The Allure of Blackness among Mixed-Race Americans, 1862-1916
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The Allure of Blackness among Mixed-Race Americans, 1862-1916
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Overview
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.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781496216793 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Nebraska |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2019 |
| Series: | Borderlands and Transcultural Studies |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
"As a Negro I Will Be Powerful"
The Leadership of P. B. S. Pinchback
There is massive literature on racial passing. Almost all of it is presented as passing from truly Black to inauthentically White. The idea that someone with racial options would want to pass as Black in order to raise his or her status in America is for most readers of American history absurd on its face. There is, however, significant evidence to support the notion that a vocal Black identity adopted during the late nineteenth century afforded many people of mixed-race ancestry in the U.S. access to increased economic, political, and social status. Civil rights agitation during the nineteenth century had become an avenue for Black-identified men and women to achieve status and power, as new positions of leadership opened up for Black leaders. To demonstrate the various ways and for what purposes racially ambiguous people shifted toward a Black identity, this chapter focuses on the years during the U.S. Civil War and the subsequent era of Reconstruction. I survey the life of a Reconstruction politician who was prominent in Louisiana, Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback. Remembered as the first Black governor in the United States (elected in 1872), Pinchback was a racially ambiguous-looking man whose heritage included mostly White ancestors. Throughout his life, however, Pinchback made a number of specific identity shifts that moved him steadily closer to a Black identity. In 1862, when Union general Benjamin Butler authorized the formation of an all-Black regiment, Pinchback finally "declared himself a Negro." This chapter charts the course of his decision and reveals how Pinchback's decision to be Black afforded him substantial social and political upward mobility.
Pinchback's specific life choices and the particular historical context in which he made them should not be understood as aberrational. There are many other such examples of mixed-race men who achieved power and prominence as Black leaders. John R. Lynch was a Reconstruction-era congressman from Mississippi and an army major who fought during the Spanish-American War and who, upon President William McKinley's request, traveled to Haiti and the Philippines to represent U.S. interests. Lynch practiced law in Chicago until his death in 1939. Other men of similar distinction were John Mercer Langston, congressman of Virginia, U.S. foreign diplomat to Haiti, president of Howard University, and great-uncle to the Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes; Norris Wright-Cuney, Republican delegate and political broker from Texas; Richard T. Greener, Reconstruction politician and U.S. foreign diplomat to Vladivostok, Russia; and Theophile T. Allain, Louisiana Republican delegate, wealthy and active member of the Louisiana Chamber of Commerce, and close friend of Pinchback. Many of these mixed-race politicians remained prominent long after the Civil War and Reconstruction, but did so primarily as a result of their decision to identify as Black leaders rather than to remain racially ambiguous members of the wealthy elite.
Aliya Saperstein and Aaron Gullickson studied U.S. census data for the period 1870–1920, when the census included a middle category, Mulatto, between Black and White, for people who were perceived to be racially mixed. They found that from one census to the next, a significant number of individuals moved between the Black and Mulatto categories. They attributed this to changes in occupational and social standing: if one moved up in class and status, one moved from Black to Mulatto; if one moved down socially, one moved from Mulatto to Black. That may be an accurate portrayal of overall trends. However, my study concentrates on people who were making a different move: from mixed or White to Black, and moving up in social status because of it.
William J. Simmons, an early Pinchback biographer and author of an anthology on Black leaders from the Reconstruction era, remarks on the prevalence of mixed-race men who entered Black leadership as a vocation of sorts, "Opposition calls forth resistance, and it may be ... [that] scores of other noble men, would be quietly performing personal duties, letting the world surge in at their windows, but never going out to meet it." Simmons's observation addresses what I refer to as the allure of Blackness. It is likely that the pull of civil rights advocacy rescued such noble men from historical obscurity. Had it not been for the pressing needs of Black people, they might well have been forgotten among other wealthy, White or mixed-race planters in Louisiana.
The prevalence of mixed-race people in the ranks of Black leadership has remained a fascination for students and scholars of African American history. Historians of the U.S. have dealt with mixed-race figures in several different ways. Typically, they are cast as midlevel brokers of "high culture." As a class, commonly referred to as "the Mulatto elite," they are usually charged with mimicking upper-class Whiteness and then carrying those values, mores, and temperaments from the Whites, who resided above them, to the Blacks, who were positioned below them. This interpretation renders various images of mixed-race persons, including that of the tragic or tortured Mulatto, to the opportunistic co-conspirator of White supremacy.
Focusing on the preponderance of passing among mixed-race individuals — that is, passing as White — is another common way scholars frame this topic. In other cases, the historiography of race and ethnicity has ignored the topic altogether by identifying all people with any known African ancestry as simply Black.
