Mixed Race Studies

Christian view on segregation

Association of Citizens Councils
Winona, Mississippi
1954-11-04
16 pages
Source: Digital Collections of the University of Southern Mississippi Libraries
USM Identifier: mus-mcc032

Rev. G. T. Gillepsie, D.D., President Emeritus
Belhaven College, Jackson Mississippi

From the McCain (William D.) Pamphlet Collection; In this pamphlet published by the White Citizens’ Council of Winona, Mississippi, Gillespie states that racial separation is the way to support racial harmony. He says that Soviet Communists are behind the Civil Rights movement, because they want to break down the barriers between races so that racial amalgamation will occur. He contends that school integration will lead to intermarriage, and he cites Biblical and pseudoscientific reasons that segregation must continue. He also quotes Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Booker T. Washington.

A reprint of an address made before the Synod of Mississippi of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S. on November 4, 1954.

The problem of race relations is not new. It is as old as civilization. Whenever in the history of the race two peoples of significantly different characteristics have come in contact with each other, or have sought to occupy the same area, a problem of race relations has inevitably developed. The closer the contact, and the more nearly the numerical strength of the two groups has approached equality, the more difficult and acute the problem has become.

The problem of racial relations throughout the world today has been greatly accentuated by the rapid development of modern means of communication and transportation, which have brought all the peoples of the world into much closer contact than ever before.

The problem has also been complicated by the worldwide spread of Karl Marx’s doctrine of Internationalism and the Classless society, combined with the vigorous propaganda of Soviet Communism to bring about a world revolution and the breakdown of all national and racial distinctions and to effect the complete amalgamation of all races.

The Anglo-Saxon and English-speaking people have steadfastly opposed and resisted the mixture of their racial stock with that of other peoples, especially where the physical and cultural characteristics were widely dissimilar, and wherever they have gone, around the world, they have consistently instituted and maintained a pattern of segregation which uniformly provided an effective check against the process of amalgamation, and which has preserved the racial integrity of the English-speaking peoples of the world.

The race problem in America arises inherently out of the concentration of large masses of the negro race in areas predominantly Anglo-Saxon in racial type and in culture, and where the principle of racial segregation has been generally upheld by legal, social and moral sanctions.

Comparatively little of the opposition to the principle of segregation has come spontaneously from the pure-blood negroes, or from the masses of the negro population; more strenuous opposition has come from the negroes of mixed blood, who have migrated from the South to Northern cities, and who bitterly resent the tensions and discrimination to which they find themselves and their families subjected in their efforts to secure recognition in Northern communities. It is not without significance, however, that a very considerable part of the violent agitation against segregation stems from sources outside the negro race, and outside of America, and coincides with the worldwide movement for racial amalgamation which has its fountainhead in Moscow.

…In Northern or Western communities, where negroes number usually less than five per cent of the total population, the admission of a few negro children to the public schools does not present any serious problem, and even if an occasional interracial marriage should occur, it would have little appreciable effect upon the cultural pattern or the blood-stream of community life, but in the South, where negroes constitute a large proportion, and in some areas a majority, of the population, the integrated school with its blurring of all racial distinctions presents a serious threat to the whole cultural pattern of community life, and points unmistakably to the gradual but eventual merging of the two distinct racial types into a mulatto race. This is not a baseless and fantastic phobia, but a well grounded and reasoned conviction which determines the attitude of Southern parents, and gives assurance that they cannot and will not acquiesce in a program which means the surrender of the birthright of their children and of generations yet unborn…

…4.  Segregation Does Not Necessarily Involve Discrimination.

Whenever two individuals or groups of widely different physical characteristics are brought into close contact, it is likely or even inevitable that some discrimination should occur, especially where the situations are competitive; but such discrimination is a spontaneous human reaction and cannot be charged against the principle of segregation.

As a matter of fact, segregation, by reducing the number of points of contact, tends to lessen friction and tension, and especially if there is clear recognition on the part of both races that the chief reason for segregation is the desirability of preventing such intimacies as might lead to intermarriage and the amalgamation of the races, then the chief occasion for misunderstanding and discrimination is removed…

Read the entire pamphlet here.

Census Bureau Reports Final 2010 Census Data for the United States

United States Census Bureau
Census 2010
2011-03-24

The U.S. Census Bureau announced today that 2010 Census population totals and demographic characteristics have been released for communities in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. These data have provided the first look at population counts for small areas and race, Hispanic origin, voting age and housing unit data released from the 2010 Census. With the release of data for all the states, national-level counts of these characteristics are now available.

For each state, the Census Bureau will provide summaries of population totals, as well as data on race, Hispanic origin and voting age for multiple geographies within the state, such as census blocks, tracts, voting districts, cities, counties and school districts.

