Mixed Race Studies

Mixed-race teen in the middle: who will she choose?

Tampa Bay Times
St. Petersburg, Florida
2012-09-23

Leonora LaPeter Anton, Times Staff Writer

Her dark eyes scanned the fluorescent-lit lunchroom, locking onto her friends in the center of the chaos. Her thoughts sprayed in many directions: the upcoming eighth-grade formal, a surprisingly bad grade she recently got on an English paper, her role in the school play.

She passed a table full of white girls and one of them high-fived her. She passed a table full of white boys and one of them called her name. She arrived at a table full of black girls — the table where she sits almost every day. As she set her notebook down, one of her best girlfriends ignored her and moved to another table.

Asianna Williams, 14, wanted to ignore the drama. She is a light-skinned mixed-race girl trying to discover who she is in a society that still carves up territory by race. Nowhere was this more evident than in the lunchroom at Thurgood Marshall Fundamental Middle School. Table after table, as far as the eye could see, white faces congregated around one table, black faces around another.

Asianna’s father is black and her mother is white. Years ago, this might have relegated her to a no-man’s land, not fully welcomed by either blacks or whites. Now, thanks in part to sheer numbers (last year, there were 42 other mixed-race students at Thurgood Marshall), Asianna doesn’t feel ostracism. But she does feel pressure.

Pressure to choose black kids. Pressure to choose white kids. Like the tables in the lunchroom, nearly everything Asianna does — and she does a lot of things — comes with an overlay of race.

But what if you were someone who didn’t want to choose?…

…There have always been people of mixed race in American society. Cultural taboos and prejudice often meant they simply identified themselves as black, or if their skin was sufficiently light-colored, tried to pass as white…

Read the entire article here.

Freedom Road Spotlights St. Augustine History

VisitFlorida.com
2012-06-29

Amy Wimmer Schwarb

Derek Hankerson wanted to help educate people not only about Spanish Florida, but about the diverse groups who contributed to the country’s founding.

A St. Augustine company is trying to reshape the American story – not to rewrite history, but to retell it.

Derek Hankerson, the man at the helm of Freedom Road, grew up in suburban Washington, D.C., learning the same tales of America’s birthplace that are told in children’s textbooks throughout the United States. But he often visited relatives in St. Augustine  and could never reconcile the history he found there with what he learned in school.

“The sign in St. Augustine said, ‘Established in 1565,’ and then I go back to school, and I don’t see a thing about Florida. I don’t see a thing about blacks,” Hankerson said. “All I see is 1776.”

Hankerson spotted that disparity when he was about 10 years old, and announced to his family that he planned to correct it. He wanted to help educate people not only about Spanish Florida, but about the diverse groups who contributed to the country’s founding.

Today, Hankerson is the managing partner of Freedom Road, which offers in-depth bus tours of northeast Florida that give visitors insight into an early American story that might be new to many of them.

“Our tours deal with five centuries of history,” Hankerson said. “This is history related to the New World. I say ‘the New World’ because that’s different than the United States of America. We’re talking pre-United States of America.”…

…James Bullock, the creative director for Freedom Road, is typically the guide for the tours. Dressed in period costume, he walks guests through how different cultures – Spanish, African, Native American, German, Irish, Greek – made their lives in the New World…

And Bullock and Hankerson stress that while much of U.S. history has focused on the separation of races, Spanish Florida brought a different culture to the New World. Even the geography of the Old World played a role: Only 11 miles separate Spain from Africa at their closest point, so trade, relationships and inter-marrying were common even before the groups came across the Atlantic...

Read the entire article here.

“A Class of People Neither Freemen nor Slaves”: From Spanish to American Race Relations in Florida, 1821-1861