To the contrary, there is abundant evidence in the archival record for P. B. S. Pinchback, which reveals a very different set of options for racially mixed people. In short, the record demonstrates that Pinchback was at one time in his life self-identified as White, and then at another, self-identified as Black. The latter move resulted in measurable personal gain for Pinchback and his family, as well as widespread political influence among the greater masses of African-descended Americans.
His story not only offers insight into the history of miscegenation, "racial uplift," or multiracial consciousness. It challenges the very paradigm in U.S. history of simple Black submission and White privilege. For Pinchback and many others, social Blackness was a way up rather than a way down, and "passing as Black" proved to be an alluring option.
Pinckney Pinchback: Passing from Racially Ambiguous Boyhood to Negro Manhood
Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback was the son of a White planter from Virginia, William Pinchback, and his former slave, Eliza Stewart. According to Jean Toomer, Pinchback's grandson and famed Harlem Renaissance novelist, "unless you were looking for signs of colored blood you would see a white youth." Toomer described his grandfather precisely: "His build was sturdy, his nerves strong. His well-informed head was on the massive side ... his complexion fair, nose rather prominent."
The precise racial heritage of Eliza is today unknown — in fact it was unknown to her son more than a century ago. According to a biographical sketch written by William Simmons during Pinchback's lifetime, Eliza "was of mixed blood and known as Mulatto, though she claimed to have Indian blood in her veins." According to Toomer, the family believed Eliza to have some unknown combination of Black, American Indian, and White ancestry. In an unfinished draft of his autobiography, Toomer explained that his grandfather did not know with certainty whether his mother was indeed Black at all. Toomer recounted a time when Pinchback showed him a picture of Eliza. He admitted that it was quite difficult "to discern what bloods were in her." As a fifteen-year-old boy, Toomer recalled, Pinchback tried very hard to detect her racial ancestry, since he was desperate "to know, as far as anyone did know, exactly what bloods were [within him]." With the picture in his hands, Pinchback asked for the boy's impression: "What is your guess? Your guess is as good as anybody's." Toomer later wrote his impression of his great-grandmother's racial ancestry: "It is clear at a glance that she's not straight Anglo-Saxon or Nordic; some dark blood has entered in; but it is anyone's guess as to what dark blood. Negro? Indian? Spanish? All three, probably." Apparently, Eliza during her lifetime was also unsure of her racial heritage, since the mixture had happened some generations before her birth in 1812. The fact that her condition of servitude alone did not suffice as evidence of African ancestry reveals the limited utility of slavery as an absolute criterion for racial identification in the United States.
The tendency here is for scholars to use the one-drop rule for Black identification: one "drop of Black blood" — one known African-descended ancestor — makes one Black. This came to be the assumption of scholars and laypeople over the first half of the twentieth century. However, during the nineteenth century fractions of blood made a significant difference in many cases. The legal classification for Black identity during much of the nineteenth century varied from state to state, and in some states it changed several times during the century. Some states defined a Black person as anyone with one-eighth African blood; some states set one-sixteenth African blood, or even one-thirty-second, as the criterion for Black identity. In Virginia until 1850 a person who was "less than one-fourth African, was entitled to be white." In South Carolina before the 1840s "both known and visible Mulattoes could be white ... and could marry into white families." By 1895 "a Negro [in South Carolina] was defined as a person with one-eighth African black ancestry." In Louisiana all "persons of color" were forbidden to intermarry with Whites until 1870, when legal reform spurred by Reconstructionists temporarily amended the law. Not until after the first decade of the twentieth century would a person with any known African ancestry at all be classified unequivocally as Black.
In another section of Toomer's draft he wrote, "Pinckney himself and his mother and her children were largely white, if not all white." Despite some evidence to the contrary, Eliza, on account of her condition of servitude, was publicly seen as Black and would be remembered in the historiography as Black.
Pinckney, one of ten children born to the couple, "was always a favorite of his father." The couple had seven children before William took Eliza to Philadelphia in 1835 for the purpose of her manumission. The fact that the couple never married was not on account of an antimiscegenation law, since Pennsylvania had no such law. Rather it was as a result of William's complicated personal life. He had maintained a parallel relationship, which developed into a marriage to Lavinia Rudd. He and Lavinia had five children who were indisputably White. "Pinky," as his father referred to him, remembered as a child being treated much like the rest of his half-brothers and -sisters from this other relationship. It was not uncommon on Southern plantations to see playing together the children born from a legal wife and those from a slave mistress. This arrangement of concubinage or polygamy was often accepted with impunity. No doubt the rape of slave women by White masters and the vicious retaliation from White wives was even more common, but such plural arrangements did exist. P. B. S. Pinchback grew up in such a racially complicated multiple family.
