Mixed Race Studies

Pioneers of Jewell: A Documentary History of Lake Worth’s Forgotten First Settlement (1885 – 1910)

Lake Worth Herald Publication
2013
254 pages
Paperback ISBN-10: 098326094X; ISBN-13: 978-0983260943
11 x 8.5 x 0.6 inches

Ted Brownstein

A documentary history of Jewell, Florida, a lost community of everglades pioneers founded in 1885 by Samuel and Fannie James, an African American couple, believed to be former slaves. Jewell eventually grew into the City of Lake Worth, its earliest history largely forgotten.

Pioneers of Jewell rediscovers the world of Fannie and Samuel James in the context of their neighbors and the wider context of Race and Segregation in the aftermath of the American Civil War. For the first time, groundbreaking research reveals the flight of Fannie’s family from North Carolina to Ohio during the Civil War along the track of the Underground Railroad, and traces the Jameses’ trek back south through Tallahassee and Cocoa, Florida, before taking up a homestead on the western shore of Lake Worth. Once in South Florida, the Jameses overcame many of the hindrances of race in those troubled times, and became the nucleus of a vibrant, mostly white, farming community.

Meet Dr. Harry Stites, a well-known physician who gave up a successful medical practice in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania to ‘rough it’ on the South Florida frontier. Meet Squire John C. Hoagland, the area’s first Justice of the Peace, who loved boating and spent much of his time sailing between Palm Beach and Jewell. Meet Michael Merkle, a hermit who lived an austere life in a lean-to west of Jewell, eating unseasoned fish and berries. Merkle, rumored to be a defrocked Catholic priest, was known to walk the pinewoods chanting in Latin when he thought no one was listening.

Relying upon primary historical sources, Pioneers of Jewell reveals:

• Bios of a dozen previously unknown Jewell pioneers.
• The dispute that challenged the Jameses’ land holdings.
• An in-depth look at the Jameses’ stunning financial success.
• Investigation of the Jameses’ slave background.
• The establishment of the Osborne Colored District.
• Klu Klux Klan activity in Lake Worth during the 1920s.
• The fate of Jewell and its pioneers.

BGHRA Convention 2013

Black German Heritage & Research Association
2013-05-15

We are pleased to announce the Third Annual International Convention of the Black German Heritage & Research Association to be held August 8-11, 2013 at Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts.

The conference will feature a keynote address by Maisha Eggers, Professor of Childhood and Diversity Studies at the University of Magdeburg, a screening of the 1952 film “Toxi” and presentations by guest artists Sharon Dodua Otoo and Sandrine Micossé-Aikins, editors of “The Little Book of Big Visions: How To Be an Artist and Revolutionize the World“.

For more information, click here. View the conference schedule here.

Rereading Pauline Johnson

Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d’études canadiennes
Volume 46, Number 2, Spring 2012
pages 45-61
DOI: 10.1353/jcs.2012.0018

Carole Gerson, Professor of English
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada

This essay argues for a broader appreciation of Pauline Johnson’s creative range and poetic accomplishment. Rereading her work in relation to some of J. Edward Chamberlin’s ideas about narrative and about home brings fresh perspectives to her writing and reception in relation to her reversal of the White masculine gaze in her representations of Native peoples, Canadian history, wilderness, and gender. Her first Euro-Canadian audience used her work to assist with their own indigenization and help them feel at home in Canada. Because most current readers construct Johnson as figure of resistance, concentrating on a small selection of her poetry on Native topics, they continue to ignore her poems that invoke a female voice to possess the wilderness, along with her innovative erotic verse that reinhabits the female body by empowering the female gaze.

Having written extensively about Pauline Johnson in the past—most recently in relation to celebrity (Gerson 2012)—I welcome the opportunity created by this collection of essays associated with the Grand River Forum to bring some of J. Edward Chamberlin’s observations about storytelling to bear on my current interest in returning approaches to Johnson. My goal is to bring fresh attention to the craft and range of her poetry and to the complexity of her reception. Chamberlin’s analysis of narrative as essential to human experience, however contradictory the stories on a given topic might seem, is amply borne out by the unusual life and career of Emily Pauline Johnson (1861-1913). The well-known part-Mohawk poet was closely associated with the Grand River region, where she honed her skills in canoeing and authorship, her talents converging in…

Disparity in Breast Cancer Between Black and White Women Can Be Eliminated by Regular Mammography Screening

Rush University Medical Center
News Release
2012-09-25

(CHICAGO) — Regular mammography screening can help narrow the breast cancer gap between black and white women, according to a retrospective study published in Breast Cancer Research and Treatment in August.

