Mixed Race Studies

Homelands and Waterways: The American Journey of the Bond Family, 1846-1926

Vintage Press an imprint of Random House
1999
720 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-679-75871-6 (0-679-75871-2)

Adele Logan Alexander, Professor of History
George Washington University

Winner for the top non-fiction prize of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association

This monumental history traces the rise of a resolute African American family (the author’s own) from privation to the middle class. In doing so, it explodes the stereotypes that have shaped and distorted our thinking about African Americans–both in slavery and in freedom.

Beginning with John Robert Bond, who emigrated from England to fight in the Union Army during the Civil War and married a recently freed slave, Alexander shows three generations of Bonds as they take chances and break new ground.

From Victorian England to antebellum Virginia, from Herman Melville‘s New England to the Jim Crow South, from urban race riots to the battlefields of World War I, this fascinating chronicle sheds new light on eighty crucial years in our nation’s troubled history. The Bond family’s rise from slavery, their interaction with prominent figures such as W. E. B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington, and their eventual, uneasy realization of the American dream shed a great deal of light on our nation’s troubled heritage.

See Adele Logan Alexander of speak about tracing her racial identity through her family roots in her book “Homelands and Waterways” in an interview on the Charlie Rose Show from 1999-10-26 here.

Parallel Worlds: The Remarkable Gibbs-Hunts and the Enduring (In)significance of Melanin

University of Virginia Press
February 2010
384 pages
6 1/8 x 9 1/4
40 b&w illustrations
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8139-2887

Adele Logan Alexander, Professor of History
George Washington University

When William Henry Hunt married Ida Alexander Gibbs in the spring of 1904, their wedding was a glittering Washington social event that joined an Oberlin-educated diplomat’s daughter and a Wall Street veteran who could trace his lineage to Jamestown. Their union took place in a world of refinement and privilege, but both William and Ida had mixed-race backgrounds, and their country therefore placed severe restrictions on their lives because at that time, “one drop of colored blood” classified anyone as a Negro. This “stain” of melanin pushed the couple’s achievements to the margins of American society. Nonetheless, as William followed a career in the foreign service, Ida (whose grandfather was probably Richard Malcolm Johnson, a vice president of the United States) moved in intellectual and political circles that included the likes of Frederick Douglass, J. Pierpont Morgan, Booker T. Washington, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Mary Church Terrell.

Born into slavery, William had an adventurous youth, including a brief career as a jockey and an interlude at Williams College; ultimately he succeeded Ida’s father as consul. The diplomat’s “expatriate” life provided him with a distinguished career and a stage on which to showcase his talents throughout the world, as well as an escape from racial stigmas back home. Free of the diplomatic hindrances her husband faced, Ida advocated openly against race and gender inequities, and was a major participant in W. E. B. Du Bois‘s post-World-War I Pan-African Congresses which took her to stimulating European capitals that were largely free of racial oppression.

In this, William and Ida’s unique dual biography, Adele Logan Alexander gracefully traces an extraordinary partnership with a historian’s skills and insights. She also presents a nuanced account of the complex impact of race in the early twentieth-century world.

Listen to National Public Radio‘s Michel Martin interview Adele Logan Alexander about the book on Tell Me More (on  2010-02-10) here.

TALK: India and Gaugin’s Tahitian Nudes: Mapping Modernism In A Global Frame

Interdisciplinary Humanities Center
University of California, Santa Barbara
3041 HSSB
2010-02-17 16:00 PST (Local Time)

Saloni Mathur, Associate Professor of Art History
University of California, Los Angeles

This presentation will revisit the legacy of Amrita Sher-Gil, the part-Indian/part-Hungarian painter who stands at the cosmopolitan helm of modern Indian art, by focusing on a single under-examined painting that she produced in 1934. The painting, provocatively titled “Self-Portrait as Tahitian,” depicts the artist’s own nude body in the romantic space of Gauguin’s Tahitian nudes. The talk will examine how Sher-Gil’s mixed race heritage, her insider/outsider status, and her sense of both distance and belonging in relation to India became a powerful driver of her short but influential artistic career.  Saloni Mathur is Associate Professor of Art History at UCLA and author of India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display (2007).

Sponsored by the IHC’s South Asian Religions and Cultures RFG.

