Critical Family History and Sundown Towns

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Christine: I am having a conversation with James W. Loewen, author of many well-known books including Lies my Teacher Told Me and Teaching What Really Happened. Jim, I didn’t know I had grown up in a sundown town until I read your book Sundown Towns. I knew the town was almost all-white, but I had more or less accepted the dominant idea that this was so because people of color didn’t choose to live there. For readers who aren’t sure what we are talking about, can you clarify: what is a sundown town?

 Jim Loewen: Sundown towns are communities that for decades were — some still are — "all-white" on purpose. I put "all-white" in quotation marks because some towns were viciously unwelcoming of African Americans even while harboring one and sometimes two black families. When Pana, Illinois, for example, forced out its African American population in 1899, whites did not make the black barber and his family leave. He had a white clientele and many acquaintances — even friends — in the white community. No one had a complaint about him. Pana did post signs at its city limits, signs that remained up at least until 1960, and permitted no other African Americans to move in, so it definitely became a sundown town. So I use <10 African Americans, not zero, as my population cutoff; for larger cities I use <0.1%.

Christine: Does a sundown town have to have a sign, like the one on the cover?

Jim Loewen: No, most towns never had a sign. Most towns never passed an ordinance. Moreover, the term "sundown town" is unknown in some parts of the nation. Nevertheless, residents understood that African Americans — and sometimes Jews, Chinese Americans, Native Americans, or members of other groups — were not welcome.

Christine: When did towns go sundown?

Jim Loewen: A few towns kept out African Americans even before the Civil War. Most went sundown much later, however, between 1890 and 1940. This is the infamous "Nadir of Race Relations," when the entire U.S., North as well as South, went more racist in our ideology than at any other point. Sundown suburbs came a little later, mostly forming from 1905 to 1968.

Christine: So, when researching family history, it appears that not only did racism in one form or another shape where our ancestors lived, but after Reconstruction, white people increasingly used various processes to create white towns, which had the effect of restricting where people of color could live. Very possibly most of us who live in the U.S. and who have ancestry going back at least a couple of generations have been touched by sundown towns. How might we look into the connection between sundown towns and family history?

Jim Loewen: First, use oral history. Older family members often know when their ancestors first got to a community. They also often know if their community was all-white by accident or by design. They may remember details. For instance, perhaps a black student was in the public schools briefly in the 1950s. Of course, no one intends to move to a town briefly. No family goes through all the trouble to enroll a child in school briefly. So already, that's evidence that the town was not all white by accident. Sometimes people will remember additional details — a brick through a window, a child beaten up at school, DWB stops.

Second, make use of the "manuscript census," the actual census enumeration. Down through 1940, the manuscript census tells the race of every resident, as well as their address, occupation, age, and sex. Just as a family historian might find an influx of "McDonalds" between, say, 1900 and 1910, s/he might find an abrupt decrease in "C" (for "colored") in the race column. Sometimes, the names no longer there can be found in the latter year in the nearest interracial town. Then you can contact descendants and learn why they left.

Christine: I would also like to direct readers to your Sundown Towns Map, which I’ve used periodically in my own family history research. You make available a very useful set of tools. On the map of the U.S., one can simply click on a state to see a list of possible sundown towns in that state, then click on a town and read documentation of its history as a sundown town.

Jim Loewen: Readers need to know that if a town does not appear on a state’s listing, that does not mean that it wasn’t a sundown town. It may mean that I simply haven’t learned about it yet. Your readers can perform a great service by sending me information about towns that they think kept out African Americans (or other groups). Eventually their material will get posted, anonymously if they so wish. My email address is jloewen@uvm.edu.

Christine: Thank you! What would you say is the most important insight a family historian might gain from asking about sundown towns in their family's past?"

Jim Loewen: Some families learn happy facts. Recently I spoke with a woman in her 50s. Her mother took down the sign at the edge of Oolitic, a small town in Indiana, and hid it in the family garage. She was proud of her mother, and rightly so. More often, white families did nothing. If they opposed the rule, they only said so within the confines of their own homes, so their opposition never registered in the community.

Christine: That was the case in my own family.

