Mixed Race Studies

Households and Neighborhoods Among Free People of Color in New Orleans: A View from the Census, 1850-1860

University of New Orleans
2010-05-14
58 pages

Frank Joseph Lovato

A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the University of New Orleans in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in History

Historians have debated to what extent the free people of color in New Orleans were members of a wealthy privileged elite or part of a middle or working class in the South’s largest antebellum city. This study steps outside the debate to suggest that analysis of the censuses of 1850 and 1860 shows correlations between neighborhoods, household structures, and occupations that reveal a heterogeneous population that eludes simple definitions. In particular this study focuses on mixed-race households to shed light on this segment of the free colored population that is mostly unstudied and generally misrepresented. This study also finds that immediately prior to the Civil War, mixed-race families, for no easily understood reason, tended to cluster in certain neighborhoods. Mostly this study points out that by the Civil War, the free people of color in New Orleans had evolved into a diverse mostly working class population.

Table of Contents

• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Maps
• List of Census Form
• Abstract
• Introduction
• Origins of the Free People of Color in New Orleans
• Historiography of the Free People of Color in New Orleans
• Methodology Used for Data Gathering
• Economic Role of the Free People of Color in Ante-Bellum New Orleans
• Community Organizations
• Neighborhoods and the Free People of Color
• Free People of Color and the Prelude to the Civil War
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Tables
• Maps
• Census Forms
• Vita

List of Figures

• Figure 1 – 4th Ward Mixed-Race Couple Distribution
• Figure 2 – 5th Ward Mixed-Race Couple Distribution
• Figure 3 – New Orleans Population in 1850 & 1860
• Figure 4 – New Orleans Colored Population in 1850 & 1860
• Figure 5 –Population Density of Colored Males in 1850 & 1860

List of Tables

• Table 1 – 1850 New Orleans Census
• Table 2 – 1860 New Orleans Census
• Table 3 – Population Density for Colored, Mulatto and Blacks in the 1850 New Orleans Census
• Table 4 – Population Density for Colored, Mulatto and Blacks in the 1860 New Orleans Census
• Table 5 – Property Values of the Free People of Color in 1850 New Orleans
• Table 6 – Property Values of the Free People of Color in 1860 New Orleans

List of Maps

• MUNICIPALITIES and WARDS 1847
• WARDS 1852
• Neighborhoods in New Orleans

List of Census Forms

• Title Page 1st and 4th Wards (1st Municipality)
• 1st Ward, 1st Municipality – 1850
• 9th Wards -1860

Read the entire thesis here.

People Can Claim One or More Races On Federal Forms

The New York Times
1997-10-30

Steven A. Holmes

The Clinton Administration today adopted new rules for listing racial and ethnic makeup on Federal forms, allowing people for the first time to identify themselves as members of more than one race.

The change, which could affect Government policies like affirmative action and the drawing of legislative districts, is the first revision in the Government’s definition of racial and ethnic groupings since 1977. It means that on Federal forms people can identify themselves in a single racial category or a combination.

The Administration rejected a ”multiracial” classification that would have covered all people of mixed racial heritage…

…But the Administration has yet to say how people who select this option will be counted in studies like the census. The Administration has not decided how to count someone who lists a racial makeup of black and white. More complicated is what to do with people listing themselves as black, white and Asian. Should such a person be counted as black, white or Asian or some combination?

The counting issue is important because Federal policy under measures like the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and aid for bilingual education is based on the percentage of certain racial groups in a given location. For example, legislative districts must be drawn in such a manner to insure that black residents are adequately represented, and block-by-block census counts are essential to the process…

…Officials at the Office of Management and Budget said they would meet with officials from other Federal agencies, interest groups, demographers, planners and social scientists to work out a policy for counting people who list themselves as members of more than one race. The officials said they hoped to put out recommendations on the issue by the fall of 1998.

The fight over how to count people will be arduous. The Association of Multiethnic Americans will argue that mixed-race residents be counted separately, Mr. Fernandez said.

Such a view is bound to raise concerns among some minority critics who have contended all along that the drive for a changing the racial categories was a way to attack affirmative action and other race-based government programs.