Earlier studies have shown that black women in Chicago are more than twice as likely to die of breast cancer compared to white women. Black women with breast cancer reach the disease’s late stages more often than white women, and their tumors are more likely to be larger and more biologically aggressive.

But according to the study, when women of both races received regular breast cancer screening — a mammogram within two years of breast cancer diagnosis — there was no difference in the rate of how many of them presented in the disease’s later stages…

Read the entire news release here.

Our Zip Code May Be More Important Than Our Genetic Code: Social Determinants of Health, Law and Policy

Social Determinants of Health
Rhode Island Medical Journal
Volume 96, Number 7 (July 2013)

Dannie Ritchie, MD, MPH, Clinical Assistant Professor of Family Medicine
Lead, Transcultural Community Health Initiative
Brown University Center for Primary Care and Prevention

Public health is defined as “what we, as a society, do collectively to assure the condition for people to be healthy.” (Institute of Medicine (IOM), 1988, 2003). This evokes the social determinants of health – where we live, learn, work and play has a greater impact on individual and population health than does access to health care. However, when we discuss health and health disparities, clinical care problems are often framed as the problems with the health-care system. Recently, the Institute of Medicine has moved to make the distinction that in public health, the clinical care system is but one part of the overall health system, which should help to avoid the conflation of health as only a product of medical care (IOM 2010)…

…This special issue contains a series of papers expanding key themes addressed in the seminars. Making real improvements in the health of our communities, especially the economically, socially and environmentally impoverished communities, requires much more than “fixing” our wasteful, fragmented and misdirected medical-care systems. If we are to achieve health equity, it is time for us to evaluate how to truly shift the dialogue, and not inadvertently replicate the same disparities we are trying to eliminate. We must examine how disparities impact us all across demographics and not only the most vulnerable, though they bear the greater burden. It is our intent with this edition to provide tools to better equip us to evaluate the social determinants of health and ways to take action through law and policy…

Read the entire article here.

“A Very Different Looking Class of People”: Racial Passing, Tragedy, and the Mulatto Citizen in American Literature

University of Southern Mississippi
2013-02-18
81 pages

Stephanie S. Rambo

Honors Prospectus Submitted to the Honors College of The University of Southern Mississippi In Fulfillment Bachelors of Arts In the Department of English

This project explores the mulatto citizen as one who prevails against tragedy, uses passing as an escape route to freedom and equality, and establishes a fixed racial identity in a color struck world. In nineteenth-century American literature, the mulatto penetrates a seemingly solid world of color to reveal racial anxieties of the time. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lonely (1852), William Wells Brown’s Clotel, or the President’s Daughter (1853), Frank J. Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends (1857) and Frances E.W. Harper’s Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted depict these mulatto characters as agents of social change. Each of these texts present the figure of the mulatto in a historical context, as a slave in the South and free/freedman in the antebellum North. Considering these various genres (esp. the blending of fiction and nonfiction at times), this study examines how different authors take a political stance by using the mulatto figure to define U.S. citizenship.

Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a foundational text due to the political response during Abraham Lincoln’s administration and from abolitionists worldwide. Stowe represents those minorities excluded from the democratic process, namely African Americans and women who were both disenfranchised. I examine political fiction by Brown, Webb, and Harper due to their depictions of the laws of slavery and African Americans’ civil rights struggles throughout the nineteenth century. Most of these American writers were excluded themselves from the political process. Therefore, I consider these writers most capable to present the voice of the marginal, mulatto citizen.

Read the entire thesis here.

And so it’s always powerful for me to visit countries outside of the United States generally, but obviously for an African American, and an African American President to be able to visit this site I think gives me even greater motivation in terms of the defense of human rights around the world.

Barack Obama, “Remarks by President Obama After Tour of Maison Des Esclaves,” (Gorée Island, Senegal) The White House: Office of the Press Secretary, (Washington, D. C., June 27, 2013). http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/06/27/remarks-president-obama-after-tour-maison-des-esclaves.

Japanese-Canadian hapa woman makes opera fun

Global Asian Women: Stories for and about Asian women around the world
2013-07-31

Elizabeth Noh

Her name means a solo piece in an opera, and it just so happens that Aria Umezawa is a trained opera singer.

The mixed Japanese-Canadian is also the co-founder and artistic director of Opera 5, a small production company in Toronto, Canada.