To whatever degree their relationship was based in love or coercion is important, but scanty records on the point force us to leave that judgment to the realm of conjecture. Toomer argues, "William Pinchback's word was law, for more reasons than one. Besides, he held the purse-strings. Eliza Stewart had nothing and owned nothing, no property or anything else, except what he gave her." Yet Toomer recognized that there was something more complicated about their relationship. Years before William took Eliza to Philadelphia he had arranged for her manumission upon his death. In a will that he kept with a friend at a neighboring plantation, he expressed his intention that Eliza and all her children be set free and ushered to a non-slave state in the event of his death. But William acted on this intention while still in life. After Eliza was freed in 1835 the couple headed to Mississippi to continue their life on a newly purchased plantation in Hancock County. At some point along the way they picked up Lavinia and her children. All were headed to Mississippi when the matter of Eliza's eighth pregnancy necessitated a detour; Pinckney was born in Macon, Georgia, on May 10, 1837.
The young Pinckney was raised on the same plantation with his full brothers and sisters and his half-brothers and sisters born of two different women, one born White and free and the other, nearly as White, just recently freed. Toomer was not naïve to the tension that existed between the families. He wrote, "It is not likely that the proud and headstrong boy yielded to his father's authority without protest, or viewed [his] mother's maternal helplessness without bitterness, or felt the utter dependence of the whole family upon the father without some rebellion — that grew and deepened over the years." Perhaps this is why William Pinchback in 1846 sent Pinckney and his elder brother, Napoleon, to the Gilmore School in Cincinnati, Ohio. The fact that the boys were sent away should not, however, be understood as punitive. The Gilmore School was a place "where other Mulatto sons of white fathers, including John Mercer Langston, were enrolled at one time or another." The move might satisfy two ends: the education of two of Eliza's sons and, perhaps, a reduction of the tensions experienced by both families.
Nevertheless one ought not disregard the fact that, at one time, William owned Pinckney's mother. Surprisingly, Pinchback "from his own words and feelings expressed [to Toomer] ... was able to feel with his father, sympathize with him, and ... though he [William] was the master of his plantation, there were forces within himself and circumstances outside of himself that pretty well mastered him." For Pinchback, his father was "a man of quality and many human features, but almost as subject to his environment as his slaves were to theirs. ... He was as considerate, decent and good to my mother and their children as he possibly could be." Aware of the ironic quality of his assessment, he continued, "He could have done more for us. Many a man in his position would have done far less, without considering himself less a man. Had he continued living until I myself became a man, my life would have worked out quite differently. At heart he was a decent human being. I have much to thank him for."
In a parenthetical citation, Toomer added that Pinchback felt "indebted" to his father. Toomer made an insightful observation when he interpreted their peculiar condition: "William ... and Eliza ... both had 'master bloods' and 'serf bloods' or 'slave bloods.' It is the same with me, their descendant. On the level of inheritance I am also compounded of master and slave, and middleman too. Is it any different with you? And on them both, as on you and me was the impress if [not] the process that was and still is moulding a new people in America."
In 1848 William Pinchback died of an illness whose name has been lost to history. Toomer described this time for Pinchback, and the rest of the Stewart family, as a "crisis year." Prior to William's death, "[the] two families, held apart by him during his life, and also somewhat harmonized all those years, came into headlong collision." Because "both families had suffered under an arrangement galling to both ... both had been oppressed by the same situation, now the oppression exploded in a form that oppressed one family still more, [and] ... matters were made worse by the question of inheritance." Eliza "felt some claim to a share in the plantation ... it having been her home as well as the home of the other family." Toomer didn't know "whether she pressed the claim," but the legal family's wrath manifested in a threat to reenslave Eliza and all her children. Even Pinckney, born free, and the child in her belly were subject to the threat. Eliza and her children fled Mississippi and settled in Ohio as a White family.
Choosing to be White did not afford them any special privilege in Ohio. Shortly after arriving they realized that "the work they [knew] how to do ha[d] place on a southern plantation, none whatever in a city." The "pinch of hunger and poverty" set in. Napoleon, Pinchback's elder brother by seven years, temporarily "lost his mind." With his father dead and his brother infirm, Pinckney, at the age of twelve, set out to find work as the primary source of support for his family. This act foreshadowed a headstrong impulse to lead others, an inclination that would later thrive in a political and social environment that called for leadership.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations,
Acknowledgments,
Introduction,
1. "As a Negro I Will Be Powerful": The Leadership of P. B. S. Pinchback,
2. Postbellum Strategies to Retain Power and Status: From Political Appointments to Property Ownership,
3. New Challenges and Opportunities for Leadership: From Domestic Immigration to "The Consul's Burden",
4. "Lifting as We Climb": The Other Side of Uplift,
Conclusion,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,