Mixed Race Studies

Nathan Crowell on Racial Identity: Gloucester County, Virginia, revisited

Renegade South: Histories of Unconventional Southerners
2013-01-14

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

Some time ago, in response to my 10 November 2011 post, “Free People of Color in Old Virginia: The Morris Family of Gloucester County,”  (which I encourage you to read or reread) I received a long email message from Nathan Crowell, who traces his own mixed-heritage ancestry back to Gloucester County. Nathan shared not only his family research with me, but also certain insights that he gained over the years from listening to his ancestors—particularly his grandmother: insights into what it meant to be a “free person of color” in a slaveholding society, what it meant to be defined as “black” when one’s skin was fair. His remarks remind us that life in the Old South was far more complex than most of us realize, and that “race” was an imposed category of human existence that had no rational biological basis, but had very real legal, social, and psychological consequences that shaped the experiences and consciousness of all members of society.

With Nathan’s permission, I have created the following post from his remarks…

Read the entire article here.

The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War

University of North Carolina Press
2001
336 pages
6.125 x 9.25
32 illus., 9 genealogical charts, 10 maps, appends., notes, bibl., index
Paper ISBN:  978-0-8078-5467-9

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

Between late 1863 and mid-1864, an armed band of Confederate deserters battled Confederate cavalry in the Piney Woods region of Jones County, Mississippi. Calling themselves the Knight Company after their captain, Newton Knight, they set up headquarters in the swamps of the Leaf River, where, legend has it, they declared the Free State of Jones.

The story of the Jones County rebellion is well known among Mississippians, and debate over whether the county actually seceded from the state during the war has smoldered for more than a century. Adding further controversy to the legend is the story of Newt Knight’s interracial romance with his wartime accomplice, Rachel, a slave. From their relationship there developed a mixed-race community that endured long after the Civil War had ended, and the ambiguous racial identity of their descendants confounded the rules of segregated Mississippi well into the twentieth century.

Victoria Bynum traces the origins and legacy of the Jones County uprising from the American Revolution to the modern civil rights movement. In bridging the gap between the legendary and the real Free State of Jones, she shows how the legend–what was told, what was embellished, and what was left out–reveals a great deal about the South’s transition from slavery to segregation; the racial, gender, and class politics of the period; and the contingent nature of history and memory.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Introduction
• Sacred Wars: Race and the Ongoing Battle over the Free State of Jones
• Part One: The Origins of Mississippi’s Piney Woods People
  • 1. Jones County’s Carolina Connection: Class and Race in Revolutionary America
  • 2. The Quest of Land: Yeoman Republicans on the Southwestern Frontier
  • 3. Piney Woods Patriarchs: Class Relations and the Growth of Slavery
  • 4. Antebellum Life on the Leaf River: Gender, Violence, and Religious Strife
  • 5. Piney Woods Patriarchs: Class Relations and the Growth of Slavery
• Part Two: Civil War, Reconstruction and the Struggle for Power
  • 6. The Inner Civil War: Birth of the Free State of Jones
  • 7. The Free State Turned Upside Down: Colonel Lowry’s Confederate Raid on Jones County
  • 8. Reconstruction and Redemption: The Politics of Race, Class and Manhood in Jones County
  • 9. Defiance and Domination “White Negroes” in the Piney Woods New South
• Epilogue. The Free State of Jones Revisited: Davis Knight’s Miscegenation Trial
• Appendixes with (Selected Descendants of the Knight, Coleman, Welborn, Bynum, Collings, Sumrall, Welch, Valentine families, and The “White Negro” Community, 1880-1920.
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Visit Victoria Bynum’s interactive site for the book here.

Racial identity and the law: miscegenation and the “one drop rule”

Renegade South: histories of unconventional southerners
2011-08-05

Victoria E. Bynum, Emeritus Professor of History (author of The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies)
Texas State University, San Marcos

The “one drop rule” of race refers to the belief that a mere drop of African ancestry makes one “black”—no matter how “white” one’s appearance. This pseudoscientific concept, still commonly believed throughout the United States and among people of various ethnic and racial backgrounds, reinforces the idea that a white person who has even one African ancestor somehow is “passing” for white. However, legal cases that involved race during an era in which being classified as a “Negro” severely circumscribed one’s civil rights reveal that questions about racial identity were anything but black and white.

Historically, one of the many paradoxes of Southern race-based society was the co-existence of the “one drop rule” alongside contradictory legal definitions of whiteness. In Mississippi and North Carolina, for example, a person with less than one-eighth African ancestry was legally defined as white. The legal criteria for determining one’s race sometimes—but certainly not always—prevailed over the one drop rule in cases involving the marital rights of mixed-race people…

Read the entire article here.

Littefield Lecture: The Free State of Jones: Community, Race, and Kinship in Civil War Mississippi

Littlefield Lecture
University of Texas, Austin
Applied Computational Engineering & Sciences Building (ACE), Avaya Auditorium 2.302
2012-03-06, 16:00-18:00 CST (Local Time)

Victoria Bynum, Professor Emerita
Texas State University, San Marcos

Dr. Bynum will be delivering this year’s Littlefield Lectures for the History Department of the University of Texas, Austin.  The lectures are based on research from my last two books, The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War and The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies.