According to Public Law 94-171, the Census Bureau must provide redistricting data to the 50 states no later than April 1 of the year following the census. As a result, the Census Bureau is delivering the data state-by-state on a flow basis. All states will receive their data by April 1, 2011.

Highlights by Steven F. Riley

• The United States population (for apportionment purposes)  is 308,745,538. This represents a 9.71% increase over 2000.
• The U.S. population including Puerto Rico is 312,471,327.  This represents a 9.55% increase over 2000.
• The number of repondents (excluding Puerto Rico) checking two or more races (TOMR) is 9,009,073 or 2.92% of the population. This represents a 31.98% increase over 2000.
• The number of repondents (including Puerto Rico) checking TOMR is 9,026,389 or 2.89% of the population.  This represents a 29.23% increase over 2000.
• Hawaii has the highest TOMR response rate at 23.57%, followed by Alaska (7.30%), Oklahoma (5.90%) and California (4.87%).
• California has the highest TOMR population at 1,815,384, followed by Texas (679,001), New York (585,849), and Florida (472,577).
• Mississppi has the lowest TOMR response rate at 1.15%, followed by West Virginia (1.46%),  Alabama (1.49%) and Maine (1.58%).
• Vermont has the lowest TOMR population at 10,753, followed by North Dakota (11,853), Wyoming (12,361) and South Dakota (17,283).
• South Carolina has the highest increase in the TOMR response rate at 100.09%, followed by North Carolina (99.69%), Delaware (83.03%) and Georgia (81.71%).
• New Jersey has the lowest increase in the TOMR response rate at 12.42%, followed by California (12.92%), New Mexico (16.11%), and Massachusetts (17.81%).
• Puerto Rico has a 22.83% decrease in the TOMR response rate and New York has a 0.73% decrease in the TOMR response race.  No other states or territories reported decreases.

Tables compiled by Steven F. Riley. Source: United States Census Bureau

Tables compiled by Steven F. Riley.  Source: United States Census Bureau

Black and White and Married in the Deep South: A Shifting Image

The New York Times
2011-03-19

Susan Saulny, National Correspondent

HATTIESBURG, Miss. — For generations here in the deepest South, there had been a great taboo: publicly crossing the color line for love. Less than 45 years ago, marriage between blacks and whites was illegal, and it has been frowned upon for much of the time since.

So when a great job beckoned about an hour’s drive north of the Gulf Coast, Jeffrey Norwood, a black college basketball coach, had reservations. He was in a serious relationship with a woman who was white and Asian.

“You’re thinking about a life in South Mississippi?” his father said in a skeptical voice, recalling days when a black man could face mortal danger just being seen with a woman of another race, regardless of intentions. “Are you sure?”

But on visits to Hattiesburg, the younger Mr. Norwood said he liked what he saw: growing diversity. So he moved, married, and, with his wife, had a baby girl who was counted on the last census as black, white and Asian. Taylor Rae Norwood, 3, is one of thousands of mixed-race children who have made this state home to one of the country’s most rapidly expanding multiracial populations, up 70 percent between 2000 and 2010, according to new data from the Census Bureau.

In the first comprehensive accounting of multiracial Americans since statistics were first collected about them in 2000, reporting from the 2010 census, made public in recent days, shows that the nation’s mixed-race population is growing far more quickly than many demographers had estimated, particularly in the South and parts of the Midwest. That conclusion is based on the bureau’s analysis of 42 states; the data from the remaining eight states will be released this week.

In North Carolina, the mixed-race population doubled. In Georgia, it expanded by more than 80 percent, and by nearly as much in Kentucky and Tennessee. In Indiana, Iowa and South Dakota, the multiracial population increased by about 70 percent.

“Anything over 50 percent is impressive,” said William H. Frey, a sociologist and demographer at the Brookings Institution. “The fact that even states like Mississippi were able to see a large explosion of residents identifying as both black and white tells us something that people would not have predicted 10 or 20 years ago.”… 

Read the entire article here.

Civil War Fires Up Literary Shootout

The New York Times
2009-07-29

Michael Cieply

LOS ANGELES — History repeats itself. But sometimes it needs a little polishing up from Hollywood.

Over the last few weeks, the writers of a pair of Civil War-era histories about the anti-Confederate inhabitants of Jones County, Miss., have been trading barbs in an unusual public spat. It began when the author of one book, rights to which had been sold to Universal Pictures and the filmmaker Gary Ross, discovered that Mr. Ross had spurred the publication of a new and somewhat sexier work on the same subject.

