Mixed Race Studies

Fifteenth Union: A Melungeon Gathering

Melungeon Heritage Association
Carolina Connections: Roots and Branches of Mixed Ancestry Communities
Warren Wilson College
Swannanoa, North Carolina
2011-07-14 through 2011-07-16

MHA is delighted to announce that this year our annual Union will be celebrated at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, NC, July 14-16, 2011. This will be our first Union in the Carolinas, states of primary significance to the history of mixed ancestry communities across America. Melungeon roots in the Carolinas have been prominent topics of discussion in past Unions, and MHA welcomes the opportunity to celebrate and study our heritage on this historic and beautiful campus. Warren Wilson College is located a few miles from Asheville in a scenic area near the highest mountains in the East. It has historic connections to the Melungeon community of Vardy, which the Union will celebrate.

We will have speakers on a wide variety of genealogical and historical topics. The program is still being developed, but two distinguished authors have agreed to discuss their new books at the Union. Each book breaks new ground in the literature of mixed ancestry in the United States.

The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White (Penguin, 2011) tells three stories that will be especially meaningful to MHA readers. Author Daniel J. Sharfstein is an associate professor of law at Vanderbilt University. Within a month of publication, his new book was acclaimed in the New York Times as “astonishingly detailed rendering of the variety and complexity of racial experience in an evolving national culture moving from slavery to segregation to civil rights.” This study of the Gibson, Spencer, and Wall families has the potential to change the national conversation about race, and MHA is honored by Mr. Sharfstein’s participation in 15th Union.

Lisa Alther is an acclaimed author of bestselling fiction whose most recent book was a nonfiction investigation of Melungeon ancestry entitled Kinfolks: Falling off the Family Tree. She returns to fiction with Washed in the Blood, forthcoming this fall from Mercer University Press. Alther’s new novel portrays the early history of the southern Appalachians. It tells the story of several generations of the Martin family, from the arrival of Diego Martin as a hog drover with a Spanish exploring party in the 16th century, describing his descendants’ struggles to survive and gain acceptance down through the early 20th century.  In this new novel, Alther connects Melungeon history to early settlement of the Southeastern US, and thus to the theme of 15th Union…

For more information, click here.

Daniel Sharfstein awarded Alphonse Fletcher Sr. Fellowship by Fletcher Foundation

Vanderbilt University Law School
2011-07-06

Daniel J. Sharfstein, associate professor of law, has been awarded an Alphonse Fletcher Sr. Fellowship by the Fletcher Foundation.
 
Professor Sharfstein’s new book, The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White, examines the history of race in the United States through three families who crossed the color line and assimilated into white communities. He will use the Fletcher Fellowship, which provides awards of $50,000 to fund research and support literary and artistic works that contribute to improving race relations and further the broad social goals of the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, to chronicle a group of Southern lawyers who argued against integration in courts during the decade following Brown…

Read the entire article here.

The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White [Discussion]

Lillian Goldman Law Library
Yale University
2011-03-07

Daniel J. Sharfstein, Professor of Law
Vanderbilt University

Moderator: Claire Priest, Professor of Law
Yale University

The Lillian Goldman Law Library together with the Yale Law School Legal History Forum and the Yale Black Law Students Association invite you to a discussion featuring an important new book by Professor Daniel J. Sharfstein, with critical commentary by Professor Claire Priest.
 
The Invisible Line unravels the stories of three families who represent the complexity of race in America and force us to rethink our basic assumptions about who we are. For example, one of the families that started out black produced a Yale-educated Confederate general! This book has been called a “must read” by major scholars spanning the fields of legal history and African American Studies. It is written with the sensitivity of a novelist from the perspective of a legal scholar and provides a fascinating account of how laws and court decisions help shape racial attitudes.

Running Time: 01:17:37

Black or White?

The New York Times
2011-05-14

Daniel J. Sharfstein, Professor of Law
Vanderbilt University

Daniel J. Sharfstein is the author of “The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White.”

In February 1861, just weeks after Louisiana seceded from the Union, Randall Lee Gibson enlisted as a private in a state army regiment. The son of a wealthy sugar planter and valedictorian of Yale’s Class of 1853, Gibson had long supported secession. Conflict was inevitable, he believed, not because of states’ rights or the propriety or necessity of slavery. Rather, a war would be fought over the inexorable gulf between whites and blacks, or what he called “the most enlightened race” and “the most degraded of all the races of men.” Because Northern abolitionists were forcing the South to recognize “the political, civil, and social equality of all the races of men,” Gibson wrote, the South was compelled to enjoy “independence out of the Union.” (Read Randall Lee Gibson’s article, “Our Federal Union.”)