“Free People of Color” in Old Virginia: The Morris Family of Gloucester County, a Case Study

Renegade South: histories of unconventional southerners
2011-11-10

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

Back in 1977, when I was a junior in college, history became a personal venture for me when an African American friend told me that his ancestors were from Virginia, but that he had always heard that they were not slaves. African Americans from Old Virginia who had never been slaves? That got my attention!

A brand new history major, I decided on the spot to research my friend’s family history. Soon I was delving into microfilmed and published records from colonial Middlesex and Gloucester Counties of Virginia, where I did indeed find the ancestors of my friend—and many more—living as “free people of color” in colonial and antebellum Virginia. The following is their story.

During the transformative years of 1680-1730, as slavery overtook servitude as the favored system of labor among planters in the English colonies of America, a small but significant population of free people of color emerged in Virginia’s Gloucester and Middlesex Counties. We know very little about their individual lives beyond their names, racial designations, and ages as recorded in church and court records. We know, for example, that Elizabeth Morris, a servant of Middlesex County, was of mixed ancestry because the vestry book of Christ Church Parish described her in 1706 as “A Mulatto Woman.” (Note 1)

That same vestry book identified Elizabeth’s white master and mistress as “gentleman” Francis Weeks and his wife, Elizabeth. The Weeks family owned a number of slaves, raising questions about why Elizabeth was not also enslaved. Perhaps her mother was also a servant, or perhaps Elizabeth was the child of an enslaved woman and a white slave master who subsequently freed her…

…But even in this deliberately bi-racial society, a third category of race and status intruded: that of free person of color, with ”color” often meaning light brown. Elizabeth Morris’s designation as a “Mulatto,” which technically meant half African, half European, should not be taken literally. Virginia officials used the term rather loosely; it might mean that an individual was born to a mixed-race couple, or simply that one or both parents were of mixed ancestry. Mainly, it meant that a person’s skin was lighter in tone than that of enslaved Africans being forced into the colony in ever greater numbers…

Read the entire article here.

Bynum: The Long Shadow of the Civil War (2010)

The Civil War Monitor: A New Look at America’s Greatest Conflict
2011-10-19

Laura Hepp Bradshaw
Carnegie Mellon University

The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies by Victoria E. Bynum. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Cloth, ISBN: 0807833819.

“Few histories,” Victoria Bynum laments, “are buried faster or deeper than those of political or social dissenters” (148). By resurrecting the histories of three anti-secessionist communities in the South, Bynum’s latest book about the Civil War home front and post-war aftermath brings previously ignored strains of political and social dissent back to life through an intricate examination of the period rooted in race, gender, and class politics. Ultimately guided by three central questions designed to probe the prevalence of Unionism among southerners during the war, the effects of Union victory on freedpeople and southern Unionists, and the Civil War’s broader legacies, Bynum finds answers in the Piedmont of North Carolina, the Piney Woods of Mississippi, and the Big Thicket of Hardin County, Texas. These regions, though miles apart, are united in Bynum’s analysis by kinship and the political alliances of non-slaveholding, yeoman farming families…

…These home front battles, Bynum tells us, had a lasting effect on the political and social clime of the Reconstruction era, and beyond.  When Republican Reconstruction ended and Jim Crow Reconstruction segregated the South, former southern Unionists like Jasper and Warren Collins of the Big Thicket region rejected the two-party political system in favor of alternative platforms such the Populists or Socialists, in addition to the predominant southern religions.  Newt Knight and his descendants struggled against the rising tide of white supremacy that sought to divide white, black, and Native American demographics by living openly as a multi-racial community.  Furthermore, Bynum highlights the challenges faced by women in the Reconstruction period, as Jim Crow also regulated sexual mores and relations between both the sexes and races.

Thematically, the book harnesses examples of gender, class, and race on the wartime home front and in the post-war period. Yet, even though a vast portion of the book is devoted to discussing the anti-secessionist personalities of Newt Knight, Jasper and Warren Collins, and to a lesser extent, Bill Owens, an explicit examination their gender is curiously overlooked. Bynum mentions that “southern Unionists, Populists, and Socialists” were portrayed as “cowards and traitors,” but she fails to examine the implications of those labels within the broader context of southern masculinity (114). That said, Bynum’s sophisticated, multi-layered analysis of class relations, especially during the Civil War, more than make up for this shortcoming. She thoroughly illustrates a web of complex, inter-community class tensions that linked the conscripted poor, men fortunate to wave Confederate service, and the home guard. Bynum successfully explicates the repercussions of a segregated South on people of mixed race descent who were forced to either claim their black identity, like Anna Knight, a descendant of Newt Knight, or to “pass” as white by relocating away from the communities of their birth and obscuring their ancestry, as many other Knight Company descendants were forced to do…

Read the entire review here.

