How many Black people during slavery/Jim Crow didn’t look Black?

[Q.Q.Switcheroo]

Marc reminds me a bit of New York congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., whose parents were both mixed-race:

[Moriarty]

Another person who would be “black” under the one drop rule: Leni Klum - her dad is Seal, a very dark skinned man, and her mom is Heidi Klum, a blonde German woman.

[iiandyiiii]

That’s false, Leni’s biological father is from a prior relationship of her mother Heidi.

[Roderick_Femm]

@Moriarty

I personally suspect that most black Americans today have some white ancestry

Henry Louis Gates Jr has made a point of this, or did for a while, in his program. He did one show with the customers of a Black barber shop, ranging in skin tones from light to very dark, and every one of them had some white ancestry.

@LSLGuy

Come ~1970, interracial relationships & the inevitable kids therefrom began again in earnest. And have continued to grow unabated until (probably) the last very few years of MAGA-inspired troglodytic racism.

I wonder how much that kind of out-from-under-the-rock racism (i.e. it was always there, but more hidden) would affect inter-racial relationships today and the number of children therefrom. It’s probably too soon to be able to get any sort of reliable statistics, and also if this is a temporary blip it could be too small to measure.

@LSLGuy

the inevitable progress to one fairly consistent shade and shape for all humans.

This made me think of Ursula Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven. Among the different wolds that Orr dreams up is one where everyone is the same color, I think it was gray or something. I don’t remember why, but I think there was a bad outcome.

I kind of like diversity myself, as long as it doesn’t result in bigotry (I know, faint hope). Not only skin tone, but height and weight and hair and eyes and all sorts of appearance factors, it seems like everyone is attracted to some different combination of those things. Too much homogeneity might lead to a reduction in interest in general.

[Chronos]

Complete interbreeding without regard to skin color wouldn’t result in everyone being the same color, any more than it’s done that for eye or hair color. There’d still be all of the shades we have today. The extreme shades (light or dark) might be rarer and the medium ones more common, but they’d all still show up.

[Moriarty]

@iiandyiiii

biological father is from a prior relationship of her mother Heidi.

You’re correct, and I apologize.

@Asuka

In a book about American slavery I read an anecdote of a slave who didn’t look black at all and could read and write as well as a clerk was being taken to a slave auction by an Italian who was one of the guards at the plantation..

Trying to find this story (I did not) led me to the story of William and Ellen Craft, who were a married couple enslaved in Georgia in the 1840s. Because she looked white, they were able to escape north (and eventually to England, where they published a book about their escape in 1860).

To accomplish their plan, Ellen pretended to be a white man, who was traveling accompanied by William, his servant. Ellen had to be a man, since a woman wouldn’t be traveling alone with a male slave.

William and Ellen worked together to covertly acquire and collate the various sartorial mechanisms needed for Ellen’s disguise as an upper-class white gentleman as well as the necessary alibis required for the escape. While William, for instance, purchased multiple articles of men’s clothing “piece by piece” in “different parts of town,” including “green spectacles” to hide her eyes, Ellen made a pair of “trowsers” (21, 24). Ellen’s position as a “favourite slave in the family” and “a ladies’ maid” also proved advantageous, for she was granted “a little room to herself” where a “chest of drawers,” made previously by William, was present (21). Ellen kept the articles of clothing purchased by William, along with the pants, stored and locked inside the chest of drawers until the night before the escape.

They didn’t live together. They took advantage of the Christmas season to manage to meet up.

the custom of some of “the best slaveholders” was to grant “their favourite slaves a few days’ holiday at Christmas time” (22). Hence, Ellen obtained an individual pass from “her mistress,” while William obtained one from the cabinet-maker for whom he worked (22). Interestingly, neither Ellen nor William Craft was able to read what their respective passes said. Nonetheless, the passes were fundamental to the perilous four-day staging that was about to occur: without them, the Crafts left little time, if any, between their escape, their respective master’s discovery of their absence, and possible inference of their plan

And of course Ellen needed to disguise the fact that she was a woman, and had to deal with another practical concern: she was illiterate, and “it was customary for travelers to register their names in the visitor’s book at hotels, as well as in the clearance or Custom-house book at Charleston, South Carolina”

Ellen devised a solution: she designed a poultice to bind her right hand up in to feign injury—and hence the inability to write—so she could “with propriety ask the officers to register my name for me” (24). Ellen’s impersonation of the ability to write, or what the late critic Lindon Barrett termed Ellen’s “pantomime of literacy,” (Barrett 1997: 324) was aided by a second poultice that Ellen designed to be worn “under her chin, up the cheeks, and to tie over the head” that disguised both Ellen’s facial expressions as well as her “beardless chin” (Crafts 1999: 24). The effect of these tactics, of Ellen “being muffled in the poultices,” as William notes, in addition to Ellen later pretending on the train to be deaf, was to avoid the conversation of which “most Yankee travellers are passionately fond” (24)

How has this not been made into a movie?!