The notion that war turned on a question of black and white as opposed to slavery and freedom was hardly an intuitive position for Gibson or for the South. Although Southern society was premised on slavery, the line between black and white had always been permeable. Since the 17th century, people descended from African slaves had been assimilating into white communities. It was a great migration that was covered up even as it was happening, its reach extending into the most unlikely corners of the South: although Randall Gibson was committed to a hardline ideology of racial difference, this secret narrative of the American experience was his family’s story.

Gibson’s siblings proudly traced their ancestry to a prosperous farmer in the South Carolina backcountry named Gideon Gibson. What they didn’t know was that when he first arrived in the colony in the 1730s, he was a free man of color. At the time the legislature thought he had come there to plot a slave revolt. The governor demanded a personal audience with him and learned that he was a skilled tradesman, had a white wife and had owned land and slaves in Virginia and North Carolina. Declaring the Gibsons to be “not Negroes nor Slaves but Free people,” the governor granted them hundreds of acres of land. The Gibsons soon married into their Welsh and Scots-Irish community along the frontier separating South Carolina’s coastal plantations from Indian country. It did not matter if the Gibsons were black or white—they were planters…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Book explores racial identification

The Post and Courier
Charleston, South Carolina
2011-04-24

Karen Spain, legal writer based in Nashville

The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey From Black to White. By Daniel J. Sharfstein. Penguin. 416 pages.

Meticulously researched and beautifully written, “The Invisible Line” is a fascinating history of how three mixed-race families migrated across the color line and changed their racial identification from black to white.

The Gibsons, wealthy mulatto landowners in Colonial South Carolina, were white Southern aristocrats by the time of the Civil War.

The Walls, slave children freed by their white father, became respected members of the black middle class before giving up their prominence to “become” white.

The Spencers, hardworking Appalachian farmers in eastern Kentucky, spent almost a century straddling the color line.

The three intricately woven genealogies reveal an America where race has never been as simple as black or white. In rugged environments where survival meant relying on neighbors for security, commerce and marriage, it was easier to assume everyone was the same than to draw impenetrable distinctions between the races…

Read the entire review here.

African Americans began to migrate from black to white as soon as slaves arrived on American shores.  In seventeenth-century Virginia, social distinctions such as class and race were fluid, but the consequences of being black or white were enormous.  It often meant the difference between slavery and freedom, poverty and prosperity, persecution and power.  Even so, dozens of European women had children by African men, and together they established the first free black communities in the colonies.  With every incentive to become white—it would give them better land and jobs, lower taxes, and less risk of being enslaved—many free blacks assimilated into white communities over time…

Daniel J. Sharfstein. The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White. New York: Penguin Press, 2011. page 3.

The Invisible Line: American families’ journeys from black to white

Research news@Vanderbilt
Vanderbilt University
2011-02-17

Amy Wolf

The idea of someone transitioning from black to white, without science or surgery, seems hard to grasp on the surface. Yet Vanderbilt Law School professor Daniel J. Sharfstein finds that African Americans have continually crossed the color line and assimilated into white communities from 17th century America through today. This actual journey has little to do with one’s skin color and more to do with a society’s willingness to look beyond race.

“We talk about the great migration north of African Americans in the 20th century, but this mass migration across the color line impacted millions of people and was hundreds of years in the making,” said Sharfstein. “It’s very easy to forget this history. This process of migrating across the color line is something that falls outside of what we think of as African American history because it’s a history that people were trying to cover up and forget as it was happening.”…

…Self definition, not color, was key

Sharfstein spent almost a decade researching dozens of families that, for social, economic, safety and other reasons, chose to change their race and create new lives. Sharfstein found court and government records, personal letters and other archives that helped paint vivid pictures of these Americans.

While previous records of “passing” have focused on individuals’ struggles to redefine themselves, often by leaving their homes and fabricating new identities, Sharfstein found large numbers of people who managed to defy the legal definitions of race right within their own communities. Sharfstein found that what mattered most was not the color of their skin, but how they defined themselves and related to their neighbors.

“What this research tells us is that the categories of black and white have never been about blood. There were plenty of people throughout American history who were not just white, but quintessentially white, powerfully white, and had African American ancestors,” said Sharfstein. “Then we’re left thinking, ‘What is black and what is white then if it’s not about blood and biology?’ And what we wind up with is just the fact of separation and hierarchy.”

Three families’s stories

Sharfstein focused much of his research on three families whom he chronicled in a new book titled “The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White.”…

Read the entire article here.

The Invisible Line: Three American families and the secret journey from black to white [Live Interview with Daniel J. Sharfstein]

Minnesota Public Radio News
Midmorning Broadcast: 2011-03-15 15:06Z (10:06 CDT, 11:06 EDT, 08:06 PDT)

Kerri Miller, Host

Daniel J. Sharfstein, Professor of Law
Vanderbilt University

For much of American history, racial identity has been defined in terms of black and white. But because of their heritage and physical appearance, some families walk the line between cultures.

A new book chronicles three mixed-race families whose identities were called into question at various periods in history – with surprising consequences.