But One Race: The Life of Robert Purvis

State University of New York Press
January 2007
293 pages
Hardcover ISBN10: 0-7914-7007-5; ISBN13: 978-0-7914-7007-7
Paperback ISBN13: 978-0-7914-7008-4

Margaret Hope Bacon (1921-2011)

Biography of famous black abolitionist and voting rights advocate, Robert Purvis.

Born in South Carolina to a wealthy white father and mixed race mother, Robert Purvis (1810–1898) was one of the nineteenth century’s leading black abolitionists and orators. In this first biography of Purvis, Margaret Hope Bacon uses his eloquent and often fierce speeches to provide a glimpse into the life of a passionate and distinguished man, intimately involved with a wide range of major reform movements, including abolition, civil rights, Underground Railroad activism, women’s rights, Irish Home Rule, Native American rights, and prison reform. Citing his role in developing the Philadelphia Vigilant Committee, an all black organization that helped escaped slaves secure passage to the North, the New York Times described Purvis at the time of his death as the president of the Underground Railroad. Voicing his opposition to a decision by the state of Pennsylvania to disenfranchise black voters in 1838, Purvis declared “there is but one race, the human race.” But One Race is the dramatic story of one of the most important figures of his time.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Ancestral Chart of the Purvis Family
• Introduction
• 1. Of Southern Birth
• 2. The City of Brotherly Love
• 3. Present at the Beginning
• 4. World Traveler
• 5. “We are Not Intruders Here”
• 6. To Aid the Fleeing Slave
• 7. A Time of Loss
• 8. Gentleman Farmer
• 9. “This Wicked Law”
• 10. “Are We Not Men?”
• 11. “A Proud Day for the Colored Man”
• 12. “Equality of Rights for All”
• 13. The Freedmen’s Savings Bank
• 14. “We are To the Manner Born”
• 15. “His Magnificent Record”
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Read the first chapter here.

Meet the New Faculty: Jennifer Brody

Duke Today
The Duke Community’s Daily News and Information Resource
Duke University
2008-10-22

Andrea Fereshteh

Exploring the intersection of race, gender and art

Durham, North Carolina — From a very early age, Jennifer Brody was curious about the intersection of art, gender and race. She recalls a time as a young girl when she drew a picture of herself and colored her skin in brown.

“I told my mother that was the color I really was, even though she couldn’t see it,” says the fair-skinned Brody, the newest member of Duke’s African and African American Studies department. “As a young child, I had a conscious perception of how I might move through the world and what kinds of limitations and possibilities my specific location might engender.”…

Read the entire article here.

Tragic Mulatto Girl Wonder: The paradoxical life of Philippa Duke Schuyler

QBR The Black Book Review
February/March 1996

Lise Funderburg

Composition in Black and White: The Life of Philippa Schuyler
by Kathryn Talalay
Oxford University Press (317 pp.)
Hardcover ISBN 0-19-509608-8

As a child prodigy, pianist and composer, Philippa Duke Schuyler incited both awe and envy. Performing at the 1939 New York World’s Fair when she was just eight, she seemed to live a charmed life, full of whirlwind concert tours in distant lands, where she met politicians, artists and royals. But while she was known as a gifted and serious musician and, later, a journalist, she was also viewed as the quintessential tragic mulatto. (Her father was the conservative black journalist and satirical novelist George Schuyler; her mother, a rebellious white Southern belle who married across the color line.) She seemed trapped at times by her talents and the constraints of relentlessly watchful parents whose aspirations for her were often suffocating. She acquired a reputation both as a temptress whose greatest interest in life was men and sex and as a perpetually frightened child. When she died in 1967, at age 35, in a helicopter crash in Vietnam during a war-orphan airlift, she met with a final irony. For all her achievements and worldliness, she could not swim to save her life…

…Talalay places Philippa’s racial identity at the center of this biography and rightfully so. Here was a woman whose parents placed tremendous expectations on her to transcend race, even as her music career was constantly limited by it. Philippa had few opportunities to make real friends among any racial group and never developed a community of support beyond her immediate family, which had its own tensions and estrangements. Her father, who adored her, was frequently away on reporting trips. As Philippa grew older, she began to see his politics and his color as embarrassments. When he ventured to spend five pages of a 150-word manuscript, The Negro in America, on his daughter, she wrote to her mother from Europe: “Get me OUT of that book. Everyone here thinks of me as a Latin, and that’s the way I want it. Anyone who had any paternal sentiments would want a child to escape suffering.” Her mother, whom the author describes as “forever Machiavellian,” collaborated on Philippa’s many acts of racial passing. As Talalay found in her research into George Schuyler’s papers, to this day the manuscript has not one, but three blank pieces of paper taped over each of the five pages concerning Philippa…

Read the entire book review here.

