Mixed Race Studies

The Allure of Blackness among Mixed-Race Americans, 1862-1916

University of Nebraska Press
October 2019
320 pages
7 photos, 3 drawings, index
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4962-0507-0

Ingrid Dineen-Wimberly, Professor of History
University of La Verne, Point Mugu, California

In The Allure of Blackness among Mixed-Race Americans, 1862–1916, Ingrid Dineen-Wimberly examines generations of mixed-race African Americans after the Civil War and into the Progressive Era, skillfully tracking the rise of a leadership class in Black America made up largely of individuals who had complex racial ancestries, many of whom therefore enjoyed racial options to identity as either Black or White. Although these people might have chosen to pass as White to avoid the racial violence and exclusion associated with the dominant racial ideology of the time, they instead chose to identify as Black Americans, a decision which provided upward mobility in social, political, and economic terms.

Dineen-Wimberly highlights African American economic and political leaders and educators such as P. B. S. Pinchback, Theophile T. Allain, Booker T. Washington, and Frederick Douglass as well as women such as Josephine B. Willson Bruce and E. Azalia Hackley who were prominent clubwomen, lecturers, educators, and settlement house founders. In their quest for leadership within the African American community, these leaders drew on the concept of Blackness as a source of opportunities and power to transform their communities in the long struggle for Black equality.

The Allure of Blackness among Mixed-Race Americans, 1862–1916 confounds much of the conventional wisdom about racially complicated people and details the manner in which they chose their racial identity and ultimately overturns the “passing” trope that has dominated so much Americanist scholarship and social thought about the relationship between race and social and political transformation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Table of Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. “As a Negro I will be Powerful”: The Leadership of P.B.S. Pinchback
• Chapter 2. Post-Bellum Strategies to Retain Power and Status: From Political Appointments to Property Ownership
• Chapter 3. New Challenges and Opportunities for Leadership: From Domestic Immigration to “The Consul’s Burden”
• Chapter 4. “Lifting as We Climb”: The Other Side of Uplift
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index

A Biography Of E. Azalia Smith Hackley (1867-1922), African-american Singer And Social Activist

Edwin Mellen Press
2001
436 pages
ISBN: 978-0-7734-7575-5

Lisa Pertillar Brevard, Core Faculty and Academic Coordinator of Humanities
Walden University

Madame E. Azalia Hackley was an African American classical singer, social worker, writer, philanthropist, and activist who championed the use of African-American spirituals among the African-American people as a tool for social change. Her efforts laid the groundwork for the use of spirituals as freedom songs during the Civil Rights Movement. This work used newspaper accounts and archive studies documenting Madame Hackley’s tours cross-country and abroad to raise funds for African-American classical musicians. It show Hackley’s intense devotion to her African-American roots, as she easily could have passed for white. Nevertheless, she traveled throughout the South in ‘Jim Crow’ railway cars by choice. This work also recovers several of her influential published works, including A Guide to Voice Culture (1909); The Colored Girl Beautiful (1916), an etiquette book for African-American women desiring professional jobs; and “Hints to Young Colored Artists”, a series of articles designed to help young African-American classical musicians succeed. Includes illustrations.

Table of Contents

• Foreword by Richard A. Long
• Introduction
• Part I: Madame Emma Azalia Smith Hackley: The Lady and Her Legacy
  • 1. Azalia’s Early Years (1867-1894)
  • 2. Denver (1894-1900)
  • 3. Philadelphia and The Washington Conservatory of Music (1900-1915)
  • 4. Jim Crow Cars and Beyond – Paris, London, Tokyo (1916-1920)
  • 5. Madame Hackley’s Last Days (1920-1922)
• Part II: The Soul and Grit of a Colored Prima Donna: Madame E. Azalia Hackley as Journalist
  • “Hints to Young Colored Artists” (1914-15) by E. Azalia Hackley
• Part III: Lessons Before Dying: Madame Hackley’s The Colored Girl Beautiful
• Part IV: A Scrapbook of Madame E. Azalia Hackley
  • Photographs
  • “Report on Scholarship for 1908” by E. Azalia Hackley
  • Correspondence Between E. Azalia Hackley and James Weldon Johnson
  • Advertisements
  • The New York Age Salutes Madame Hackley (Obituary by Lucien H. White, 1922)
• Chronology
• Appendix: A Guide in Voice Culture (1909) by E. Azalia Hackley
• Sheet Music: “Carola, A Serenade” (1918) by E. Azalia Hackley
• Bibliography
• Index

Photograph by Julius Taylor