Ellen Craft’s Radical Techniques of Subversion

Ellen and William Craft

[Kimstu]

@Moriarty

How has this not been made into a movie?!

Harriet Beecher Stowe used the stratagem of the Crafts IIRC in the last part of Eliza and George Harris’s escape to Canada, where Eliza cuts her hair off and dresses as a young man with George as “his” companion.

[Lumpy]

Mark Twain wrote a story “Pudd’n’Head Wilson” about a 1/16th black mulatto women who switches her 1/32 black son for her master’s son:

To all intents and purposes Roxy was as white as anybody, but the one-sixteenth of her which was black outvoted the other fifteen parts and made her a negro. She was a slave, and salable as such. Her child was thirty-one parts white, and he, too, was a slave, and by a fiction of law and custom a negro. He had blue eyes and flaxen curls like his white comrade,

[Moriarty]

I found this example.

On May 15, 1845, an enslaved black woman named Fanny ran away from her Alabama owner. Since Fanny could read and write, her owner speculates in an advertisement posted in the Alabama Beacon (June 14, 1845) that she might forge a pass for herself. But Fanny’s master also comments that "she is as white as most white women, with straight light hair, and blue eyes, and can pass herself for a white woman."5

https://www.jstor.org/stable/44982355?mag=passing-for-white-to-escape-slavery&seq=2

That’s just wild to me. It adds a whole new dimension to the legalized rape that accompanied so many of these master/slave relationships.

[Exapno_Mapcase]

Walter F. White led the NAACP for 26 years. He was so light-skinned, with blonde hair and blue eyes, that he could travel freely through the South where other black leaders were subject to attack. That also allowed him to infiltrate meetings and groups who did not suspect his race, and so get valuable information.

Walter White (activist)

[Moriarty]

I hit reply too soon. Aborted post

[JohnnyEcks]

Abolitionists published photos of mixed race children indistinguishable from white during the Civil War, particularly after the capture of New Orleans. Cynical, but probably effective. Wikipedia has a page on the practice

White slave propaganda

[Moriarty]

I failed on identifying Seal’s daughter, but Maria Carey is another example of a person with a black dad and a white mom.

These “mulatto” women had beautiful skin tone. There’s undoubtedly a certain sexual kink underlying stories of Slave Masters bearing chIldren with their slaves. It’s downright diabolical when you then consider that they viewed the resulting children to be valuable property.

The more kids these slavers had, the wealthier they became.

I don’t think many people today fathom the degree of depravity in a slave society. Sally Hemings was 16 (and Thomas Jefferson 46) when she had her first child .

[Q.Q.Switcheroo]

@Moriarty

I failed on identifying Seal’s daughter, but Maria Carey is another example of a person with a black dad and a white mom.

See also Derek Jeter:

[Lumpy]

The implication being that white people could be kidnapped, branded as “mulattos” with forged papers, and sold as slaves? Did that ever actually happen?

[JohnnyEcks]

I think that was one implication- there was an incident where a German orphan was lost in New Orleans, and family members later found her enslaved, though many suspect it was wishful thinking on the part of the family and opportunism on the part of the girl.

Sally Miller

I suspect that it was more to humanize the enslaved and make Northerners imagine their own children in that situation. A dark skinned, unfamiliar looking child probably would not gain the same sympathy that one similar to the viewer’s own children would. And, of course, it shows the rank hypocrisy of the institution.

[Lumpy]

Can’t find the cite now but somewhere I’d read of a Welshman with black tightly curled hair stepping off the boat and immediately being suspected of being mixed race. Heck, Ray Dorset aka. “Mungo Jerry” might have had trouble in the pre-desegredation South.

[F.U.Shakespeare]

Delta blues legend Charlie Patton often passed:

Charley Patton (1929 photo portrait) - Charley Patton - Wikipedia

It’s believed he had roughly equal amounts of White, Black, and Native American ancestry.

[Earl_Snake-Hips_Tucker]

I think both of Katherine “Hidden Figures” Johnson’s grandfathers were White, and there’s a decent chance both grandmothers had some White blood, and she probably could have passed.

[Melbourne]

@Roderick_Femm

there was just less easy opportunity for it, and more social opprobrium against it)

Harper Lee’s fictional character Dolphus Raymond is evidence of both the social opprobrium and the continued existence of mixed-race relationships