Journal of Social History
Volume 26, Number 3 (Spring, 1993)
pages 587-609

Daniel L. Schafer, Professor of History emeritus
University of North Florida

This essay examines the status of free blacks in Florida, focusing on the transition from mild and flexible three-caste race policies under the Spanish prior to their departure in 1821 to the harsh and rigid two-caste policies brought by the Americans. Comparison of Cuba and East Florida shows that Spain followed parallel policies in these two colonies, yet the status of free blacks in Cuba plummeted after 1800 while their counterparts in East Florida retained their places in a seignorial caste system. Local conditions rather than metropolitan laws, institutions, and religions explain these divergences. Free blacks who remained in Florida after 1821 saw their rights decline sharply. By 1829 a rigidly discriminatory two-caste policy was in place that severely restricted future manumissions. Implementation of the new laws was effectively circumvented until the 1850s, however, as the local plantation elites, mostly holdovers from the Spanish era and fathers of free mulatto children, monopolized political offices and ignored two-caste race policies in favor of their older traditions. Case studies drawn from local records explore the fate of free blacks caught in this transition. In the 1850s cotton and lumber prices escalated along with political controversies; white supremacist attitudes and policies became the general will. Were elderly women in the past by definition dependent on their family and on charity, or was it possible for these women to build up an independent living to some extent? Research into the place of women within the household is one of the methods to gain insight into the degree of independence of elderly women. Research has shown that the elderly (women and men) did not necessarily have a dependent position within the household. A large proportion of the elderly headed their own households. This article deals with the composition of households of elderly women in the Dutch capital Amsterdam in the second half of the nineteenth century. It analyses whether elderly women could retain their independence within the household to some extent. The degree of independence is related to the position within the household, i.e. whether these women were members or heads of a household. The main source used to reconstitute the households of elderly women is the population register of Amsterdam of the period 1851-1892.

Read the entire article here.

A Seminole Warrior Cloaked in Defiance

Smithsonian Magazine
October 2010

Owen Edwards

A pair of woven, beaded garters reflects the spirit of Seminole warrior Osceola

Infinity of nations,” a new permanent exhibition encompassing nearly 700 works of indigenous art from North, Central and South America, opens October 23 at the George Gustav Heye Center in New York City, part of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). The objects include a pair of woven, beaded garters worn by Billy Powell of the Florida Seminole tribe.
 
Billy Powell is hardly a household name. But his Seminole designation—Osceola—resonates in the annals of Native American history and the nation’s folklore. Celebrated by writers, studied by scholars, he was a charismatic war leader who staunchly resisted the uprooting of the Seminoles by the U.S. government; the garters testify to his sartorial style.
 
Born in Tallassee, Alabama, in 1804, Powell (hereafter Osceola) was of mixed blood. His father is thought to have been an English trader named William Powell, though his­torian Patricia R. Wickman, author of Osceola’s Legacy, believes he may have been a Creek Indian who died soon after Osceola was born. His mother was part Muscogee and part Caucasian. At some point, likely around 1814, when he and his mother moved to Florida to live among Creeks and Seminoles, Osceola began to insist he was a pure-blood Indian.
 
“He identified himself as an Indian,” says Cécile Ganteaume, an NMAI curator and organizer of the “Infinity of Nations” exhibition…

…“He was a bit flamboyant,” says historian Donald L. Fixico of Arizona State University, who is working on a book about Osceola. “Someone in his situation—a man of mixed blood living among pure-blood Seminoles—would have to try hard to prove himself as a leader and a warrior. He wanted to draw attention to himself by dressing in a finer way.”…

Read the entire article here.

The Seminole Indians of Florida: Morphology and Serology

American Journal of Physical Anthropology
Volume 32, Number 1 (January, 1970)
pages 65-81

William S. Pollitzer
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Donald L. Rucknagel
University of Michigan

Richard E. Tashian
University of Michigan

Donald C. Shreffler
University of Michigan

Webster C. Leyshon
National Institute of Dental Research, NIH

Kadambari Namboodiri
Carolina Population Center
University of North Carolina

Robert C. Elston
University of North Carolina

The Seminole Indians of Florida were studied on their three reservations for blood types, red cell enzymes, serum proteins, physical measurements, and relationships. Both serologic and morphologic factors suggest their close similarity to other Indians and small amount of admixture. The Florida Seminoles are similar to Cherokee “full-bloods” in their absence of Rho and their incidence of O and M. In the presence of Di^a they are similar to other Indians, especially those of South America. While the presence of G-6-P-D A and the frequency of Hgb. S are indicative of Negro ancestry, the absence of Rho suggests that the Negro contribution must have been small. Physical traits give parallel results. Both serology and morphology further show that the Seminoles of the Dania and Big Cypress reservations are more similar to each other than to those of the Brighton reservation, in keeping with their history.

Read the entire article here.

Escaping to Destinations South: The Underground Railroad, Cultural Identity, and Freedom Along the Southern Borderlands

National Park Service
Network to Freedom
2012-06-20 through 2012-06-24
St. Augustine, Florida

The Network to Freedom has joined with local partners to present an annual UGRR [Underground Railroad] conference beginning in 2007. These conferences bring together a mix of grass roots researchers, community advocates, site stewards, government officials, and scholars to explore the history of the Underground Railroad. Rotated to different parts of the country, the conferences highlight the unique history of various regions along with new research.