Composition in Black and White: The Life of Philippa Schuyler

Oxford University Press
January 1995
360 pages
47 halftones
6-1/8 x 9-1/4
ISBN13: 978-0-19-511393-8
ISBN10: 0-19-511393-4

Kathryn Talalay

The Tragic Saga of Harlem’s Biracial Prodigy

George Schuyler, a renowned and controversial black journalist of the Harlem Renaissance, and Josephine Cogdell, a blond, blue-eyed Texas heiress and granddaughter of slave owners, believed that intermarriage would “invigorate” the races, thereby producing extraordinary offspring. Their daughter, Philippa Duke Schuyler, became the embodiment of this theory, and they hoped she would prove that interracial children represented the final solution to America’s race problems.

Able to read and write at the age of two and a half, a pianist at four, and a composer by five, Philippa was often compared to Mozart. During the 1930s and 40s she graced the pages of Time and Look magazines, the New York Herald Tribune , and The New Yorker . But as an adult she mysteriously dropped out of sight, leaving America to wonder what had happened to the “little Harlem genius.” Suffering the double sting of racial and gender bias, Philippa was forced to find recognition abroad, where she traveled constantly, performing for kings and queens, and always in search of her self. At the age of thirty-five, Philippa finally began to embark on a racial catharsis: she was just beginning to find herself when on May 9, 1967, while on an unauthorized mission of mercy, her life was cut short in a helicopter crash over the waters of war-torn Vietnam.

The first authorized biography of Philippa Schuyler, Composition in Black and White draws on previously unpublished letters and diaries to reveal an extraordinary and complex personality. Extensive research and personal interviews from around the world make this book not only the definitive chronicle of Schuyler’s restless and haunting life, but also a vivid history of the tumultuous times she lived through. Talalay has created a highly perceptive and provocative portrait of a fascinating woman.

Black, White, and Indian: Race and the Unmaking of an American Family

Oxford University Press
July 2006
312 pages
2 maps, 15 halftones, 1 line illus.
6-1/8 x 9-1/4
ISBN13: 978-0-19-531310-9
ISBN10: 0-19-531310-0

Claudio Saunt, Associate Professor of History and Associate Director of the Institute of Native American Studies
University of Georgia

Winner of the William P. Clements Prize, Clements Center for Southwest Studies

Deceit, compromise, and betrayal were the painful costs of becoming American for many families. For people of Indian, African, and European descent living in the newly formed United States, the most personal and emotional choices–to honor a friendship or pursue an intimate relationship–were often necessarily guided by the harsh economic realities imposed by the country’s racial hierarchy. Few families in American history embody this struggle to survive the pervasive onslaught of racism more than the Graysons.

Like many other residents of the eighteenth-century Native American South, where Black-Indian relations bore little social stigma, Katy Grayson and her brother William–both Creek Indians–had children with partners of African descent. As the plantation economy began to spread across their native land soon after the birth of the American republic, however, Katy abandoned her black partner and children to marry a Scottish-Creek man. She herself became a slaveholder, embracing slavery as a public display of her elevated place in America’s racial hierarchy. William, by contrast, refused to leave his black wife and their several children and even legally emancipated them.

Traveling separate paths, the Graysons survived the invasion of the Creek Nation by U.S. troops in 1813 and again in 1836 and endured the Trail of Tears, only to confront each other on the battlefield during the Civil War. Afterwards, they refused to recognize each other’s existence. In 1907, when Creek Indians became U.S. citizens, Oklahoma gave force of law to the family schism by defining some Graysons as white, others as black. Tracking a full five generations of the Grayson family and basing his account in part on unprecedented access to the forty-four volume diary of G. W. Grayson, the one-time principal chief of the Creek Nation, Claudio Saunt tells not only of America’s past, but of its present, shedding light on one of the most contentious issues in Indian politics, the role of “blood” in the construction of identity.

Overwhelmed by the racial hierarchy in the United States and compelled to adopt the very ideology that oppressed them, the Graysons denied their kin, enslaved their relatives, married their masters, and went to war against each other. Claudio Saunt gives us not only a remarkable saga in its own right but one that illustrates the centrality of race in the American experience.