The encounter has created unexpected bad blood over incidents that occurred—or not—more than 100 years ago. And it offers a glimpse of the way that show business and its values have become entwined with the academic book world and its decision-making process.

On June 23 Doubleday published “The State of Jones: The Small Southern County That Seceded From the Confederacy,” a narrative history by the Harvard scholar John Stauffer and the Washington Post writer Sally Jenkins. The book, which on Monday was ranked No. 83 on Amazon’s best-seller list, presented Newton Knight, the leader of the renegade county, as a morally driven hero in the mold of John Brown—but whose appeal was enhanced by his romance with an ex-slave who, in the book’s account, became the love of his life as relations with his white wife cooled.

In the book’s acknowledgments, the authors thanked Mr. Ross, who they said had brought the idea to their editor, Phyllis Grann at Doubleday, and whose screenplay had served as “our impetus and our inspiration.”

This all came as a surprise to Victoria Bynum, a history professor at Texas State University, San Marcos. Her own book on the subject—“The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War”—had been published eight years earlier by the University of North Carolina Press, which sold the film rights to Universal as material for Mr. Ross’s project in 2007…

Read the entire article here.

In Census, Young Americans Increasingly Diverse

The New York Times
2011-02-04

Sabrina Tabernise

WASHINGTON — Demographers sifting through new population counts released on Thursday by the Census Bureau say the data bring a pattern into sharper focus: Young Americans are far less white than older generations, a shift that demographers say creates a culture gap with far-reaching political and social consequences.

Mississippi, Virginia, New Jersey and Louisiana all had declines in their populations of white residents ages 18 and under, according to the bureau’s first detailed report on the 2010 Census.

…Growth in the number of white youths slowed sharply in the 1990s, up by just 1 percent in the decade, as the number of white women of childbearing age fell, according to Kenneth M. Johnson, a demographer at the University of New Hampshire.

More recently, it has dipped into a decline. The number of whites under the age of 20 fell by 6 percent between 2000 and 2008, Mr. Johnson said, citing countrywide census estimates.

Instead, growth has come from minorities, particularly Hispanics, as more Latino women enter their childbearing years. Blacks, Asians and Hispanics accounted for about 79 percent of the national population growth between 2000 and 2009, Mr. Johnson said.

The result has been a changed American landscape, with whites now a minority of the youth population in 10 states, including Arizona, where tensions over immigration have flared, said William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution…

…Even in Virginia, a largely suburban state whose white adult population rose considerably over the decade, the young white population registered a decline.

In contrast, the number of mixed-race children doubled, Hispanic children doubled, and Asian children were up by more than two-thirds, according to Mr. Johnson…

Read the entire article here.

The “One Drop Rule” revisited: Mary Ann McQueen of Montgomery County, North Carolina

Renegade South: Histories of Unconventional Southerners
2010-12-21

Victoria E. Bynum, Emeritus Professor of History
Texas State University, San Marcos

Many people, perhaps most, think of “race” as an objective reality. Historically, however, racial categorization has been unstable, contradictory, and arbitrary. Consider the term “passing.” Most of us immediately picture a light-skinned person who is “hiding” their African ancestry. Many would go further and accuse that person of denying their “real” racial identity. Yet few people would accuse a dark-skinned person who has an Anglo ancestor of trying to pass for “black,” and thereby denying their “true” Anglo roots!

So why is a white person with an African ancestor presumed to be “really” black? In fact, in this day of DNA testing, it’s become increasingly clear that many more white-identified people have a “drop” or two of African ancestry than most ever imagined. Are lots of white folks (or are they black?) “passing,” then, without even knowing it?

Having said all that, I’d like to provide some historical examples of the shifting and arbitrary nature of racial categorization. Those familiar with Newt Knight already know about the 1948 miscegenation trial of his great-grandson, Davis Knight. According to the “one drop rule” of race, Davis was a black man by virtue of having a multiracial great-grandmother (Rachel Knight). Yet, social custom and the law differed. One was legally “white” in Mississippi if one had one-eighth or less African ancestry, and Davis eventually went free on that legal ground…

…In 1884, Mary Ann McQueen, a young white woman about 33 years old, was suspected of having “black” blood. So strong were these suspicions that her mother, who had always been accepted as white, swore out a deed in the Montgomery County Court that “solemnly” proclaimed her daughter to be “purely white and clear of an African blood whatsoever.” But why did suspicions about the “purity” of Mary Ann McQueen’s “blood” arise in the first place?…

Read the entire essay here.