The 2012 Conference theme is the resistance to slavery through escape and flight to and from the South, including through international flight, from the 16th century to the end of the Civil War. Traditional views of the Underground Railroad focus on Northern destinations of freedom seekers, with symbols such as the North Star, Canada, and the Ohio River (the River Jordan) constructed as the primary beacons of freedom. This conception reduces the complexity of the Underground Railroad by ignoring the many freedom seekers that sought to obtain their freedom in southern destinations.

Likewise, borders and the movement across them by southern freedom seekers are also very crucial to our understanding of the complexities of the Underground Railroad. Freedom seekers often sought out political and geographical borderlands, as crossing these locations usually represented the divide between slavery and freedom. To this end, the conference will explore how southern freedom seekers seized opportunities to escape slavery into Spanish Florida and the Seminole Nation, to the Caribbean Islands, and into the western borderlands of Indian Territory, Texas, and Mexico.

Escape from enslavement was not just about physical freedom, but also about the search for cultural autonomy. The conference will explore the transformation and creation of new cultural identities among southern freedom seekers that occurred as a result of their journeys to freedom, such as the dispersal of Gullah Geechee culture and the formation of Black Seminole cultural identity.

The 2012 Conference will include participation by independent and academic scholars at all levels, educators, community activists, public historians and preservationists, and multi-media and performance artists. The conference seeks to create a cultural, historical, and interpretive exchange between domestic and international descendent communities of southern freedom seekers.

Gullah Geechee and Black Seminole descendants are particularly welcome at the conference.

For more information, click here.  Call for papers information (Deadline 2012-01-15) is here.

Persistent Borderland: Freedom and Citizenship in Territorial Florida

Texas A&M University
August 2007
295 pages

Philip Matthew Smith

A Dissertation by Philip Matthew Smith Submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies of Texas A&M University in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in History

Florida’s Spanish borderland was the result of over two hundred and fifty years of cooperation and contention among Indians, Spain, Britain, the United States and Africans who lived with them all. The borderland was shaped by the differing cultural definitions of color and how color affected laws about manumission, miscegenation, legitimacy, citizenship or degrees of rights for free people of color and to some extent for slaves themselves.

The borderland did not vanish after the United States acquired Florida. It persisted in three ways. First, in advocacy for the former Spanish system by some white patriarchs who fathered mixed race families. Free blacks and people of color also had an interest in maintaining their property and liberties. Second, Indians in Florida and escaped slaves who allied with them well knew how whites treated non-whites, and they fiercely resisted white authority. Third, the United States reacted to both of these in the context of fear that further slave revolutions in the Caribbean, colluding with the Indian-African alliance in Florida, might destabilize slavery in the United States.

In the new Florida Territory, Spanish era practices based on a less severe construction of race were soon quashed, but not without the articulate objections of a cadre of whites. Led by Zephaniah Kingsley, their arguments challenged the strict biracial system of the United States. This was a component of the persistent borderland, but their arguments were, in the end, also in the service of slavery and white patriarchy.

The persistent border included this ongoing resistance to strict biracialism, but it was even more distinct because of the Indian-African resistance to the United States that was not in the service of slavery. To defend slavery and whiteness, the United States sent thousands of its military, millions of its treasure, and spent years to subdue the Indian-African alliance and to make Florida and its long shorelines a barrier to protect whiteness and patriarchy in the Deep South.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• ABSTRACT
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• LIST OF FIGURES
• LIST OF TABLES
• CHAPTER
• I INTRODUCTION
  • The problem
  • An imaginary line
• II FLORIDA’S BORDERS
  • First-contact Florida.
  • First Spanish Period, 1565-1763
  • British Period, 1763-1784
  • Second Spanish Period, 1784-1821
  • The Adams-Onís Treaty, 1818-1821
• III A NEW TERRITORY
  • “The Province is as yet such a Blank”
  • First impressions
  • “warm climates are congenial to bad habits.”
  • “There is such a heterogeneous mass here.”
  • Who was in Florida?
  • Appendages and sustenance
  • Who can be a citizen?
  • “no law except the law of force”
  • “the retreat of the opulent, the gay and the fashionable.”
  • Citizenship, lotteries and matrimony
  • Color, race, and subjection of the borderland
• IV OPPORTUNITIES IN A CARRIBEAN PLACE
  • Borderland or profitable periphery
  • Unlocking the economy
  • Infrastructure
  • “In a Spanish street”
  • “The sickness rages here.”
  • “an added peculiar charm”
• V INDIAN LANDS AND CARIBBEAN THREATS
  • “ – the land was not theirs, but belonged to the Seminoles”.
  • Natural and unnatural connections
  • “apprehensions of hostilities on our southern border”
  • “a separate and distinct people.”
  • “most exposed, but important frontiers of the Union”
  • “apply force to a much greater extent.”
  • “the horrors of St. Domingo enacted over again in earnest”
• VI WHITE ADVOCATES
  • Liberty for people of color
  • Zephaniah Kingsley, Jr. and Anna Madigigine Jai
  • Kingsley’s arguments
  • “this species of our population”
  • “the grand chain of security”
  • “the materials of our own dissolution”
  • Colonization versus naturalization
  • The difference between biracial and multi-tier slavery
  • Memorial to Congress of 1833
  • Leaving Florida for Haiti
  • Other signers
  • Another white advocate
  • Legacy of white advocacy
• VII BLACK CITIZENS
  • Free blacks in Florida
  • Slavery laws and manumission
  • Free black rights reduced
  • Free blacks resist
  • Mixed families, white allies
  • Parents and children
  • The good old flag of Spain
• VIII CONCLUSION
  • Summary
  • True to our native land
  • The defining feature
  • The insecure Deep South
• REFERENCES
• APPENDIX A
• APPENDIX B
• VITA

