Mixed Race Studies

The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies [Book Review]

Civil War Book Review
Summer 2010

Michael Perman, Professor of History and Research Professor of Humanities
University of Illinois, Chicago

Family and Dissent in the South during and after the Civil War

Bynum, Victoria E. The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.

Victoria Bynum’s new book expands on her 2002 study, The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War, because it supplements the resistance against the Confederate government in southern Mississippi with two other similar revolts, one in east Texas and the other in central North Carolina. The outcome is not a longer book but a very compact volume of just 148 pages of text that presents, to a wider audience than most scholarly monographs, the little-known story of this local opposition to the Confederacy. Bynum then proceeds to show that, after the war, these same three pockets of resistance generated a pattern of dissidence that continued throughout the last decades of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. This “long shadow of the Civil War” consisted of a tradition of dissent that passed through several generations within the families and communities that were involved in these three initial anti-Confederate insurgencies.

…The people who engaged in these overt acts of resistance were, according to Bynum, non-slaveholding farmers who lived outside the plantation areas of their states and who increasingly resented the conflict as “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight” that was also perceived as “a slaveowners’ war and a non-slaveowners’ fight.” Moreover, these rebels came from the same local communities and were even related to each other. As kinfolk, they banded together, with the women playing a major role in the resistance, protecting their families and communities from Confederate threats to their livelihood and shielding their male kin who were of draft-age. A third characteristic was their independent spirit and their nonconformist behavior. One of the most prominent of them, Newt Knight, lived openly with his racially-mixed family and their offspring, defiantly unconventional conduct that is described in some detail in the book’s sixth and final chapter…

…Victoria Bynum’s interest in Anna Knight is especially understandable, since one of her fields is women’s history and her first book was Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South (1992). In fact, two chapters of the six in The Long Shadow of the Civil War focus on women, while a third deals with women and race. Chapter two emphasizes the part played by women, primarily in the Quaker Belt, within the resistance against the Confederacy. Not only did women support this dangerous defiance but they acted on their own in many aspects of it, in particular harboring deserters and encouraging their sons to refuse to enlist. Chapter six is about “The Women of the Knight Family” and it explores the very complicated and independent maneuvers that these mixed-race women employed to deal with the conventions of race and gender in the Jim Crow South. And lastly, chapter three examines the resistance in North Carolina’s Quaker Belt that was mounted during the post-war period of Reconstruction against the former Confederates and the Ku Klux Klan who were determined to remove the Republicans from control of their state and to restore the freedmen to the subordinate position they had endured as slaves. In this contest, black women in particular challenged attempts to control their autonomy especially their sexuality, even defending themselves in court, a remarkable development so soon after emancipation…

Read the entire review here.

The Code Noir (French language: The Black Code) was a decree passed by France’s King Louis XIV in 1685. The Code Noir defined the conditions of slavery in the French colonial empire, restricted the activities of free Negroes, forbade the exercise of any religion other than Roman Catholicism, and ordered all Jews out of France’s colonies. The code has been described by Tyler Stovall as “one of the most extensive official documents on race, slavery, and freedom ever drawn up in Europe.”

…2 of the 60 articles, the document specified that:

• married free men will be fined for having children with their slave concubines, as will the slave concubine’s master. If the man himself is the master of the slave concubine, the slave and child will be removed from his ownership. If the man was not married, he should then be married to the slave concubine thus freeing her and the child from slavery (art. 9)
• children between a male slave and a female free woman are free; children between a female slave and a free man are slaves (art. 13)

Read all 60 articles (in French) here.

Wikipedia

Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), is a landmark United States Supreme Court decision in the jurisprudence of the United States, upholding the constitutionality of state laws requiring racial segregation in private businesses (particularly railroads), under the doctrine of “separate but equal”.

Wikipedia

Comments by Steven F. Riley:

The Plessy decision is significant in that it not only gave constitutional legitimacy to Jim Crow segregation, it also effectively codifed the so-called “one-drop rule” which designated anyone with any known quantity of African ancestry—no mater how small—as black.   Homer Plessy, (of one-eighth African ancestry) was by all appearances  “visibly white” and in fact had to announce his appearance on the railroad car in which he was traveling.

Multiracial College Students: Understanding Interpersonal Self-Concept in the First Year

The University of Michigan
2010
151 pages

Mark Allen Kamimura

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Education) in The University of Michigan 2010

This purpose of this study was to explore the differences between mixed and single race students in the factors that contribute to an interpersonal self-concept. The data in this study are drawn from a national longitudinal survey, Your First College Year (YFCY), from 2004-2005 and include mixed race Black and Asian students and their single race Black and Asian peers to explore interpersonal self-concept.

The results suggest that mixed and single race Asian and Black students have different pre-college and first year experiences, but only mixed race Black students were found to develop a significantly higher interpersonal self-concept after their first-year than their single race peers. Most importantly for mixed and single race students are their interactions with diverse peers. For all groups, both negative and positive interactions based on race within the college environment directly impact interpersonal self-concept. First-year college experiences (Positive Ethnic/Racial Relations, Racial Interactions of a Negative Quality, Leadership Orientation, Sense of Belonging, Campus Racial Climate, Self-Assessed Cognitive Development) were the most significant contributors to the development of an interpersonal self-concept in comparison to pre-college experiences.

