Posted: Tue 29 Jan 2008 13:57 Post subject: NATIONAL RESISTENCE TO THE ONE DROP RULE: SOME EVIDENCE
*************************************************************
VACILLITATING SPEECH ON THE RACIAL NATURE OF MULATTOS.
Before 1920, and especially before 1900, the word "mulatto" was used in a very peculiar fashion. Mulattos were called that, and never termed negros without specifically mentioning that they were mulattos. Furthermore, the interchangeability of the two words before 1900, seemed to be rigid and generally not applied. All of this is supicious, because in light of the fact that mulattos were seen as EITHER INFERIOR OR SUPERIOR TO BLACKS, it makes you wonder if mulatto really meant the same race as negro after all.
*************************************************************
Character in The OverShadowed, Sutton E. Griggs (1901)
"what makes blue-veiners so aristocratic, is that we blacks like them, the white folks like them, and they like themselves"
Citation: Alfred H. Stone, (1903)
According to the sociologist A.H. Stone, "The mulatto is not a negro, and neither written nor social law can make him one."
Appeals to Race Prejudice by counsel in criminal cases, Virginia Law Register, August 1918th, No. 4 )
“On the trial of a mulatto it is prejudicial error for the prosecutting attorney to make a bitter denunciation of mulattoes as a race.”
The Booker T. Washington Papers, Volumn 4: 1895, 1898, Harlan et. al, (1975)
“The American said, “That is Frederick Douglass, the great negro orator.’
-‘You do not mean to say a negro can speak like that, do you?’
-‘OH well, he is not a negro, he is a mulatto, a kind of half negro.”
On Racial Frontiers, the New Culture of Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellisson, and Bob Marely, Gregory Stephons (1999).
Mulatto slaves, a growing presence in the 1850s, were even more of a threat to the “peculiar institution,”…As Williamson writes: “If whites be human and fitted only for freedom and blacks be somehow subhuman and made for slavery, what then is a mulatto? How does one justify the enslavement of white blood?”
*************************************************************
As late as 1909, the one drop rule was successfully fought off in Louisiana, and the three-tiered, two-colorline system was maintained, legally, and socially.
*************************************************************
Critical White Studies, Looking Behind The Mirror, Delgado and Stefancic, (1997)
In State v. Treadway [ 1908 ], the court laid out the sub-classification of “colored” in very specific terms. The court’s categories of griffe, octoroon, quadroon, and mulatto….According to the coutr’s classifications, a “mulatto was the child of one black and one white person.”
The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I., Jan. 1916
“Litigation on the subject of the definition of the free person of color reached its climax in the year of our Lord, 1909, when Judge Frank D. Chretien defined the word Negro as differentiated from person of color as used in Louisiana…The District Attorney claimed that any one having a trace of African blood in his veins, however slight, should be classed as a Negro… The case went to the Supreme Court of Louisiana on an appeal from the decision of Judge Chretien who held that a mulatto is not a Negro in legal parlance. The Supreme Court in a decision handed down April 25, 1910, sustained the view of Judge Chretien. This decision was an interpretation of an act of 1908 which set forth a definition of the word Negro.--See State vs. Treadway, 126 Louisiana, 300.”
*************************************************************
Before 1930, it was common place for mulattos and multiracials with african ancestry not to identify themselves as negros, becoming increasingly more so the further back in history.
*************************************************************
The Negro and The White Man, W. J. Gaines (1897)
"...There is a very observable tendency among what are called the mulattoes to withdraw themselves from the dark-skinned negroes and set up for themselves a distinct social class. This has its bearing upon the home life of our race, often determining the matter of hospitality and marriage. It is dividing the negroes as nothing else does, and is threatening, helped as it is by constant miscegenation with the white race, to obliterate the dark-skinned negro...Hence, it is generally the case, the negro is glad of the white infusion of blood he has received through miscegenation. He finds that the lighter his skin is, the more he is admired by his own race and the more he is preferred by the white race. In many instances the mixture of white with negro blood is a matter of pride and boasting with those so amalgamated, and has created a social class called mulattoes. These separate themselves from the negroes of darker skins, and affect a feeling of superiority. "
The Politics of Racial Betrayal, Randall Kennedy (2008)
"Consider the case of William Ellison, who was born into slavery in 1790 in South Carolina. Allowed to purchase his freedom (by a white man who may well have been his biological father), Ellison amassed a sizable fortune, bought and sold slaves, contributed funds to pro-slavery vigilantes, aided the Confederacy, and then, after the Civil War, supported the opponents of Reconstruction. Today many people would describe Ellison as "black" despite his obvious multiraciality. Yet Ellison "did not consider himself a black man but a man of color, a mulatto, a man neither black nor white, a brown man."
