Patient librarians and archivists at a number of institutions enabled me to research this book thoughtfully and thoroughly. I am indebted to the staffs of the Southern Historical Collection; Louisiana State; Tulane and the Amistad Research Center; the University of Mississippi; Duke; Virginia State; the University of Kentucky; Bowdoin College; the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University; the South Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina; the Freedmen and Southern Society Project at the University of Maryland; Harvard’s Law Library, Widener Library, Houghton Library, and Peabody Museum Archives; Manuscripts and Archives at Yale; the Filson Club Historical Society; the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History; Old Courthouse Museum in Vicksburg; the Library of Congress; the National Archives and Records Administration; the Maryland State Archives; the Mississippi Department of Archives & History; the North Carolina Office of Archives & History; the South Carolina Department of Archives & History; the Washingtoniana Collection at the D.C. Public Library; the Louisiana Division of the New Orleans Public Library; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York; the Buchanan County Public Library in Grundy, Virginia; the Johnson County Public Library in Paintsville, Kentucky; and the Terrebonne Parish Main Library in Houma, Louisiana.
As I traveled north and south, the people and places in this book came to life through conversations I had and friendships I made with a group of people whose thoughtfulness, generosity, candor, and trust I will never forget. Understanding O.S.B. Wall, Jordan Spencer, and Randall and Hart Gibson, among others, would not have been possible without Linda Alexander, Calvin Beale, Danny Blevins, Lisa Colby, Gordon Cotton, Robert Denton Jr., Robert Denton Sr., Freda Spencer Goble, Thelma Denton Hancock, Ed Hazelett, Paul Heinegg, Jan Horne, Ginger Hunley, William LaBach, Val McKenzie, Sarah B. Morrison, Sir Thomas L. Murphy, Joe Pearce, H. Foster Pettit, Walter Preston, Hewey Purvis, Tommy Ratliff, Lowell Ed Spencer, Manuel Spencer, Ed Talbott, Valentine Van Zee, and last but certainly not least, Isabel Wall Whittemore.
At Vanderbilt University Law School, my home since 2007, I have been blessed with brilliant colleagues and a warm, welcoming community. In addition to generous funding from the Law and Human Behavior Program, the Constitutional Law Program, and the Dean’s Office, I have had a wealth of superb readers, mentors, and friends. Without their support, this book would not have been written. Special thanks go to Mark Brandon, Ed Rubin, Gary Gerstle, Sarah Igo, Chris Guthrie, Kevin Stack, Lisa Bressman, and John Goldberg, as well as Frank Bloch, Rebecca Brown, Jon Bruce, Chris Brummer, Jim Ely, Tracey George, Nancy King, Liz Lunbeck, Alistair Newbern, Erin O’Hara, Bob Rasmussen, Jeff Schoenblum, Mike Vandenbergh, and Ingrid Wuerth. Vanderbilt’s librarians and library staff have spent nearly four years helping me track down hundreds of books, statutes, and hearing transcripts, as well as the weather in eastern Kentucky on May 4, 1912. My sincere thanks go to Jo Bilyeu, Peter Brush, Martin Cerjan, Michael Jackson, Stephen Jordan, Jim Kelly, Linda Tesar, Bill Walker, and especially Mary Miles Prince. For terrific research assistance, I thank Benjamin Berlin, Kathleen Gilchrist, William Hardin, Shaina Jones, Matthew Koreiwo, Lauren Lowe, Jacob Neu, and Steven Riley. For miraculous feats of administrative assistance, I thank Brandy Drinnon, and I am also grateful for the work of Christie Bishop, Marita Bush, and Sue Ann Scott. Grace Renshaw has been very helpful with publicity and communications. Stephen McElroy and Scott Nelson provided crucial technical support.