Victoria Bynum to be Featured Guest on Mixed Chicks Chat

Mixed Chicks Chat (The only live weekly show about being racially and culturally mixed. Also, founders of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival) Hosted by Fanshen Cox and Jennifer Frappier
Website: TalkShoe™ (Keywords: Mixed Chicks)
Episode: #220-Victoria Bynum
When: Wednesday, 2011-08-10, 21:00Z (17:00 EDT, 16:00 CDT, 14:00 PDT)

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

Professor Victoria Bynum, a graduate of the University of California, San Diego, is a historian of gender, race, and class relations in the Civil War Era South. Her blog, Renegade South, and her numerous publications feature true stories about mixed-race families, anti-Confederate guerrillas, and other unconventional Southerners.

Listen to the episode here or download it here (00:35:59, 14.4 MB).

Selected Bibliography

• The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.
• 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 and the ‘One Drop Rule’ in the Post-Reconstruction South,” Renegade South: Histories of Unconventional Southerners on March 17, 2009, http://renegadesouth.wordpress.com/2009/03/17/race-and-the-one-drop-rule-in-the-post-reconstruction-south/.
• “‘White Negroes’ in Segregated Mississippi: Miscegenation, Racial Identity, and the Law,” The Journal of Southern History, Volume 64, Number 2 (May, 1998): 247-276.

Speaking About Southern Unionists… and Mixed-Race People: A Report and an Announcement

Renegade South: histories of unconventional southerners
2011-05-07

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

I just returned from a wonderful visit to Leiden University in the Netherlands, where I spoke generally about Civil War Southern Unionists and specifically about The Free State of Jones as part of that university’s yearly American Studies Lecture Series. In commemoration of the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, this year’s theme was “The American Civil War After 150 Years: An Unfinished War?”

I was impressed by the deep interest in the American Civil War displayed by Leiden students and faculty. I’m happy to report there were no arguments between True Believers in either the noble “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy, or the total benevolence of Northern motives and goals in thwarting the South’s secession from the Union. Rather, discussions centered on understanding that many Southerners–white as well as black–opposed secession and the creation of the Confederacy, and that many more turned against the Confederacy as the war dragged on. How common across the South was guerrilla warfare such as that of Jones County, Mississippi?, they wanted to know. Who was Newt Knight? This question led to a discussion about the deep need displayed by Civil War partisans to turn Newt into either a murderous traitor to ”The South,” or, conversely, into an abolitionist whose racial views anticipated the modern Civil Rights Movement…

…There was special interest among the Leiden audience in the mixed-race community that grew out of Newt Knight’s wartime collaboration with Rachel Knight, the former slave of his grandfather, Jackie Knight. Many of the questions centered on issues of racial identity and the historical importance–and limits–of the “one drop rule” in determining such identities. Members of the audience were fascinated by the variety of racial identities assumed by, as well as imposed upon, descendants of Newt Knight, his white wife Serena, and the two mixed-race women–Rachel Knight and her daughter George Ann–by whom he had children.  Historically, they understood, race is a social, political, and legal construction rather than a biologically rational system…

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.

Beyond Bondage: Free Women of Color in the Americas [Review]

Journal of American History
Volume 92, Issue 3 (2005)
pages 974-975
DOI: 10.2307/3660015

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

Beyond Bondage: Free Women of Color in the Americas. Ed. by David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004. xii, 329 pp. Cloth, isbn 0-252-02939-9. Paper, isbn 0-252-07194-8.)

Noting that free people of color never fully escaped the degrading effects of race-based slavery, David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine offer fourteen essays that explore women’s experiences of race, gender, and class in the slaveholding societies of the United States, the Caribbean, and South America. The book is divided into two sections, both of which contain rich information about enslaved as well as free women of color. The first section is organized around the conditions under which women achieved freedom; the second, around women’s economic and social adjustment to freedom. Key themes such as quality of freedom, economic status, and racial mixing are addressed in both sections…

…Virtually all the authors cite light skin and similar economic occupations as characteristic of free women of color. Félix V. Matos Rodréguez, for example, describes various food-selling establishments operated by free women of color, who made up the majority of street vendors in mid-nineteenth-century San Juan, Puerto Rico. In the United States as well, Loren Schweninger and Wilma King cite free women who earned their living as “laundresses, maids, seamstresses, cooks, midwives, venders, and servants” (p. 107) and a few who managed to own substantial property or small businesses.

Another common experience that connected the lives of free nonwhite women across national borders was the exploitive sexual system that permeated slave societies. Negative racial and gender stereotypes encouraged the rape and sexual degradation of relatively powerless enslaved and free women of color. There was another side to sexual exploitation, however. Many women of color manipulated the practice of concubinage (which often began with rape) to their advantage. Trevor Burnard tells the story of Phibbah, a Jamaican slave who gained social authority among slaves, profitable employment, property ownership, and ultimately freedom as a result of becoming the concubine of her powerful overseer. Virginia Meacham Gould similarly traces the freedom and prosperity of Henriette Delille of New Orleans, a proper Catholic Creole of color, to maternal African ancestors who escaped slavery on account of their descent from one of Louisiana’s wealthiest white colonists…

Read the entire review here.