Citation: The American Negro, W.E.B. Reuter, (1928 )
According to Reuter, some mulattos identify with negros and others identify with whites, and private mulatto-only circles and clubs are common.
Citation: A letter titled "The Name Negro", Dubois, (1928)
"Historically, of course, your dislike of the word Negro is easily explained: "Negroes" among your grandfathers meant black folk; "Colored" people were mulattoes. The mulattoes hated and despised the blacks and were insulted if called "Negroes.""
Citation: Shades of Brown, Trian Jones, (2000)
1. Mulattos formed blue-vein societies in Nashville.
2. Mulatto elite social clubs were formed after the civil war, they were special societies which shared the same culture as upper-class whites.
3. Mulattos created sperate residential communities: Chicago: Chatham, East Hyde park. New York: Striver's Row, Sugar Hill.
4. Mulattos formed seperate proffesional associations.
5. Mulattos formed preperatory schools and Colleges which denied admission to Blacks.
6. In elite mulatto circles, people were often admitted even if they were poor, wereas wealthy blacks were denied entry.
Barbadian South Carolina: A Class-Based Color Line, Essays on the Color Line and the One-Drop Rule, Frank W Sweet (2005)
At war’s end, South Carolina’s Mulatto elite quickly moved to seize power. Across the South, only one fourth of the delegates of Reconstruction constitutional conventions were of the Black endogamous group. In South Carolina they were in the majority—seventy-six out of 124.58At first, they were decidedly ambiguous about the future role of freedmen, their former slaves and inferiors. The conflict was felt in all social institutions. In 1866, Rev. Henry M. Turner wrote about his parishioners, “the blacks were arrayed against the brown or mulattoes, and the mulattoes in turn against the blacks.”
The modern mulatto: a comparative analysis of the social and legal positions of mulattoes in the antebellum south and the intersex in contemporary America, George and Marie-Amelie.
[ During the ante-bellum period, ] The lower South, consisting of South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, (19) had a contrastingly generous view of free mulattoes, and afforded these individuals a status superior to that of blacks, thereby creating a third, intermediate class between black and white.
"Miscegenation and the Free Negro (sic) in Antebellum 'Anglo' Alabama: A Reexamination of Southern Race Relations" by Gary B. Mills, The Journal of American History, Vol. 6, No. 1, June 1981. Pp. 16-34.
Check pages 27 through 31 of this long articles and you will see where Mills shows that families of known racially mixed ancestry moved from "colored" to "white" status within a generation or two with the knowledge and consent of the white community. This information totally contradicts the myth of "passing."
VIRGINIA'S ATTEMPT TO ADJUST THE COLOR PROBLEM*
W. A. Plecker, M.D., FELLOW A.P.H.A.
State Registrar of Vital Statistics, Richmond, Virginia
* Read at the joint session of the Public Health Administration and Vital
Statistics Section of the American Public Health Association at the
Fifty-third Annual Meeting at Detroit Michigan, October 23, 1924. This copy from The American Journal of Public Health, 1925.
"This produced the mulatto. Now it is this mulatto, or his offspring, that is causing all the trouble. They do not wish to be classed as negroes and, if light enough in color, try to pass as white and marry into white families..."
From the legal case: Hampton v. State
"These Negroes [ mulattos ] thought they were better than other Negroes, but in fact they were worse than negroes; they were Negritoes, a race hated by the white race and despised by the Negroes…”
"Racial Integrity or `Race Suicide': Virginia's Eugenic Movement, W. E. B. Du Bois, and the Work of Walter A. Plecker" Negro History Bulletin, Derryn E. Moten, April-Sept (1999)
“…This "third race," maintained Plecker, "regarded themselves as white, asserting the rights of same, and thought themselves superior to Negroes."