Fate or coincidence? Her parents had no idea when they named her 25 years ago.

“My parents joke that if they knew I would follow my namesake, they would have named me lawyer or doctor,” says Aria.

Her calling came at the age of 6, when she saw her first opera, Turandot by Puccini. “The music touched me.”

The experience lead her to study at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto and later at McGill University in Montreal. She trained as an opera singer, but she found that she wasn’t cut out to be a performer and was more suited to be a director…

…Aria is bi-racial. Her mother is Caucasian from the province of Alberta in western Canada. Her father is Japanese who came to Canada as a teenager. Aria was born and raised in Toronto. She has two younger brothers.

Some people say Eurasian, but “hapa” is commonly used in North America. The term originates from Hawaii and means a person of mixed blood. We talk about her mixed background.

“Growing up, it never occurred to me that my family was different on any sort of substantial level. We ate foods that my friends didn’t eat, and I was enrolled in karate instead of ballet, but I figured every family had its quirks,” she says…

Read the entire article here.

New book details racism faced by black soldiers who helped build Alaska Highway

Edmonton Journal
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
2013-08-02

Chris Zdeb

EDMONTON – Author John Virtue admits he knew “absolutely nothing” about The Black Soldiers Who Built the Alaska Highway, which is also the title of his latest book, before he started researching the topic six years ago.

He was inspired to write the story at the suggestion of Monte Irvin, a former New York Giant and a member of the baseball Hall of Fame, who Virtue met while writing a book about the role of the Mexican League in desegregating American baseball.

Virtue had never heard about the black soldiers who worked on the highway, even though he was raised in Edmonton, the staging area for the project.

You’d think it would be hard to miss 5,000 black troops, almost half of the 11,000 American soldiers who spent 18 months working on two of the biggest construction projects of the Second World War…

…The black soldiers should have been especially newsworthy, since they were the first African-American troops to be deployed outside of the U.S. mainland during the Second World War.

“The main reason why the contributions of the black soldiers was ignored during the war,” the former journalist says from his Miami Beach home, “is because of the power of congressmen from the southern states, who thought that anything that glorified the contributions of the blacks would cause problems back home. They might agitate for improvement of their conditions once the war was over and they were back home.”…

…There was immediate opposition from Brig.-Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner, Jr., commander in charge of the defence of Alaska, to black soldiers being sent to the far north. On receiving a letter from Brig.-Gen. Clarence L. Sturdevant, assistant of the Corps of Engineers, informing him that two black regiments would be sent to the Yukon and Alaska to help with the highway, Buckner minced no words in his reply.

“I have no objections whatever to your employing them on the roads if they are kept far enough away from the settlements and kept busy and sent home as soon as possible,” wrote Buckner, a southern aristocrat raised in rural Kentucky.

“The very high wages offered to unskilled labour here would attract a large number of them and cause them to remain and settle after the war, with the natural result that they could interbreed with the Indian and Eskimos and produce an astonishingly objectionable race of mongrels which could be a problem from now on.”…

Read the entire article here.

Obama Warms To Speaking Personally About Race

Weekend Edition Saturday
National Public Radio
2013-08-13

Linda Wertheimer, Senior National Correspondent and Host

Ari Schapiro, White House Correspondent

On race, Barack Obama often says he is not president of black America, but of the United States of America. Though he has not avoided the subject during his time in office, he tends not to seek out opportunities to discuss racial issues.

“He wanted to address them in a time and a way that accomplished specific objectives,” says Joshua Dubois, who ran the White House’s faith-based initiatives during Obama’s first term.

Obama addressed race most comprehensively in a Philadelphia speech during his first presidential campaign, after incendiary sermons by the pastor Jeremiah Wright came to light. “Race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now,” he said.

A handful of other events followed in the next four years, including a White House “beer summit” between a black Harvard professor and a white police officer; and the occasional commencement address at a historically black college.

Sherrilyn Ifill, who leads the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, believes Obama’s posture is typical for African-Americans who lead racially diverse groups. “It’s not as though many of us relish wading into issues of race,” she says. “We often feel we must, or we feel compelled to, but very few of us are eager to do it, and certainly I think the president was not eager to do it.”…

…During his recent travels through Africa, Obama talked repeatedly and explicitly about the significance of his skin color. “As an African-American president, to be able to visit this site I think gives me even greater motivation in terms of defense of human rights around the world,” he said at a slave port in Senegal…

Listen to the story here.  Download the audio here. Read the entire transcript here.