Jim Loewen: Even when that’s the case, that's an important insight, for it teaches that we white folks were "beneficiaries" of this outrageous custom and did nothing to change it. Black families, too, often pass down little about the bad things that happened to them long after slavery. Young people need to know what their elders went through. All Americans need to know about the Nadir. Few do. It does not fit with our national storyline, evident in every high school history textbook, of unrelenting automatic progress. We used to die young; now we have modern medicine. We used to be intolerant; now we are tolerant. We used to have slavery; now we have Obama. We used to be racist; now we aren't. The idea that we might have grown more racist for decade after decade after 1890 is hard to grasp. The idea that college campuses, towns, whole counties allowed black residents in 1880 but not by 1920 — hard to grasp. The idea that Jackie Robinson wasn't the first black ball player in the Major Leagues, but only the first after 1890 — hard to grasp. Family history is often the most powerful way to grasp these national trends and processes.

Christine: Thank you so much, Jim, not only for this conversation but also for the terrific books and tools you’ve been giving us.

Language, History, and E Pluribus Unum

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A week ago, while watching the Superbowl with friends, I saw Coca Cola’s now-famed ad E Pluribus Unum. At first, I was puzzled why I wasn’t following the lyrics to America the Beautiful, then realized they were being sung in multiple languages -- English, Spanish, Keres (an indigenous American language), Tagalog, Hindi, Senegalese French and Hebrew. Regarding pluralism as normal, I appreciated what Coke was doing (even though I don’t appreciate sugary drinks), admired the artistry of the ad, then promptly forgot about it.

I was surprised a few days later to hear about the tremendous uproar it prompted. On Coca Cola’s Facebook page, while there are far more likes than dislikes, the comments section includes things like the following:

• Disgraceful!
• Unpatriotic
• Speak English or go home
• No Coke for me
• De-Americanize America, divide and conquer

While I do not know those who are offended by the ad personally, I do know many people (most of whom are of European descent) who share their sentiment. Many us Euro-Americans assume our ancestors readily and willingly traded in the languages and cultures they brought in order to become American. For a huge number of us, however, this assumption is false. But since our own histories were suppressed in the process of erasing our ancestors’ languages, we aren’t aware of those histories. Let me share a bit of mine that I uncovered using family history research tools.

My father’s side of the family was of German descent. My German immigrant ancestors arrived to the U.S. between 1843 and 1868, most coming to Illinois but at least one to Pennsylvania. As nearly as I have been able to piece together, they left Germany primarily because of a combination of war as Prussia was expanding, poor crops leading to the possibility of famine, and to join other family members who preceded them. They helped to create and lived within what became bilingual, bicultural communities. In their case, the German church was an important institution that maintained bilingualism for about sixty years. How do I know that?

1. Visiting where my ancestors lived. Browsing through Ancestry.com, I learned that in October of 1855, one of my German immigrant ancestors helped to found Zion Chapel (which had been a German Methodist church), in Boody, Illinois. So, on a trip to Illinois, I visited the church. There, I was able to read church records, including hand-written records from its early years. In so doing, I not only saw that its language had been German, I also learned the German origin of my name – Sleeter -- which was Schlichter in church records. (Apparently church members had two sets of names: English names for records kept in English, and German names for records kept in German.) I was also able to read Zion Methodist Church centennial records, where I learned that Rev. Peter Hehner had been sent to Boody by the St. Louis Conference of the German Methodist Church in 1855; 18 German residents (including great-great grandfather Wilhelm Schlichter and great-great grandmother Amelia Farharenhorst’s father) established the church, initially in Wilhelm Schlichter’s home.

2. Digitized old newspaper articles. While I do not have access to the German press from that era, English newspapers occasionally featured German church events. For example, an article in the Saturday Herald, describing the anniversary celebration of Zion Chapel's Literary Society in August, 1887, noted that “some of the songs, and most of the other exercises were in German. Since the audience was made up of those who spoke both languages equally well all were alike enjoyed.”

3. Library and historical society research about specific churches. Writing in 1923 about Zion Chapel in the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society (vol. 16), N. M. Baker noted that its services were held continuously in German "until the late war [WW I] made the use of German unpopular" (p. 102). More about that below.