”I believe the same people who are against affirmative action are the same people who are pushing this,” said Robert Hill, the director of the Institute of Urban Research at Morgan State University in Baltimore…

Read the entire article here.

Born a Half-Caste

Aboriginal Studies Press
1990 (revised edition)
78 pages
210 x1 50mm, b/w illus
Paperback ISBN: 9780855751609

Margaret (Marnie) Kennedy (1919–1985)

Marnie Kennedy was born in 1919 ‘on the bank of Coppermine Creek’. Her story takes us from her birthplace in Western Queensland, to Palm Island where she grew up ‘under the Act’, and back to western Queensland where she spent all of her hard-working life on cattle stations. It is a story of quiet courage and determination, dedicated ‘to my mother, my children and grandchildren, and my people’.

Indifferent Inclusion: Aboriginal people and the Australian Nation

Aboriginal Studies Press
September 2011
288 pages
230 x 152mm; b/w Illustrations
Paperback ISBN: 9780855757793

Russell McGregor, Associate Professor of History
James Cook University, Townsville, Queensland, Australia

McGregor offers a holistic interpretation of the complex relationship between Indigenous and settler Australians during the middle four decades of the twentieth century. Combining the perspectives of political, social and cultural history in a coherent narrative, he provides a cogent analysis of how the relationship changed, and the impediments to change.

McGregor’s focus is on the quest for Aboriginal inclusion in the Australia nation; a task which dominated the Aboriginal agenda at the time. McGregor challenges existing scholarship and assumptions, particularly around assimilation. In doing so he provides an understanding of why assimilation once held the approval of many reformers, including Indigenous activists.

He reveals that the inclusion of Aboriginal people in the Australian nation was not a function of political lobbying and parliamentary decision making. Rather, it depended at least as much on Aboriginal people’s public profile, and the way their demonstrated abilities partially wore down the apathy and indifference of settler Australians.

Russell McGregor is Associate Professor of History at James Cook University in Townsville. He has published extensively on the history of settler Australian attitudes toward Aboriginal people, including the award-winning book Imagined Destinies. His other research interests are in Australian nationalism and environmental history.

Contents

• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Notes on Terminology
• Abbreviations and Acronyms
• Prologue: The Crimson Thread of Whiteness
• Chapter 1: Preserving the National Complexion
  • Managing miscegenation
  • Hiding heredity
  • Opponents
  • Continuities and discontinuities
• Chapter 2: Primitive Possibilities
  • Reappraising the primitive
  • Refiguring the federation
  • Humanitarians and activists
  • A new deal
• Chapter 3: Aboriginal Activists Demand Acceptance
  • Conditional citizenship
  • Virile, capable and black
  • Representation and rights
  • Citizen soldiers
• Chapter 4: Restricted Reconstruction
  • Postwar world order
  • Challenging white Australia
  • An anthropologist discovers citizenship
  • Appreciating the Aboriginal
• Chapter 5: To Live as We Do
  • Stranded individuals
  • Avoiding ‘Aborigines’
  • Mobilising civil society
  • Attenuated identities
• Chapter 6: Assimilation and Integration
  • Assimilation through tradition
  • An expedient slogan
  • Definitions and redefinitions
• Chapter 7: Enriching the Nation
  • Respect and redemption
  • Sporting heroes
  • Indigenous wisdom
  • Appreciation and appropriation
• Chapter 8: Fellow Australians
  • Voting rights
  • Drinking rites
  • Right wrongs, write yes
  • Special assistance or minority rights?
• Chapter 9: After the Referendum
  • Dream time in Canberra
  • Land rights
  • An Aboriginal nation
• Epilogue: Unfinished Business
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index

Chapter 1: Preserving the National Complexion

After the First World War, Australians began to notice a new trend among the Aboriginal population. Within their own enclaves, people of mixed descent were reproducing faster than white Australians. Remarking on this trend, demographer Jens Lyng observed in 1927 that ‘the idea of the White Australia ideal eventually being shattered from within cannot be dismissed as altogether absurd’.1 Lyng’s wording was guarded, and there is no evidence to suggest that the Australian public was alarmed by half-caste reproduction rates or fearful that it posed a threat to the national ideal. Some administrators of Aboriginal affairs were alarmed and fearful, however — or at least their statements on the issue were alarmist and fear-provoking. Two administrators in particular — Western Australia’s Chief Protector of Aborigines (later Commissioner of Native Affairs), AO Neville, and the Northern Territory’s Chief Protector of Aborigines, Cecil Cook — elevated the ‘half-caste menace’ to their highest priority.