LIST OF FIGURES

1. La Florida, 1584
2. Drake’s attack on St. Augustine, May 28 and 29, 1586
3. Spanish missions in Florida, 1680
4. Castillo de San Marcos, St. Augustine
5. Fuerte Negro
6. East Florida, 1826
7. Florida, 1834
8. Kingsley home, Fort George Island
9. Anna’s house, Fort George Island
10. Former slave dwellings on Fort George Island
11. Ruins of Fort George Island slave dwellings

LIST OF TABLES

• 1 Northeast Florida Non-Indian population
• 2 Non-Spanish immigration to Florida during Second Spanish Period
• 3 Population of St. Augustine during the Second Spanish Period
• 4 Percent free blacks to slaves in 1830
• 5 Percent free blacks to slaves in 1860
• 6 Pre-emancipation census
• 7 Free blacks in households, 1830
• 8 Memorial signers’ households, 1830 and 1840
• 9 Free blacks as a percent of total population during antebellum years
• 10 Population of Nassau, Duval and St. Johns counties
• 11 Black baptisms in St. Augustine, 1784-1821
• A-1 1820 United States Census
• A-2 1830 United States Census
• A-3 1840 United States Census
• A-4 1850 United States Census
• A-5 1860 United States Census
• A-6 1840 Florida Census
• A-7 1850 Florida Census
• A-8 1860 Florida Census

Read the entire dissertation here.

A Health Survey of the Seminole Indians

Yale Journal Biology and Medicine
Volume 6, Number 2 (December 1933)
pages 155–177

H. Hamlin

Among the numerous tribes of Indians living in Oklahoma the Seminoles offer some interesting phenomena for study which may contribute information on the subject of race mixture and its relationship to environment and health. The early history of the tribe in its original habitat of the Florida Everglades is not without romantic color, embodying as it does the Spanish occupation of the Southeastern United States and the stormy times before and after the War of 1812 that culminated in the Florida purchase. Many other tribes besides the Seminoles were occupying rich lands that European settlers coveted for plantations so that agitation for removal of the Indians by coercion gained increasing favor. Slavery augmented the conflict since negro deserters were continually seeking refuge among the Indians, especially in parts that now constitute Georgia and Florida.

It is recorded that as early as 1785 bands of Cherokees, Choctaws, Delawares and Shawnees began migrating west to settle because of pressure from whites along the borders of their old domain and the scarcity of game. The transfer of Indians comprising the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek and Seminole tribes from their indigenous habitat to lands in what is now the state of Oklahoma was carried on with continuous difficulty until after 1840. The government was forced to conduct two expensive military campaigns against the Seminoles, and over a thousand recalcitrants refused to be caught and expatriated. These survivors remained in Florida. By 1906 around 100,000 individuals, of whom only about 26.4 per cent were full-bloods, had been officially enrolled as the Five Civilized Tribes and had been given individual land grants.