The findings in this study expand the literature on multiracial college students and provide empirical evidence to support institutional practices that aim to promote a positive interpersonal self-concept in the first college year.

Table of Contents

• DEDICATION
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• LIST OF FIGURES
• LIST OF TABLES
• LIST OF APPENDICES
• ABSTRACT
• CHAPTER 1
  • INTRODUCTION
    • Statement of the Problem
    • Purpose and Scope of the Study
    • Significance of the Study
    • Contributions of the Study
• CHAPTER 2
  • LITERATURE REVIEW
    • The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Census 2000
    • Social Construction of Race and Racial Categories
    • Multiracial Terminology
    • College Student Identity
  • Overview of Relevant Studies on Mixed and Single Race Students
    • Multiracial Students in Higher Education
    • Relevant Studies of Multiracial Individuals
    • Relevant Individual Race Studies
  • Theories on Multiracial Identity
    • Linear Racial Identity Development Approach
    • Resolution Approach
    • Ecological Approach
  • Comparisons Between Single-Race and Multiracial Research
    • Theoretical Comparison
  • Indicators of Multiracial Interpersonal Self-Concept
    • Positional
    • Resources
    • Information
    • Relationships
    • Environment
    • Involvement
    • Politics
    • Identity
    • Personal
    • Conceptual Mode
• CHAPTER 3
  • METHODOLOGY
    • Date Sources and Data Collection
    • Sample
    • The 48 Cases
    • Dependent Variable
    • Independent Variables
    • Conceptual Regression Model
    • Data Preparation
    • Limitations
• CHAPTER 4
  • RESULTS
    • Independent t-Tests
      • Single Race Black Students and Mixed Race Black Students (Independent Variables)
      • Single Race Asian Students and Mixed Race Asian Students (Independent Variables)
      • Interpersonal Self-concept (Dependent Variable)
      • Summary
    • Multivariate Analysis
      • Interpersonal Self-Concept for First Year Mixed and Single Race Black Students
      • Summary
      • Interpersonal Self-Concept for First Year Mixed and Single Race Asian Students
      • Summary
      • Comparison of Interpersonal Self-Concept Between Groups
      • Summary of Results
• CHAPTER 5
  • DISCUSSION
    • Summary of Findings
    • Implications to Practice in Higher Education
      • Student Affairs
      • Academic Incorporation
      • Higher Education and Institutional Policy
    • Implications for Research
      • Theory
      • Design and Methodology
      • Future Research
    • Conclusion
• APPENDICES
• REFERENCES

List of Figures

• Figure 2.1 Conceptual Model for Interpersonal Self-Concept
• Figure 3.1 Conceptual Regression Model

LIST OF TABLES

• Table 2.1 Factors Contributing to a Multiracial Interpersonal Self-Concept
• Table 3.1 Sample Size
• Table 3.2 Interpersonal Self-concept Factor Analysis
• Table 3.3 Summary of Variables and Indices
• Table 3.4 Factor Analysis Descriptive Statistics
• Table 3.5 Positive Race/Ethnic Relations
• Table 3.6 Racial/Ethnic Interactions of a Negative Quality
• Table 3.7 Campus Racial Climate
• Table 3.8 Race/Ethnic Composition of the Environment
• Table 3.9 Leadership and Community Orientation
• Table 3.10 Informed Citizenship
• Table 3.11 Satisfaction with College
• Table 3.12 Sense of Belonging
• Table 3.13 Self-Assessed Cognitive Development
• Table 4.1 Frequencies, Means, Standard deviations, and Test of Significance on Independent Variables for Entire Sample by Race (Total Black n=2647 and Total Black+n=485)
• Table 4.2 Means, Standard deviations, and Test of Significance on Independent Variables for Entire Sample by Race (Asian Total n=1927 and Total Asian+n=464)
• Table 4.3 Means, Standard deviations, and Individual and Paired Tests of Significance on Dependent Variables for Entire Sample by Race (Black Total n=2647 and Total Black+n=485) and (Asian Total n=1927 and Total Asian+ n=464)
• Table 4.4 Standardized beta coefficients for blocked entry regression on Dependent Variable Interpersonal Self-Concept (α=.599) for Entire Sample: Black and Black+ (n = 2,434)
• Table 4.5 Standardized beta coefficients for blocked entry regression on Dependent Variable Interpersonal Self-Concept (α=.647) for Entire Sample: Asian and Asian+ (n = 2,158)
• Table 4.6 Unstandardized beta coefficients for blocked entry regression on DependentVariable Interpersonal Self-Concept. Comparison of Black and Black+ (α=.599, n = 2,434) and Asian and Asian+ (α=.647, n = 2,158)

LIST OF APPENDICES

• APPENDIX A: Office of Management and Budget Information
• APPENDIX B: Renn’s Ecology of College Student Development Model

Read the entire dissertation here.