Neville’s and Cook’s solution to the half-caste problem was biological absorption, colloquially called ‘breeding out the colour’. This entailed directing persons of mixed descent into marital unions with white people, so that after several generations of interbreeding all outward signs of Aboriginal ancestry would disappear. It held an incongruent array of aims and means. Absorption promised to resolve the supposed problems resulting from racial intermixture by encouraging still more intermixing. It aimed to uphold the ideal of white Australia but flew in the face of popular notions of white Australia as a doctrine of racial purity. While racist in many ways, absorption simultaneously defied prevalent racist assumptions of hybrid inferiority. It parallelled eugenicism in certain respects, but also clashed with eugenic principles. It was inspired partly by humanitarian welfarism, but evinced profound disdain for the subjects of its welfare interventions.

Despite these myriad inspirations and aspirations, absorption’s primary objective was accurately stated in its colloquial designation. It aimed to ‘breed out the colour’ — to physically transform persons of Aboriginal ancestry into white Australians and thereby bleach out the as yet small coloured stain in the national fabric. Half-castes must become white since whiteness was the essential qualification for national membership. Breeding the colour out of persons of Aboriginal descent was equally a program of breeding them into the community of the nation. This chapter argues that biological absorption in the interwar years should be understood in the context of a strongly ethnic conception of Australian nationhood, whereby myths of blood kinship provided the core of national cohesion. It also argues that while absorption was a variant of assimilation, it was in crucial respects different to the social assimilation which some critics were beginning to advocate in the 1930s, and which came to the fore after the Second World War…

Read the entire chapter here.

Banneker’s family tree still bears rich fruit

The Baltimore Sun
2006-06-12

Gregory Kane

And so Molly Welsh, an Englishwoman sentenced to indentured servitude in 17th-century Maryland, wed an African slave named Bannaka. And they begat four daughters, one of whom was named Mary.

And Mary wed a slave named Robert, who took her last name, which, by the time of their nuptials, had become Bannaky. Mary and Robert begat one son and three daughters. One of the daughters, Jemima, wed Samuel D. Lett. From that union came eight children, including a son named Aquilla.

“Aquilla Lett eventually moved to Ohio,” Gwen Marable said Saturday afternoon. A number of generations later, “that’s how I came to be born in Ohio,” she said. Marable eventually found her way to Maryland. She may be in these parts for good.

“The project has really kept me here,” Marable said.

That project would be the Benjamin Banneker Historical Park and Museum in Baltimore County. That son Mary and Robert Bannaky had was none other than Benjamin Banneker—the farmer, astronomer, mathematician, surveyor and publisher—whose farm once sat on the site where the park is now located. Marable described herself as a collateral descendant of Banneker, not a direct descendant…

…”It’s been said that she married Bannaka to keep him from running off,” said Cole Wiggins, a board member of the Friends of the Banneker Historical Park and Museum. “But don’t quote me on that. It’s never been proved.”

Actually, wisecracking husbands might say that Welsh’s marrying Bannaka might have been the sure way to make him run off. What may be closer to the truth is that marriages between white, female indentured servants and black men—whether slave or “free men of color”—could have been quite common at the time…

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Romancing the Raj: Interracial Relations in Anglo-Indian Romance Novels

History of Intellectual Culture
Volume 4, Number 1 (2004)
ISSN 1492-7810

Hsu-Ming Teo, Senior Lecturer and Head of Modern History
Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

This article examines Anglo-Indian romance novels written by British women during the period of the Raj. It argues that these love stories were symptomatic of British fantasies of colonial India and served as a forum to explore interracial relations as well as experimenting with the modern femininity of the New Woman. With the achievement of Indian independence in 1947, British interest in India as a locus for romance rapidly declined, thus demonstrating that these novels were never concerned with India but with British lives and British colonialism.

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