Before this project was a project, I had teachers who opened up new worlds to me. I thank Steve Biel, Larry Buell, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Karl Guthke, Jeff Melnick, Peggy Pfeiffer, Tom Siegel, and Werner Sollors. My first sustained encounter with the complexity of the color line occurred in 1993 in South Africa, where I volunteered on a voter education project before the country’s first “nonracial” election. It was an intense introduction to apartheid-era classifications, and my conversations there—especially with Thabo Manyoni, Cinque Henderson, and Natosha Reid—put me on a path that led to this book. Howard French, Jesus Sanchez, Janette Williams, Larry Wilson, and Dave Zahniser are dear friends who helped shape how I see the world and write about it.
At Yale I had incomparable mentors and untiring advocates in Bob Gordon, Harold Koh, Carol Rose, and Peter Schuck. I also thank Emily Bazelon, Lincoln Caplan, Crystal Feimster, Glenda Gilmore, and Mark Templeton for their guidance and support. My conversations with Daniel Markovits, absurd and profound, have been a great joy these last thirteen years. As a lawyer, I had the privilege of working with extraordinary judges and attorneys, including Dorothy Nelson and Rya Zobel, Michael Strumwasser, Fred Woocher, Kevin Reed, and Johanna Shargel, all of whom deepened my understanding of law and the lives lived in its shadow. In Boston I became a legal historian with the help of Charlie Donahue, Mort Horwitz, Christine Desan, Mary Dudziak, Pnina Lahav, David Seipp, Jed Shugerman, Michael Stein, and especially Ken Mack, who has been a friend and a reader of my work without equal. I was also lucky enough to belong to a writing group with Steve Biel, Jona Hansen, Jane Kamensky, John Plotz, Jennifer Roberts, Seth Rockman, Conevery Valenčius, and Michael Willrich, whose comments and suggestions from the start of the project to its completion were unfailingly insightful. I am particularly grateful to Jane for reading and commenting on the entire manuscript. At NYU I learned from some of the best readers and writers of legal history, including Richard Bernstein, Harold Forsythe, Dan Hulsebosch, John Phillip Reid, and especially Bill Nelson, who has been a mentor of boundless generosity to more than a generation of scholars. George Barnum, Randall Burkett, Vernon Burton, Rachel Cohen, Jane Dailey, Doug DeMay and Nell Ma’luf, Adam Feibelman and Cindy Gardner, Crystal Feimster and Dani Botsman, George Flautau, Laura Freidenfelds, Matthew Gilmore, Andrew Kent, Morgan Kousser, Brian Kraft, Joe Mathews, Mary Gorton McBride, Seth Mnookin, Nick Parrillo, Matthew Pearl, Zach Schrag, and Diana Williams were all helpful with research and publishing questions at various stages of the project. Chris Capozzola, Kristin Collins, Dan Hamilton, Alison LaCroix, and Brad Snyder are friends and colleagues who read portions of the book and have long been sources of ideas and advice; Matthew Lindsay read the entire manuscript and had excellent suggestions. John Donahue, Jeremy Hockenstein, and Ira Stoll have been my friends for more than twenty years, and it was always a pleasure to talk with them after a day of research or writing.
I am grateful to Wendy Strothman and Dan O’Connell at the Strothman Agency for believing in and shepherding the book before a single word had been committed to paper. At The Penguin Press, Vanessa Mobley had the vision to see what this project could become, and Janie Fleming was a careful reader with a keen sense of narrative. Janet Biehl and Bruce Giffords provided elegant and meticulous copyediting and production support. I owe special thanks to my editor, Ginny Smith, whose incisive comments and infectious enthusiasm improved the book in countless ways.
Writing about big families across generations often reminded me of my own loving extended family. My grandparents, Sidney and Beverly Sharfstein and Reuben and Pearl Shiling, loved stories and jokes and ideas and books, but most of all they loved me. I wish they were alive to see this book. I am grateful for the love, support, and friendship of my sister Sarah and Brian and baby Sydney, Yngvild and Sam and Isak, Howard and Jill, David and Claire, my in-laws Curt and Mary Mikkelsen, and Erika and Mike and Katherine. My brother Josh read the entire manuscript in one weekend during a blizzard in Baltimore in December 2009, and as always his comments were spot on, medically sound, and in the public interest. For as long as I can remember, he has been my friend and champion. I thank my father, Steven Sharfstein, not only because there was a copy of Black Skin, White Masks in the house when I was growing up, and not only because he told stories about what it was like to meet Martin Luther King Jr. and attend the March on Washington as a young man. My father has shown me how to live a socially engaged life of ideas and action. He has always put family first. And it is always fun to watch baseball with him—even when the Orioles are playing. My mother, Marg
aret Sharfstein, has the most acute observational skills and best sense of humor of anyone I have ever met. She has kept our family together with the kind of strength and abiding love that has its own gravitational force. I am who I am because of her.