One of the other German immigrants in my family tree was a German Methodist Episcopal pastor. Once I found that out, I sought information about the denomination and the training of pastors. A little internet research revealed that German Methodist churches had been started in the U.S. in the 1830s, as a way of ministering to German immigrant communities. Dr. Wilhelm Nast, who has been called the father of the German Methodist Church, was a missionary to the U.S. who translated basic Methodist documents into German in the 1830s. Two seminaries were established to prepare German Methodist ministers: Nast Theological Seminary in Ohio, and Central Wesleyan College in Missouri. According to Rev. G. Davies, writing in the 1929 publication Journal and Year Book of the Illinois Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church (Wagoner Printing Co., p. 375), noted that my ancestor Rev. Ross continued his earlier education in Germany by attending Central Wesleyan College, located initially in Quincy Illinois. In 2006, O. E. Kriege described the program at Central Wesleyan College as producing “well equipped bilingual ministers” who are generally expected to do German services in the morning and English in the evening; and demand outstrips supply (in S. M. Jackson, editor, The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, Vol VII. Kessinger Pub,, p. 367).

So what happened? To investigate, I read newspapers published in Illinois during World War I. The quotes below are all from the Decatur Review.

In July, 1914, war erupted between Austria and Serbia, then Germany declared war on Russia, France, and Belgium in rapid succession. While the English-language press joined England in siding against Germany, German-Americans attempted to present Germany’s point of view while also reaffirming their own American patriotism. For example, Decatur lawyer Albert G. Webber wrote on August 11:

A German-American citizen in expressing his view upon the very unfortunate war situation in Europe is liable to be misunderstood and have his loyalty to the government of the United States questioned. First, let me say, I believe every thoughtful honest German-American citizen cannot help resenting every insinuation, that because of his sympathy for the German people, that he is betraying disloyalty to the United States. When the destiny of this government was trembling in the balance of uncertainty, no nationality furnished a larger percentage of valiant soldiers to maintain the union than was furnished by the German-American people.

After pointing out German-Americans’ active role supporting the Union during the Civil War, then distinguishing between the German Kaiser and ordinary German citizens who had no control over the Kaiser, Webber went on to situate the conflict within European resentments toward Germany.

Another German American, making much the same argument, pointed out a month later that “The German people are looked upon as foreigners, the English as ancestors.”

In 1915, Germany added England to its list of enemies, and sank the Lusitania, believing it was carrying munitions. By 1917, as Germany increased its submarine attacks against non-German ships, German-Americans worked to affirm their loyalty to the U.S., now downplaying their German roots. For example, a national convention the National German American Alliance passed resolutions “endorsing the action of President Wilson in severing diplomatic relations with Germany and pledging its loyalty to the United States.” The Alliance also lamented a growing backlash against German-Americans: “Our delegates felt that we have been greatly misunderstood and unjustly criticized during the war, but if it comes to a war with Germany, our actions will not be susceptible to any further misunderstanding, for we will back up our American government with our lives and our means.”

In August, 1917, former President Teddy Roosevelt announced that “some senators, congressmen, and newspaper editors” were “standing where the copperheads stood in the civil war.” He demanded “suppression of the German language press” and “deportation of ‘fifty-fifty Americans.’” A month later, the Post Office Department considered “exclusion from the mails of certain influential German language newspapers printed in various sections of the United States . . . as a part of the government’s determination to prevent circulation of anti-war propaganda.”

The governor of Iowa announced a plan to “stamp out disloyalty,” saying that he hoped to see "a sentiment created in our state so strong, so vigorous and so overpowering that no disturber or enemy sympathizer will dare to start his disturbance in any community in our state.” (Iowa shortly after that outlawed any use of the German language whatsoever.)