"Forty Acres and a mule: Horace Mann Bond and the Lynching of Jerome Wislon" Adam Fairclough, Journal of American Studies, 31, 1997
“Although interacial unions had become a rarity by the 1930s, they still persisted.”
“…throughout the South during the 1930s: mulattoes were ceasing to regard themselves as a distintinct group, separate and superior to darker skinned African Americans….The pressure of white racism and the levelling effects of the great depression had compelled mulattoes to abandon lingering pretensions to an intermediate status between black and white…”
A literary piece: Father and Son, Langston Hughes (1934)
"I'm warning you, boy, God damn it!... Now I want you to answer me, and talk right." …The old man sat down in his chair again by the whisky bottle and the partly opened door. He took a drink. "What do you mean, talk right?" Bert said. "I mean talk like a nigger should to a white man," the Colonel snapped. "Oh, but I'm not a nigger, Colonel Norwood," Bert said, "I'm your son."
*************************************************************
As late as the 1960s, some mulattos / multiracials with black ancestry refused to identify as blacks. This was explicit: these people did not see themselves as "negros".
*************************************************************
"Cross", Langston Hughes ( written before 1967 )
My old man's a white old man And my old mother's black.
If ever I cursed my white old man I take my curses back.
If ever I cursed my black old mother And wished she were in hell,
I'm sorry for that And now I wish her well.
My old man died in a big fine house My ma died in a shack.
I wonder where I'm gonna die, Being neither white nor black!
FEDERAL WRITERS' PROJECT
American Guide, (Negro Writers' Unit)
Pearl Randolph, Field Worker
Lake City, Florida
January 14, 1937
REBECCA HOOKS
She was born in Jones County, Georgia of Martha and Pleasant Lowe, who were slaves of William Lowe. The mother was the mulatto offspring of William Lowe and a slave woman who was half Cherokee. The father wasalso a mulatto, purchased from a nearby plantation
Whenever she had not knitted her required number of socks during the week, she simply informed them that she had not done it because she had not wanted to--besides she was not a "nigger." This stubbornness accompanied by hysterical tantrums continued to cause Rebecca to receive many stiff punishments that might have been
avoided.
[ Nancy Elizabeth ] Prophet was born on March 19, 1890, in Warwick, Rhode Island, to a family with deep roots in the region. She described her mother, Rosa E. Walker Profitt, as a "mixed Negro." Her father, William H. Profitt, claimed both African and American Indian ancestry...The sculptor, who identified herself as "mulatto" in a 1910 census, changed her identity to "Indian" in the 1920 census…Invited in 1959 to be included in the book American Negro Art, Prophet refused, insisting that "an anthropologist must certainly know that I am not a Negro, and though I am of mixed blood, the two races which I represent [ presumably white and indian ] are quite different from that which you wish your publication to represent."
The life of Philippa Schuyler, by Kathryn Talalay (1995)
[ Philippa Duke Schuyler was born in 1931 to George and Josephine, a black journalist father, and White Texas Heiress ]
A little later she wrote Josephine again: “NOWHERE in my forthcoming book do I want the word Nego or colored mentioned in connection with me, NOWHERE.”
....she wrote Jody not George [ in 1962 ]:
“Everyone here [ Europe ] thinks of me as a Latin, and that’s the way I want it...I look like any other of the Sicilians, Greeks, Spaniards, or Portuguese here in Rome. I am not a Negro, and won’t stand for being called one in a book that will circulate in countries where that taint has not been applied to me.”
Last edited by ImBack on Tue 29 Jan 2008 14:45; edited 4 times in total
“Everyone here [ Europe ] thinks of me as a Latin, and that’s the way I want it...I look like any other of the Sicilians, Greeks, Spaniards, or Portuguese here in Rome. I am not a Negro, and won’t stand for being called one in a book that will circulate in countries where that taint has not been applied to me.”
As they tell me, that does not play well in the good old USA! It sounds nice, though!
I do not think that is really resistance! If it were, then whatever her maternal ethnicity her mother was, then she may embrace that as opposed to embracing an ethnicity she was not part of!
'
FAQ
Search
Register
Log in