Since I began this project, my immediate family has doubled in size. My two boys, Saul and Abe, make every day wonderful. I see the world with new eyes because of them. That said, any inadvertent mentions in this book of dinosaurs, spiders, robots, spaceships, skeletons, pirates, and dogs that talk are entirely my own.
When there was no end in sight, Ann Mikkelsen’s advice and encouragement, patience and unfailing support, kept this project going. She has read every word that I have written many times, and I would be lost without her wise counsel and brilliant editing. Every day for eighteen years we have spent hours talking, and every day I am inspired by her ideas and intellect and empathy, her way of reading the world closely. I understand love and family, truth and beauty, happiness and home, because of her. My gratitude is indescribable. This book is dedicated to her.
NOTES
ARCHIVES CITED
American Missionary Association Archives, Amistad Research Center, Tulane University, New Orleans
Mrs. Mason Barrett Collection of the papers of Albert Sidney Johnston and William Preston Johnston, Louisiana Research Collection, Tulane University, New Orleans
Sayles Jenks Bowen Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
John E. Bruce Papers, Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, New York
Calliopean Society Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library, New Haven, Connecticut
J.F.H. Claiborne Papers, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson
Anna Julia Cooper Papers, Collection 23-1, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C.
Charles Nunnally Dean Papers, Special Collections, J. D. Williams Library, University of Mississippi, Oxford
District of Columbia Public School Records, Charles Sumner School Museum and Archives, Washington, D.C.
Randall Lee Gibson Papers, Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, Louisiana State University Libraries, Baton Rouge
Randall Lee Gibson Papers, Louisiana Research Collection, Tulane University, New Orleans
Gibson and Humphreys Family Papers, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Randall Lee Gibson and Family Archive, Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, New York
Hart Gibson Alumni Records, Manuscripts and Archives, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut
Grigsby Collection, Filson Historical Society, Louisville, Kentucky
Edmund T. Halsey Papers, Filson Historical Society, Louisville, Kentucky
Oliver Otis Howard Papers, George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections and Archives, Bowdoin College Library, Brunswick, Maine
Josiah Stoddard Johnston Papers, Filson Historical Society, Louisville, Kentucky
John Mercer Langston Papers, Special Collections, John Hope and Aurelia E. Franklin Library, Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee
Leak and Wall Family Papers, 1785-1897, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Liddell (Moses, St. John R., and Family) Papers, Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, Louisiana State University Libraries, Baton Rouge
McConnell Family Papers, Louisiana Research Collection, Tulane University, New Orleans
Whitefield McKinlay Papers, Carter G. Woodson Collection, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Kelly Miller Papers, Manuscripts Collection, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C.
Mrs. William and H. Foster Pettit Family Collection, University of Kentucky Archives, Lexington
Rufus and S. Willard Saxton Papers, Yale University Library, New Haven, Connecticut
Robert H. Terrell Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Washingtoniana Collection, District of Columbia Public Library, Washington, D.C.
David Weeks and Family Papers, Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, Louisiana State University Libraries, Baton Rouge
INTRODUCTION: THE HOUSE BEHIND THE CEDARS
1 Thomas L. Murphy, interview by author, October 28, 2005, Hampton, Ga.
2 See Willard B. Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880-1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 166-67, 176, 178.