German-Americans, particularly those born in Germany, were targeted as spies in a German plot to colonize America, using the German press to give the Kaiser’s orders to Germans in America. In summer, 1918, newspapers noted to the internment of German-American citizens in Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, and the lynching of a German-American coal miner in Collinsville, Illinois:

• “Half a dozen German civilians interned at Hot Springs, NC are reported dead of typhoid fever and 165 ill as a result of drinking unfiltered water from French Broad river with the hope that their illness would prevent the war department from transferring them to the military prison camp at Fort Oglethorpe, GA.” (Aug. 14, 1918, p. 1) 
• “Huns After Facts on Prager Lynching. That the lynching of Robert Paul Prager allegedly German spy April 5, last, will be made a matter of representation by the German government was indicated in a letter received by John Mellon, clerk of the circuit court. Requesting accurate information regarding the lynching.” (July 21, 1918, p. 23) 

Reports in Decatur newspapers sketched assaults on the German language; here are a few from the Decatur Review:

• “Warn town to stop talking Hun. Lincoln, Neb., Aug 29 – Citizens of Harbine, Neb. yesterday rode by automobile to Plymouth, a neighboring town and placarded the place with notices demanding that the use of the German language in Plymouth be stopped.” (Aug 29, 1919, p. 1) 
• "Mrs. Zua Hobson, patriotic Instructor of the W. R. C., ‘called down’ one of the Alhambra players at the chautauqua Saturday afternoon for using the German language in telling a story. He continued with his story and was branded as a German sympathizer by Mrs. Hobson, who searched tor him after the program with the intention of prosecuting him, but he could not be located.” (Aug 27, 1918, p. 6) 
• “A communication was received from citizens of the west asking that the minister of a German church be requested to preach in English and that the songs be sung in English.” (June 15, 1919, p. 4) 
• “Painters are engaged at the German church in Belleville in removing the yellow paint placed there a week ago by vandals. The building is to be repainted. The authorities are unable to find any trace of the parties who desecrated this house of worship.” (July 29, 1919, p. 9) 
• “Singing of German opera in the German language is banned in New York until after the peace treaty is ratified.” (Oct. 28, 1919, p. 11) 

The teaching of German in high school was suspended. When the superintendent of Decatur schools was asked in June, 1919, whether German might be restored after the war, he replied: “I suppose it will be put back sometime. But there will not be any hurry about it so far as I am concerned. The more I learn of the German conduct of this war the less I am in sympathy with things German.”

Methodist church publications concurred with the sentiment to ban German. Writing in The Christian Advocate, a weekly newspaper of the Methodist Church, Bishop Cooke proclaimed: “nothing separates humanity like diversity of tongues . . . let our preachers and people use only the English language . . . we should preserve the unity of the nation and foreign language is not the language of the young people of America.”

German was so thoroughly suppressed by the end of the war, and further with World War II, that not only was German-English bilingualism destroyed, but so too was historical memory that it had even existed. I invite readers to look into their own family histories, using research tools and frameworks available to them. We need to resurrect these suppressed histories and make them public, so that we do not continue to do to others the violence done against our own ancestors.

Legacies of Slavery in the Family

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What would you do if you were white and discovered you descend from slaveholders, which many of us did whether we know it or not? That is exactly the question Katrina Browne, Thomas DeWolf, and several of their relatives confronted. In the preface to the book Inheriting the Trade: A Northern Family Confronts its Legacy as the Largest Slave-Trading Dynasty in U.S. History, Thomas DeWolf explains that, “It’s easy to agree that slavery prior to the Civil War was wrong. It’s much more difficult for whites to reflect on the systematic racism that lingers today,” including huge disparities in access to education, housing, jobs, health care, and legal justice. By examining their family legacy, Browne, DeWolf and other members of their family and network hope that other whites will be able to confront legacies of inherited racism, and that both Blacks and whites will be able to heal.

The work this family is doing is immensely important. Browne and DeWolf detail their journey in Inheriting the Trade, and the companion DVD, Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North. The journey was initiated when Katrina Browne came to realize through a family history written by her grandmother that her family, whom she had grown up learning to be proud of, had been very active slave traders. She contacted other family members, organizing those who wanted to participate in a profoundly impactful journey from Rhode Island to the slave forts in Ghana, to the sugar plantations in Cuba. Through this journey, documented in both the book and the DVD, audiences learn not only about the slave trade itself, but poignantly about how DeWolf descendants dealt with learning their horrific legacy.