“White Negroes” in Segregated Mississippi: Miscegenation, Racial Identity, and the Law

The Journal of Southern History
Volume 64, Number 2 (May, 1998)
pages 247-276

Victoria E. Bynum, Emeritus Professor of History
Texas State University, San Marcos

Not until David L. Cohn returned to his native Mississippi after an absence of two decades did he understand the complexities of the racial system in which he, a white man, had been reared during the first decades of the twentieth century. “I began to discover that this apparently simple society was highly complex,” he wrote in the 1948 foreword to his memoir of Delta life. “It was marked by strange paradoxes and hopelessly irreconcilable contradictions. It possessed elaborate behavior codes written, unwritten, and unwritable.”

In the same year that Cohn’s words were published, Davis Knight, a twenty-three-year-old Mississippi man, collided with this system of paradoxes, contradictions, and codes. On June 21, 1948, the Jones County Circuit Court in Ellisville indicted Knight, who claimed to be—and certainly looked—white, for the crime of miscegenation. Two years earlier, on April 18, 1946, he had married Junie Lee Spradley, a white woman. The state claimed that, even though Knight appeared to be white, he was in fact black…

The Physical Form of Mississippi Negroes

American Journal of Physical Anthropology
Volume 16, Issue 2 (October/December 1931)
pages 193–201
DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.1330160213

Melville J. Herskovits (1895-1963), Professor of Anthropology and African Studies
Northwestern University

Vivian K. Cameron

Harriet Smith

During the years 1923 to 1927, research was carried on in an attempt to investigate the physical form of the American Negro, with particular reference to the question of a possible physical type being formed in the United States, and to the amount and consequences of the racial mixture that had gone into the formation of the Negro population of this country.  The results of this research may be briefly summarized as follows: first, that the American Negro, as indicated by the genealogies collected in the course of the study, represented much more racial crossing than had been generally recognized, and secondly, that in spite of this crossing, a physical type which combined the characteristics of the African and European ancestral populations hand which was relatively homogeneous in character had been formed.

Awaiting publication of the complete results of this study, a volume outlining the results was brought out. The point most generally made when this work was criticized was that since the majority of the sample utilized in the study had been measured in the north, the group studied could not be…

Read or purchase the article here.

White Negro Communities: Too White To Be Black And Too Black To Be White

Johnathon Odell: Discovering Our Stories
2010-07-25

John Odell

Yvonne Bivins had to make a choice very few Americans have forced upon them.  She could live as a black woman or a white woman.

Yvonne’s ancestry is enmeshed with the Knights of Jones County [Mississippi]. She was born into one of the so-called “White Negro” communities that sprang up after the Civil War all over through the Piney Woods. These communities grew up around Piney Woods plantations, actually no bigger than farms. There’s Six Town and Soso and Sheeplow. Her community is called Kelly Settlement and located few miles miles outside of Laurel.

Hold on to your hats and I’ll tell you how Kelly Settlement came into existence.  John Kelly, an early petitioner in Mississippi Territory, purchased 640 acres on the Leaf River. His son, Green Kelly had a liaison with a slave named Sarah. Sarah had children by her white master, by a white neighbor and by another slave on the farm. That made three sets of children, a total of eleven.

This may surprise you. It sure did me. But according to Yvonne, it was not an uncommon practice for Piney Woods slave owners, perhaps because of the intimacy created by these modest estates that demanded close-quarters living, to provide for all their offspring, regardless of color. We just don’t hear about it. Newt Knight was vilified not because he sired darker offspring, but because he refused to deny them…

Read the entire article here.

The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War [Book Review]

H-Net Reviews
2002-01-23

Ethan S. Rafuse, Associate Professor of Military History
United States Military Academy

Victoria E. Bynum.“The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War”.  The Fred W. Morrison Series in Southern Studies.  Chapel Hill & London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001.  xvi + 316 pp. Tables, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. (hardcover).  ISBN 0-878-2636-7.

Race, Gender, and the Contested Memory of the Free State of Jones

In her new book, Victoria E. Bynum demonstrates that our knowledge of Mississippi’s legendary Free State of Jones, like so much else associated with the Civil War that has inspired contention and controversy, has been shaped as much by the agenda of those who have attempted to tell the story as by actual events.  This much is known: in the fall of 1863, in the Piney Woods region of southern Mississippi, Confederate deserters led by Newton Knight organized an anti-Confederate guerrilla band that eventually dominated its community and, according to legend, proclaimed Jones County’s independence from the Confederacy.  To deal with the Jones County rebellion, Confederate authorities dispatched two cavalry expeditions into the region that launched devastating attacks upon, but were unable to completely quell, Knight’s band of deserters.  After the war, members of the Knight Company participated in Reconstruction politics and a mixed-race community emerged with Captain Knight as the focal point…

Read the entire review here.