Interview with Daniel J. Sharfstein, author of “The Invisible Line”

The Christian Science Monitor
2011-02-23

Stacie Williams, Monitor Contributor

In “The Invisible Line,” law professor Daniel J. Sharfstein uses the stories of three families to explore the fluid nature of racial identity in America.

Race has never been an easy concept in this country; the rigid constructs by which people judge black and white have always left room for individuals who could move across either side of the line. Today, more Americans are choosing to identify as multiracial; that segment of the population has grown 35% since the 2000 Census.

Exhibit A: The president of the United States, who has a white mother, but chooses to identify himself as African American.

Vanderbilt University Associate Law Professor Daniel J. Sharfstein analyzes the constantly evolving perceptions and experience of race in his new book The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White. Sharfstein uses his legal background to fill in the shades of gray and highlight an American experience, which for many changed with the stroke of a pen, or with hair dye.

I recently had a chance to talk with Professor Sharfstein about his book and questions of racial identity in America….

…How key is the role of the Census in gauging how many more people are keeping their racial identities fluid?

As a country, we’re committed to principles of equality. The Census has an important function in figuring out how things are going—how well we’re living up to the principles of equality and anti-discrimination. On one level, how people self-identify is an interesting measure of how far we’ve come. On another level, it’s not completely related to larger societal issues we’ve made a commitment to overcome.

Have your opinions on racial constructs changed with Obama in the White House?

I think this country has changed a lot in the past couple decades and the way in which we understand the color line has been changed. As people have embraced multiracialism, its raised interesting questions about people who have been able to discover they have African Americans in their family history. I think these new ways of understanding identity are playing a role in how people are understanding their heritage. But I do think the election of Barack Obama is a major moment in the history of race. Race has never been about biology and blood. Plenty of white people have African blood. I’m looking at this history of migration across the color line and what do categories of black and white mean? These categories have been proxies for hierarchies and discrimination… for having a full set of rights as citizens.

Read the entire interview here.

The Author Speaks: Interview With Daniel J. Sharfstein

AARP Bulletin
American Association of Retired Persons
2011-02-17

Julia M. Klein

His powerful new book examines how three American families became white

Before Daniel J. Sharfstein’s senior year at Harvard, he spent the summer of 1993 in South Africa as a volunteer for a voter education project. There, one of his fellow workers told him she had been categorized as “colored,” or mixed-race, because a constable doing the classification appreciated her father’s service as a police officer.

“As a result of that one simple act, she had led a very different life from her colleagues,” recalls Sharfstein, now associate professor of law at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn. “That was a revelation to me, that something that could seem as natural and inevitable as race could bend because of a personal relationship or community ties or even just individual whim.”

He returned to the United States wondering whether the same kind of thing had happened here.

Sharfstein’s South African experience, followed by a stint as a journalist, Yale Law School and years of archival research and interviews, led to The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey From Black to White. The book interweaves the story of three families with African ancestry—the Gibsons, the Spencers and the Walls—who, over time and in different ways, became identified as white. The color line in America, Sharfstein learned, has been surprisingly permeable. The AARP Bulletin talked to Sharfstein by phone.

Q. Throughout American history, how important was physical appearance in defining whiteness?

A. To a certain degree it was important. We have to remember that, for a long time, the United States was a rural society and almost everybody worked outside. There was a really broad range of complexions that could be considered white…

…Q. What was the legal standard for defining whiteness in the 19th century?

A. There really was no standard. Virginia for more than a century had a one-quarter rule. If you had one African American grandparent, that made someone legally black. Other states, like North Carolina, had a one-eighth rule, while South Carolina didn’t have any specific fraction. One South Carolina court held in the 1830s that “a man of worth, honesty, industry and respectability should have the rank of a white man, while a vagabond of the same degree of blood should be confined to the inferior caste.”…

…Q. In slavery’s absence, you write, “preserving white privilege seemed to require new, less flexible rules about race and constant aggressive action to enforce them.” Why?

A. What really mattered in the South, in the antebellum period, was not who was black and who was white, but who was slave and who was free. The prospect of freedom for African Americans was a motivating force getting people to think about what racial categories themselves meant. In the last days of slavery, because slavery as an institution was under such attack, white Southerners were countering with race-based justifications, and that survived the demise of slavery. After the Civil War, as black freedom was taking root, right alongside it were modern forms of racism that persist to this day.

Q. You suggest that rigid rules about race only increased the number of people transitioning from black to white. Why was that?

A. When rules became more rigid, they were almost always accompanied by rules that subjected African Americans to higher taxes, made it harder for them to own land and increased fear that free African Americans would be returned to slavery. The harder these laws made it to live and to provide for their children, the greater the incentives were to make the move from black to white. Because these lines were being drawn in a way that essentially separated people who looked white from [other] people who looked white, it was impossible to make the line between black and white impregnable…

Read the entire article here.