Since publication of these works, the family and colleagues have organized several venues to raise white awareness of legacies of racism, and to build an active network of descendants of both slaveholders and slaves, working together to challenge racism. Coming to the Table offers an internet platform for people to connect. Anyone who is a descendent of slaves or slaveholders can ask to join; I’m a member. More active at present is Coming to the Table's Facebook group, which features discussions of racism today as well as yesterday, members' publications about their own stories, upcoming events, and so forth.

The Tracing Center on Histories and Legacies of Slavery takes this work “on the road,” so to speak. As described on its website, its "mission is to create greater awareness of the entire nation’s complicity in slavery and the transatlantic slave trade and to inspire acknowledgment, dialogue and active response to this history and its many legacies." The Center offers screenings of Traces of the Trade, speakers, facilitated dialogues, workplace trainings on race and privilege, as well as various anti-racist discussion guides and guides for viewing the film.

With Sharon Morgan, Thomas DeWolf recently co-authored the book Gather at the Table, a dialog across race between a descendant of a slave and descendant of a slaveholder. This book aims to prompt national dialogue about racism and work toward healing. The authors (who met through Coming to the Table) spent three years traveling together through 27 states examining racism's history and current manifestations. This award-winning book is based on that journey.

If you wonder why I believe it is important to unpack the histories of our families in a social context that takes account of racism, class, and patriarchy, I point toward the work of the DeWolf descendants as an example of what can be done. We make tomorrow's history through our actions today. But if we do not know our own history, if we haven't come to terms with it, the history we make may end up reproducing rather than changing injustices. 

Racism, Inheritance, and Family Financial Aid

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“I didn’t own slaves, why should I feel guilty?” is a common response of White people to hearing about racism today. This response regards slavery and theft of Indigenous peoples’ land as so ancient that paying attention to them today only invites anger and guilt. But I will show how racial privilege is a living inheritance. As a backdrop, consider data from the 2004 census, when the median net wealth of White non-Hispanic families was $113,822, of Black families just $8,650; and of Hispanic families, $13,375. Might these huge discrepancies have historical roots?

I was born into a White professional class family, daughter of a father who was a physician and a mother who stayed home to raise her children. When I was six, my father died suddenly of a heart attack. My mother’s parents came to our financial rescue: between them and my father’s life insurance, we were able to keep our home, and my mother was able to continue to stay home to raise us. Later my maternal grandparents helped put us through college, and my share of my grandfather’s will helped fund my graduate education. My grandmother established a trust; when my mother died, the share I inherited helped pay for my house. Where did these financial assets come from?

Strong contributors were a long history of inheritance and “family financial aid.” As Shammas, Salmon and Dahlin document in Inheritance in America (Galveston, Frontier Press), “The bulk of household wealth in America, perhaps as much as 80 percent of it, is derived from inheritance, not labor force participation” (p. 3). Lui, Robles, Leondar-Wright, Brewer, and Adamson, in their book The Color of Wealth: The Story Behind the U.S. Racial Wealth Divide (The New Press, 2006) explain that large disparities in family wealth produce disparities in “family financial aid” to offspring, such as contributions to a down payment on a house or help with college tuition. About half of White families can afford this kind of aid, compared with only about one-fifth of Black families.  

Here’s a slice of how these processes worked in my family before I was even born. (For a more complete discussion, see my chapter in Critical (hi)Stories: Crafting Pedagogies of Collaboration, Inclusion, Re(presentation) and Voice edited by Kristen Luschen and Judith Flores Carmona, in press with Peter Lang.)

My maternal grandmother descended from the Appalachian Mountains. Growing up, I had assumed her family to be relatively poor. It turns out that while some were poor, others were not, including the H. and McC. families.  

George H., a land speculator, bought 160 acres from the state of Tennessee in 1827, land that was previously Cherokee. He bought other pieces of land as well, but this was the one he bought right after Indigenous peoples had been pushed off of it. County deeds records show a pattern of him buying and selling land continuously in Tennessee, which during that time that was mainly restricted to White people. In addition, between the 1830s and the Emancipation Proclamation, he owned between 3 and 6 slaves at a time. In the 1860 U.S. Census, his family wealth had grown to $30,000 ($719,152 in 2010 dollars).