From the foregoing historical outline the possibilities of comparative study on the present-day Seminoles in both Oklahoma and Florida can be understood. Such a project was sponsored by the Laboratory of Anthropology at Santa Fe, New Mexico, during the summer of 1932 and placed under the direction of Dr. W. M. Krogman of the Anatomy Department of Western Reserve University. The greater part of the work resolved itself into the compilation of detailed anthropometric measurements of selected individuals. The tribal rolls, upon which the government based the land allotments, made feasible the deduction of rather accurate genealogical tables for four or five generations. The statements of every subject concerning his or her family were checked and protracted further by comparison with Campbell’s Abstract of Seminole Indian Census Cards, which proved an invaluable source of information. It is hoped that opportunity may avail to correlate the findings on physical measurements and other criteria of the Oklahoma Seminoles with the results of a similar procedure among the Seminoles still living in Florida, the latter serving as a control group…

…After the Creek war of 1813-14 a great many Creeks from the upper Creek country moved into Florida. They increased the population considerably and began mixing with the predominant Hitchiti (Oconee) racial element. This new strain was definitely Creek and later came to be identified with the Seminole. Such an interpretation is substantiated further by Wissler’, who classifies the languages of the Upper Creeks, Lower Creeks, and Seminoles together under the northern division of Muskogee proper. It seems clear that the Florida Seminoles were originally derived from the non-Muskogean Hitchiti of Georgia admixed with the earlier Floridian Yamasee and Yuchi, and this combination later admixed with Muskogee, mostly Creek. Before his departure for the west therefore, the Florida Seminole undoubtedly had a high percentage of Creek blood; and the two by impact of association had become linked enough in language and culture to obscure their separate origin.

Before the advent of Seminole stock in the west there was unquestionably an appreciable amount of negro blood present. This was a result of slavery, which reached its greatest development as a social practice in the Southeast during the latter part of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries. Large numbers of slaves apparently succeeded in escaping from their masters to gain sanctuary among the Florida Indians. It would seem that negroes were usually anxious to make their way into Florida where they were often able to acquire a kind of group independence among the Indians. A large number of negroes accompanied the Five Tribes on their westward migration, including slaves of the Indians as well as those who had intermarried and their offspring. To the Creek fraction represented in Florida Seminole blood, therefore, must be added an unknown but quite definite component representing negro admixture acquired prior to removal. There probably had been some infusion of white blood with the Seminoles through Spanish intermixture before they took up residence in the west. Nash”, Giddings and Bartram’ predicate its occurrence in their writings, but the emphasis on the negro element is much greater. According to Nash”, the amount of white blood in the modern Florida Seminoles has increased to some extent, and this view is confirmed by others, notably Hrdlikcka. On the other hand negro intermixture among the present-day descendants of the original Florida Seminoles has declined. The population has been reported to be around 500 for a number of decades so that investigators have been able to tabulate race crossing with some certainty’0. White half-castes are granted full status by the Indians and an increase in their number is predicted for the future. Presumably, the propagation of white blood in the Florida Indians since the Seminole wars may be attributed to the offspring of unsanctioned Indian-White matings…

Pure Seminole—Age 44.

Seminole-Negro—Age 25.

Seminole-White—Age 34.

Read the entire article here.

INDIGO – Laura Kina & Shelly Jyoti

Diana Lowenstein Fine Arts
2043 North Miami Avenue
Miami, Florida 33127
2011-05-14 through 2011-06-30

Opening Reception
2011-05-14, 14:00-21:00 EDT (Local Time)

Laura Kina, Associate Professor Art, Media and Design and Director Asian American Studies
DePaul University

Shelly Jyoti, Visual Artist, Fashion Designer, Poet, Researcher and Independent Curator

In the 19th century, Bengal was the world’s biggest producer of indigo but today, the deep blue color of indigo is synthetically created in a lab and is associated in the West with blue jeans more than its torrid colonial past. But indigo holds a sustained presence in the post-colonial identity of India. Employing fair trade embroidery artisans from women’s collectives in India and executing their works in indigo blue, Jyoti and Kina’s works draw upon India’s history, narratives of immigration and transnational economic interchanges. The artists decided to collaborate in 2008-2009, considering their mutual interest in textile history, pattern & decoration. They began by thinking about the intersections of their own ethnic and national positions in relation to fabrics. For this exhibition in particular, Jyoti’s Indigo Narratives utilize traditional embroidery and embellishments along with heritage symbols belonging to traveling ethnic communities who settled in coastal Gujarat while Kina’s Devon Avenue Sampler series focuses on a contemporary Desi/Jewish community in Chicago.  This exhibition includes new works in mediums such as hand-embroidery on khadi, acrylic on fabric, hand-stenciled Sanskrit calligraphy and textile embroidery on canvas.

For more information, click 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