An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America

Farrar, Straus and Giroux an imprint of Macmillan
2003
416 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches
16 Pages of Black-and-White Illustrations/Map/Notes/Index
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-374-52951-2, ISBN10: 0-374-52951-5

Henry Wiencek

L.A. Times Book Prize – Winner, History

A major new biography of Washington, and the first to explore his engagement with American slavery

When George Washington wrote his will, he made the startling decision to set his slaves free; earlier he had said that holding slaves was his “only unavoidable subject of regret.” In this groundbreaking work, Henry Wiencek explores the founding father’s engagement with slavery at every stage of his life–as a Virginia planter, soldier, politician, president and statesman.

Washington was born and raised among blacks and mixed-race people; he and his wife had blood ties to the slave community. Yet as a young man he bought and sold slaves without scruple, even raffled off children to collect debts (an incident ignored by earlier biographers). Then, on the Revolutionary battlefields where he commanded both black and white troops, Washington’s attitudes began to change. He and the other framers enshrined slavery in the Constitution, but, Wiencek shows, even before he became president Washington had begun to see the system’s evil.

Wiencek’s revelatory narrative, based on a meticulous examination of private papers, court records, and the voluminous Washington archives, documents for the first time the moral transformation culminating in Washington’s determination to emancipate his slaves. He acted too late to keep the new republic from perpetuating slavery, but his repentance was genuine. And it was perhaps related to the possibility–as the oral history of Mount Vernon‘s slave descendants has long asserted–that a slave named West Ford was the son of George and a woman named Venus; Wiencek has new evidence that this could indeed have been true.

George Washington’s heroic stature as Father of Our Country is not diminished in this superb, nuanced portrait: now we see Washington in full as a man of his time and ahead of his time.

A Southern Family in White and Black: The Cuneys of Texas

Texas A&M University Press
2002-12-06
192 pages
6.125 x 9.25
4 b&w photos.
ISBN 13: 978-1-58544-200-3

Douglas Hales, Professor of History
Temple College, Temple, Texas

The complex issues of race and politics in nineteenth-century Texas may be nowhere more dramatically embodied than in three generations of the family of Norris Wright Cuney, mulatto labor and political leader. Douglas Hales explores the birthright Cuney received from his white plantation-owner father, Philip Cuney, and the way his heritage played out in the life of his daughter Maud Cuney-Hare. This intergenerational study casts light on the experience of race in the South before Emancipation, after Reconstruction, and in the diaspora that eventually led cultural leaders of African American heritage into the cities of the North.

Most Texas history books name Norris Wright Cuney as one of the most influential African American politicians in nineteenth-century Texas, but they tell little about him beyond his elected positions. In The Cuneys, Douglas Hales not only fills in the details of Cuney’s life and contributions but places him in the context of his family’s generations.

A politically active plantation owner and slaveholder in Austin County, Philip Cuney participated in the annexation of Texas to the United States and supported the role of slavery and cotton in the developing economy of the new state. Wealthy and powerful, he fathered eight slave children whom he later freed and saw educated. Hales explores how and why Cuney differed from other planters of his time and place.

He then turns to the better-known Norris Wright Cuney to study how the black elite worked for political and economic opportunity in the reactionary period that followed Reconstruction in the South. Cuney led the Texas Republican Party in those turbulent years and, through his position as collection of customs at Galveston, distributed federal patronage to both white and black Texans. As the most powerful African American in Texas, and arguably in the entire South, Cuney became the focal point of white hostility, from both Democrats and members of the “Lily White” faction of his own party. His effective leadership won not only continued office for him but also a position of power within the Republican Party for Texas blacks at a time when the party of Lincoln repudiated African Americans in many other Southern states. From his position on the Galveston City Council, Cuney worked tirelessly for African American education and challenged the domination of white labor within the growing unions.

Norris Wright Cuney’s daughter, Maud, who was graced with a prestigious education, pursued a successful career in the arts as a concert pianist, musicologist, and playwright. A friend of W. E. B. Du Bois, she became actively involved in the racial uplift movement of the early twentieth century. Hales illuminates her role in the intellectual and political “awakening” of black America that culminated in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. He adroitly explores her decision against “passing” as white and her commitment to uplift.

Through these three members of a single mixed-race family, Douglas Hales gives insight into the issues, challenges, and strengths of individuals. His work adds an important chapter to the history of Texas and of African Americans more broadly.