Mixed Race Studies

“I Was Black When It Suited Me; I Was White When It Suited Me”: Racial Identity in the Biracial Life of Marguerite Davis Stewart

Journal of American Ethnic History
Volume 26, Number 4, Women’s Voices, Ethnic Lives through Oral History (Summer, 2007)
pages 24-49

A. Glenn Crothers
University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky

Tracy E. K’Meyer, Associate Professor of History
University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky

Sitting onthe rooftop restaurant of the fictional Drayton Hotel in Chicago, Irene Redfield, the occasional “passer” and protagonist of Nella Larsen’s Passing, is suddenly swept with panic when she notices another woman—ostensibly a white woman—staring at her. “Did that woman, could that woman, somehow know that here before her very eyes on the roof of the Drayton sat a Negro?” Redfield asked herself. “No,” she concludes after some time, “the woman sitting there staring couldn’t possibly know” because a light-skinned woman like herself was usually mistaken “for an Italian, a Spaniard, a Mexican, or a gipsy.” Despite her assurance, Redfield still was troubled by the experience. She “felt, in turn ” Larsen writes, “anger, scorn, and fear slide over her.” Larsen’s fiction, based in the reality of African American life in the 1920s, provides a clear portrait of what sociologist F. James Davis has called “the agony of passing,” the fear of exposure by both the white and black communities. Fast forward to the end of the twentieth century, when in contrast to Larsen’s fearful passer Irene, such popular figures as Tiger Woods celebrate their mixed-race backgrounds and when the U.S. Census, which, as one sociologist puts it, “counts what the nation wants counted,” offers such individuals the opportunity to reject old categories and self-identify as “other.”

Marguerite Davis Stewart’s life spanned the decades between these two poles of racial experience, between tension-wrought “passing” and the embrace of multiracial identities. About the same time Larsen was envisioning the scene at the fictional Drayton Hotel, Stewart and her mother, light-skinned, African American women from Louisville, Kentucky, were staying at an all-white hotel in French Lick, Indiana. Brought to the hotel by a white man who loved Stewart’s mother, Stewart, a child at the time, remembered no sense of panic, no sense of fear in this environment. “Any time my people wanted to do what they wanted to do, they did what they damned [well] pleased,” including…

Behind the Lines—Marquerite Davis

Louisville Magazine
November 2006

Bruce M. Tyler, Associate Professor of History
University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky

The writer, an associate professor of history at the University of Louisville and author of Louisville in World War II (Arcadia Publishing, 2005), became intrigued by the role African-Americans played during the transformation of Bowman Field from a civilian airport to an Army Air Forces airfield after Pearl Harbor. In the course of his research, he met an elderly Marguerite Davis, who lived alone in Louisville with her memories — and photographs and documents — from her years working with members of the armed services as they evolved from segregation toward integration during those war years. Here, based on interviews with Davis and those who knew her, as well as research into the documents of the day, is the story of a woman who moved between black and white as the military geared up for World War II.

The first question I ask during an interview is, “When were you born and where?” I asked Marguerite Davis Stewart and she replied that her name was Marguerite Nelsenia Davis and she was born in Louisville, Ky., on Sept. 1, 1911. She was from a mixed-race parentage — her father was African-American and her mother was from a German family in Munfordville, Ky. Her parents were Preston Davis, a black commissioned lieutenant during World War I, and Luverta Davis. The two did not stay together long because, my interviewee said, “My father and mother were incompatible.” Her father nevertheless stayed in contact and helped support mother and daughter in Louisville.

Apparently, Luverta Davis did not approve of Preston Davis’ lifestyle. Marguerite Davis said that her father smuggled Canadian whiskey in through Chicago and brought it to Louisville and sold it to the white-owned hotels during Prohibition. He did not do this work himself, according to his daughter, but paid others to do it. He had several white partners. He also had business involvements with several nightclubs that catered to blacks, although some whites patronized his clubs. Davis did not link her father’s underworld and nightclub lifestyle to the breakup of her parents, but this seems a strong possibility to me. I learned to not say or ask something that might get me tossed out of her home and end my interviews or frequent telephone conversations with her in her declining years. She made it clear to me on several occasions that she sought to have her professional life recorded for posterity, not her personal life, though she often turned our conversations to the latter.

Although Davis held strong views about race relations, she repeatedly told me that she wanted to downplay race as much as possible. She thought racial distinctions were silly and highly destructive to her and the human rights of people. Davis was light-skinned and could have passed for white, but she completely rejected any such notion. She admired her father and said nothing to disparage him. “My identity was irrelevant to me,” she said in one of our interviews. “The places I went and the work I did (in the Red Cross) were important to me. If you want to know the truth about it, I have no racial identity. I liked my black college. I enjoyed Fisk University (a historic black school located in Nashville, Tenn.).

“I liked black people; I liked some white people; I liked some Japanese; I liked some of everybody, and some I didn’t like. Race has no meaning to me and never did in my family.”…

Read the entire article here.