He and his first wife had about 14 children. One of their eldest, Ben, from whom I descend, went to Arkansas where he bought a small plantation and six or seven slaves. When Ben and his wife’s three children (one of whom, Dewitt, was my ancestor) were still small, he died from injuries sustained in a duel, leaving behind debts, since apparently he had managed the plantation very badly. The three children were sent to Tennessee to live with their grandfather and his second wife; I am not sure why they did not stay with their mother. When George died, his will divided his estate equally among his children and the offspring of children who had died. Having being raised by a wealthy grandparent, then inheriting a portion of his estate, Dewitt was able to complete his education, buy a small farm, and later become County Clerk.

One of Dewitt’s daughters was my great-grandmother, who married a descendant of the McC family. William McC was a neighbor of George. In 1828, he purchased 67 acres from a trader who had earlier purchased the land apparently from the Cherokee Nation. Like George, he also bought more land, although not as aggressively, and without buying slaves. By 1860, William’s family wealth was $9,000 ($275,746 in 2010 dollars). His will directed that his wife and children each be given $700 ($16,766 in 2010 dollars) plus an equal share of his estate after other bequests had been made.

One of William’s sons was my great-great grandfather John. In 1860, William deeded 132 acres to John for the equivalent of about $40,000 (2010 dollars). At some point, John had a two-story brick house built on the farm. It still stands, pictured below in the process of renovation.

One of John's sons married Dewitt’s daughter; these were my great grandparents. They left Tennessee right after they were married, stopping for a few years in Steamboat Springs, Colorado (from which the Ute had just been expelled) and buying land there. A few years later, they moved the San Francisco area. My great-grandfather drifted from job to job and eventually abandoned the family. But my great-grandmother managed to accumulate money, I suspect with the help of her Tennessee parents. She passed down what she had to her children, one of whom was my grandmother.

My grandparents invested in property in the San Francisco Bay area; these were the grandparents that had helped us when I was younger. Their ability to invest in property needs to be understood in the context of rampant racial discrimination, such as restrictive covenants to prevent people of color from buying into White neighborhoods, and real estate practices that steer buyers of color away from White neighborhoods.The Federal Housing Administration, created by the federal government in 1934 to help lift (White) families out of the Depression by offering loans, was specifically constructed to keep people of color from buying in White neighborhoods. So, my grandparents were able to buy and sell property in a market structured by regulations and processes that explicitly benefited White property buyers like themselves.

I haven’t mentioned my ancestors working. Most of them worked hard, but with resources. Some augmented those resources, others blew them. But the point is that considerable wealth initially came from land from which the Indigenous peoples had been expelled so that Whites could have access to it. Slave labor augmented that wealth. And the wealth was passed down through the family in the forms of inheritance and family financial aid.

One cannot rewrite history, but one can author the present. For example, currently the land base of most Indigenous tribes is inadequate. Within the boundaries of many reservations, the U.S. government sold or transferred control of plots of land to non-Indians, resulting in a checkerboard pattern of land under tribal control, giving rise to economic difficulties for tribes as well as difficulty in building tribal sovereignty. Other tribes lost their land entirely during the Termination period the 1950s, and are trying to reclaim it.

To address these problems, several Indian-controlled organizations seek financial donations; anyone today can help out. Examples include:

• The Indian Land Tenure Foundation , which works with various organizations to address loss of land in Indian Country.
• White Earth Land Recovery Project, that works to help recover the original land base of the White Earth Indian Reservation in Minnesota.
• The Lakota Lands Recovery Project, a grassroots organization working to consolidate tribal control over the land and resources of the Pine Ridge Reservation.

If you are curious as to how inheritance and family financial aid played out historically in your own family, in contexts that enabled White families to accumulate resources on the backs of people of color, property records and wills are a good place to start.

Becoming White: Reinterpreting a Family Story by Putting Race Back into the Picture

(We've moved to: http://christinesleeter.org/becoming-white/)

I grew up hearing stories about a great-great-grandmother who immigrated from Switzerland to the U.S. by way of New Orleans. According to stories, she was a linguist who spoke four or five languages fluently, an accomplished seamstress, and a medium. (My siblings and I loved the idea of a New Orleans fortune-teller in the family tree.) Stories we heard suggested that she was a strong and talented woman who worked hard and lived life well. But it turns out that the stories, having filtered out race, allowed us to miss understanding how she came to identify as white and work to affirm white privilege. What I learned, described below, is developed in much more detail in an article I published in Race Ethnicity & Education in 2011 (volume 14, issue #3), and uses tools in this blog, starting with the Context Questions Framework.