3 For nearly a century, sociologists and others have attempted to estimate the percentage of whites in the United States who have some recent African ancestry; speculation ranges from 1 to 20 percent. See, e.g., Hornell M. Hart, Selective Migration as a Factor in Child Welfare in the United States, With Special Reference to Iowa (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1921); Caroline Bond Day, A Study of Some Negro-White Families in the United States (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1932); John H. Burma, “The Measurement of Negro Passing,” American Journal of Sociology 52 (1946), p. 18; E. W. Eckard, “How Many Negroes ‘Pass’?” American Journal of Sociology 52 (1947), p. 498; Roi Ottley, “Five Million White Negroes,” Ebony, March 1948, pp. 22-28; Robert P. Stuckert, “African Ancestry of the White American Population,” Ohio Journal of Science 58 (1958), pp. 155, 160 (“Over twenty-eight million white persons are descendants of persons of African origin”); James Ernest Conyers, “Selected Aspects of the Phenomenon of Negro Passing” (unpublished Ph.D. diss., Washington State University, 1962), pp. 23-27, summarizing and critiquing sociological studies; Werner Sollors, Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 280-84; and Brent Staples, “A Hemings Family Turns from Black, to White, to Black,” New York Times, December 17, 2001, p. A20. On assertions of newly white status, see Linda J. Alexander’s account of discovering her family’s origins as free people of color in Louisiana, “The ‘White’ House,” Sunday Advocate Magazine (Baton Rouge), April 30, 2000, p. 18, online at http://www.authorsden.com/visit/viewarticle.asp?AuthorID=9014&id=5920.
4 See generally Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968); and Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). On migration as a central theme of African American history, see Ira Berlin, The Making of African America: Four Great Migrations (New York: Viking Press, 2010). The journey from black to white arguably constitutes a fifth migration.
5 See generally Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York: Random House, 1974); Leon F. Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961); and Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Knopf, 1998).
6 “The problem of evidence is insurmountable,” observes Winthrop Jordan. “The success of the passing mechanism depended upon its operating in silence.” See Jordan, White Over Black, p. 174. Nevertheless, historians have punctuated their accounts of the evolution of race in the United States and the prevalence of interracial sex with anecdotes in which African Americans refashioned themselves as white. See, e.g., Joel Williamson, New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States (New York: Free Press, 1980), pp. 100-106; Berlin, Slaves Without Masters, pp. 160-64; James Hugo Johnston, Race Relations in Virginia and Miscegenation in the South, 1776-1860 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1970), pp. 191-216; Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the 19th-Century South (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 96-122; Joshua D. Rothman, Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families Across the Color L
ine in Virginia, 1787-1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), pp. 212-15; and Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), p. 601. For reverse-passing stories, in which whites chose to live with and as blacks, see, e.g., Martha Hodes, The Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006); and Martha Sandweiss, Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line (New York: Penguin, 2009). On conventional passing narratives, see Sollors, Neither Black Nor White Yet Both, pp. 246-84.
7 See, e.g., “Desdemona After a Divorce,” New York Times, December 23, 1883, p. 6; “Drafted Man, Classed as Colored, Commits Suicide in an Ohio Camp,” Washington Post, September 29, 1917, p. 4; “Colored Girl at Vassar,” New York Times, August 16, 1897, p. 1; “Negro Passing as White Reveals Ole Miss Career,” Washington Post, September 26, 1962, p. A4; Mitchell Owens, “Surprises in the Family Tree,” New York Times, January 8, 2004, p. F1; Pauli Murray, The Autobiography of a Black Activist, Feminist, Lawyer, Priest, and Poet (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990), pp. 34-35; Shirlee Taylor Haizlip, The Sweeter the Juice: A Family Memoir in Black and White (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994); Gregory Howard Williams, Life on the Color Line: The True Story of a White Boy Who Discovered He Was Black (New York: Penguin, 1996); Adele Logan Alexander, Homelands and Waterways : The American Journey of the Bond Family, 1846-1926 (New York: Vintage, 2000); Bliss Broyard, One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life—A Story of Race and Family Secrets (Boston: Little, Brown, 2008); Ariela J. Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008).
8 See generally George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971); Berlin, Slaves Without Masters; Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Knopf, 1979).
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