Chemist and Engineer

The birth record on file in New Orleans City Hall is spare: “Norbert Rillieux, quadroon libre, [free quadroon] natural son of Vincent Rillieux and Constance Vivant. Born March 17, 1806. Baptized in St. Louis Cathedral by Pere Antoine.”

Vincent Rillieux was an inventor himself who designed a steam-operated press for baling cotton. He appears to have had a long relationship with Constance Vivant, “a free woman of color,” and one of their sons, Norbert, became what is now called a chemical engineer. The use of the father’s surname and the baptism in New Orleans’ cathedral indicate the paternity was publicly acknowledged.

As a boy the precocious Norbert showed an interest in engineering, and his father sent him to France for his education. By the age of 24, Rillieux was an instructor in applied mechanics at the Ecole Centrale in Paris. Around 1830, Rillieux published a series of papers on steam engines and steam power.

While in France, Rillieux began working on the multiple effect evaporator. As George Meade, a sugar expert, wrote in 1946: “The great scientific contribution which Rillieux made was in his recognition of the steam economies which can be effected by repeated use of the latent heat in the steam and vapors.” What Rillieux did, and what became the basis for all modern industrial evaporation, was to harness the energy of vapors rising from the boiling sugar cane syrup and pass those vapors through several chambers, leaving in the end sugar crystals.

Rillieux’s evaporator was a safer, cheaper, and more efficient way of evaporating sugar cane juice than the method then in use, the Jamaica train. In this system, teams of slaves ladled boiling sugar juice from one open kettle to another. The resulting sugar tended to be of low quality since the heat in the kettles could not be regulated, and much sugar was lost in the process of transferring juice from kettle to kettle.

Some Louisiana sugar planters quickly understood the significance of Rillieux’s invention, and he returned to New Orleans in the early 1830s, years that coincided with a sugar boom. Rillieux tinkered with his invention over the next decade, and in 1843 he was hired to install an evaporator on Judah Benjamin’s Bellechasse Plantation. Benjamin, a Jewish lawyer who later served as secretary of war in the Confederacy, became Rillieux’s staunchest supporter in Louisiana sugar circles. Benjamin wrote in 1846 that sugar produced with the Rillieux apparatus was superb, the equal of “the best double-refined sugar of our northern refineries.”

The success of his evaporator apparently made Rillieux, according to a contemporary, “the most sought after engineer in Louisiana,” and he acquired a large fortune. But while his invention no doubt enriched sugar planters, Rillieux was still, under the law, “a person of color” who might visit sugar plantations to install his evaporator but who could not sleep in the plantation house. (Nor, for that matter, could a man of Rillieux’s accomplishments be expected to stay in slave quarters. Some planters, it appears, provided Rillieux with a special house with slave servants while he visited as “a consultant.”). As the Civil War approached, the status of free blacks deteriorated with the imposition of new restrictions on their ability to move about the streets of New Orleans and other draconian laws.

It was about this time that Rillieux moved back to France. Race relations may have played a part in his decision. At one point, Rillieux became incensed when one of his applications for a patent was denied initially because authorities mistakenly believed he was a slave and thus not a citizen of the United States. The declining profitability of the sugar industry in Louisiana also may have been a factor. In any event, in Paris, Rillieux developed a passion for Egypt. In 1880, a visiting Louisiana sugar planter found Rillieux deciphering hieroglyphics at the Bibliotheque Nationale. Rillieux died in 1894 and was buried in the famed Paris cemetery of Pere Lachaise. His wife, Emily Cuckow, lived comfortably for another eighteen years…

…Neither slave nor free

Americans pouring into the newly purchased Louisiana Territory encountered a social caste virtually unknown in the Eastern seaboard States: gens de couleur libre, free people of color. In the early years of the nineteenth century, free blacks comprised 25 percent of the population of New Orleans, far higher than in most other areas of the American South, where nearly all blacks were slaves.

The number of free blacks in New Orleans was due in part to the French and Spanish heritage of Louisiana. Both France and Spain had lenient manumission policies and both encouraged slaves to purchase their freedom. But the majority of free blacks resulted from sexual relations between white men and black women. One Spanish bishop lamented, “a good many inhabitants live almost publicly with colored concubines” and they consider the issue of such liaisons “as their natural children.” Finally, the ranks of the gens de couleur libre swelled in the early years of American control of New Orleans with the influx of thousands of light-skinned freemen fleeing the internecine warfare in the new black Republic of Haiti.

In the eighteenth century, Louisiana free blacks enjoyed a higher social status and had more rights than the small free black population of the English colonies. Their condition would deteriorate under American control, but it remained true that free blacks maintained a privileged status in the antebellum years. As late as 1856, the Louisiana Supreme Court ruled that under Louisiana law there is “all the difference between a free man of color and a slave, that there is between a white man and a slave.” Indeed, a few free blacks even belonged to the planter class, owning slaves themselves…

Read the entire article here.

Plaque honour for ‘first black star’ Elisabeth Welch

BBC News
2012-02-27

The singer Elisabeth Welch is to be commemorated with an English Heritage blue plaque in south-west London.

She is the second black woman to be honoured with a blue plaque in London.

It will be unveiled in Ovington Court, Kensington, which was her home during the 1930s when she rose to fame on the cabaret circuit.

The performer died aged 99 in 2003 and has been described as “Britain’s first black star”.

Paul Reid, Director of Black Cultural Archives said it was “an important moment for black heritage”.

Welch was born in New York in 1904, but lived in London for 70 years…

…The first black woman to be honoured with a plaque was the nurse Mary Seacole in 2005…

Read the entire article here.