The Invisible Line: A Secret History of Race in America
416The Invisible Line: A Secret History of Race in America
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Overview
--Annette Gordon-Reed, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello
In America, race is a riddle. The stories we tell about our past have calcified into the fiction that we are neatly divided into black or white. It is only with the widespread availability of DNA testing and the boom in genealogical research that the frequency with which individuals and entire families crossed the color line has become clear.
In this sweeping history, Daniel J. Sharfstein unravels the stories of three families who represent the complexity of race in America and force us to rethink our basic assumptions about who we are. The Gibsons were wealthy landowners in the South Carolina backcountry who became white in the 1760s, ascending to the heights of the Southern elite and ultimately to the U.S. Senate. The Spencers were hardscrabble farmers in the hills of Eastern Kentucky, joining an isolated Appalachian community in the 1840s and for the better part of a century hovering on the line between white and black. The Walls were fixtures of the rising black middle class in post-Civil War Washington, D.C., only to give up everything they had fought for to become white at the dawn of the twentieth century. Together, their interwoven and intersecting stories uncover a forgotten America in which the rules of race were something to be believed but not necessarily obeyed.
Defining their identities first as people of color and later as whites, these families provide a lens for understanding how people thought about and experienced race and how these ideas and experiences evolved-how the very meaning of black and white changed-over time. Cutting through centuries of myth, amnesia, and poisonous racial politics, The Invisible Line will change the way we talk about race, racism, and civil rights.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781101475805 |
---|---|
Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
Publication date: | 02/17/2011 |
Sold by: | Penguin Group |
Format: | eBook |
Pages: | 416 |
File size: | 689 KB |
Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Table of Contents
Author's Note xi
Family Trees xiv
Introduction: The House Behind the Cedars 1
1 GIBSON: Mars Bluff, South Carolina, 1768 13
2 WALL: Rockingham, North Carolina, 1838 27
3 SPENCER: Clay County, Kentucky, 1848 39
4 GIBSON: New Haven, Connecticut, 1850-55 53
5 SPENCER: Jordan Gap, Johnson County, Kentucky, 1855 73
6 WALL: Oberlin, Ohio, September 1858 85
7 CIVIL WAR: Wall, Gibson, and Spencer, 1859-63 103
8 CIVIL WAR: Wall and Gibson, 1863-66 119
9 GIBSON; Mississippi, New Orleans, and New York, 1866-68 135
10 WALL: Washington, D.C. June 14, 1871 151
11 SPENCER: Jordan Gap, Johnson County, Kentucky, 1870s 169
12 GIBSON: Washington, D.C., 1878 181
13 WALL: Washington, D.C, January 21, 1880 197
14 GIBSON: Washington, D.C, New Orleans, and Hot Springs, Arkansas, 1888-92 215
15 WALL: Washington, D.C, 1890-91 229
16 SPENCER: Jordan Gap, Johnson County, Kentucky, ca. 1900 241
17 WALL: Washington, D.C, 1909 253
18 SPENCER: Home Creek, Buchanan County, Virginia, 1912 273
19 GIBSON: Paris and Chicago, 1931-33 293
20 WALL: Freeport, Long Island, 1946 307
Epilogue 321
Acknowledgments 331
Notes 337
Index 385
What People are Saying About This
“Deeply intertwined in the American story of race are these stories of camouflaged families and their passages across the color line. Daniel Sharfstein disentangles them with eloquence and compassion, opening a hidden chapter of history that offers new insights into the country's struggle to overcome.”--(David K. Shipler, author of A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America)
"The Invisible Line" shines light on one of the most important, but too often hidden, aspects of American history and culture; how families traveled back and forth across supposedly fixed racial categories. Deeply researched and elegantly presented, Sharfstein's narrative of three families negotiating America's punishing racial terrain is a must read for all who are interested in the construction of race in the United States.” --(Annette Gordon-Reed, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello)
“By unraveling the process whereby black became white and vice-versa, Sharfstein unmasks the fiction of race and, in exquisite detail, exactly how race was—and is—made in the United States. This is a true American story. Its consequences pervade the American past and shadow its future.” --(Ira Berlin, professor of history at the University of Maryland, and the author of Many Thousands Gone)
“The Invisible Line is a powerful indictment of one of America’s most enduring myths: that black and white are separate and meaningful racial categories. Drawing upon little- known racial identity trials and extensive genealogical and historical research, Daniel Sharfstein brings sharply to life the stories of three families who over the course of three centuries journeyed from black to white. Written with a novelist’s eye for fascinating characters and a rich sense of place and a scholar’s precision and panoramic perspective, The Invisible Line makes visible the shifting artificial nature of the “color line” and its dire, life-changing consequences. Read this book if you want to understand the roots of our knotted racial history. Read this book if you hope to untangle it.” --(Bliss Broyard, author of ONE DROP)
“THE INVISIBLE LINE is a stunning achievement. It is a tremendous contribution to our understanding of the role of race in American history, and particularly the role of those individuals and families who found themselves in the borderlands of racial identity. The book is beautifully written, one of those rare books which makes history come alive. What these families endured and achieved, what they suffered and what they accomplished is part of the true story of the people of America, but one which is rarely told.”--(Lawrence M. Friedman, Marion Rice Kirkwood Professor, Stanford Law School, Stanford University, and author of A History of American Law)
“THE INVISIBLE LINE is an original and often startling look at the vagaries of the "color line," and those who passed over it and those who hovered around it. Sharfstein shows that this line could be manipulated not only by individuals and families, but also by the legal and political institutions of the South. In so doing, he shows definitively, and as no other study has done, that it was not a doctrinaire belief in racial purity that gave the South stability but rather a fluid understanding by its people and its institutions of racial difference and its multiple permutations.” --(Henry Louis Gates, Jr.)