My great-great grandmother was probably born in Switzerland around 1832, although census records also mention France and Germany. She and my great-great grandfather, born in France, immigrated to the U.S. during the 1850s, arriving in New Orleans, then relocating to Vicksburg, Mississippi. She was a dressmaker and hat-maker, he was a miller. Very likely, they were recruited from Europe. R. M. Miller explains in a 1981 article “The Fabric of Control”, published in The Business History Review (volume 55, issue 4), that as the Southern cotton industry expanded, slaves were massively relocated from working in mills to the fields, so mill owners began to import workers from Europe, playing European immigrants and slaves off each other to keep immigrants’ wages down.

When my great-great grandparents arrived in the U.S., although initially they would have identified as French or Swiss rather than as white, they entered a context in which everyone was legally classified by race. The census categories were white, free black, free mulatto, or slave. There were no alternatives. About one-third of the population of Vicksburg were enslaved Blacks. Being classified as white conferred full access to the job market, and legal privileges and rights that free Blacks did not have. But my great-great grandmother’s status as white may not have gone unquestioned. According to a description on her 1871 passport application, I learned that she had a dark complexion. Hmm. She may well have learned to assert her status as white. I know that my great-great grandparents came to identify with the Confederacy, since they have their fourth child, born in 1864, the middle name “Jefferson Davis” (a hero to whites in Vicksburg). It is likely they identified with it because ending slavery might end racialized advantages they were using.

In the economic chaos that followed the Civil War, my great-great grandmother continued to claim and use any advantage she could for economic advancement. By Googling her name, I learned that in1868, less than a year after Mississippi passed law enabling bankruptcies, she filed for bankruptcy, claiming that 22 women clients in cities ranging from Vicksburg and Natchez, Mississippi to Richmond, Louisiana owed her the equivalent of $38,500 in 2007 dollars. She was one of a handful of women to immediately make use of this new law.

The family moved to San Francisco sometime during the 1870s, showing up there with a Chinese servant in the 1880 Census, and minus my great-great grandfather who had likely died. They probably left Mississippi because of its ongoing economic chaos, coupled with stories about riches in California. They were aided by completion of transcontinental railroads. But in San Francisco, they countered another racialized conflict over scarce jobs. Completion of the railroads threw Chinese laborers out of work. San Francisco’s population swelled between 1860 and 1900 as people flock in looking for work. While whites were usually more than 90% of the population, in 1880, their proportion dropped to 90.0%, and the Chinese population reached 9.%. As competition for too few jobs fueled tension between whites and Chinese, whites used their power to greatly restrict rights of Chinese people. For example, in 1879, a state-wide referendum was passed overwhelmingly to amend the state constitution to prohibit public entities from employing Chinese. Stories circulated about young white women losing their jobs and turning to prostitution to survive.

In 1882 (the same year the U.S. Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act), my great-great grandmother and six other white women filed articles of incorporation to establish the Woman’s Protective League of California. According to an article in the July 5, 1882 issue of the Sacramento Bee newspaper (which one my sisters located by Googling our great-great grandmother), the League’s goals were mainly to help young women gain employment, property, education and work training, and fair wages. In pursuit of these goals, part of its mission was “to discourage the employment of Chinese in any capacity whatever by the people of this State.” By specifically seeking to exclude Chinese from employment, the organization promulgated whiteness as a prerequisite for employment and ownership of property. (I assume my great-great grandmother fired her Chinese servant.) But although she learned to claim whiteness as salient to her identity, she apparently did not relinquish her Swiss-French identity, since the family story holds that when her grown daughters used to visit her, all spoke French.
 

Why did this woman from whom I descend become an anti-Chinese activist? I suspect her husband’s experiences in the cotton mill industry taught her about advantages of being classified as white in a racist society, and that her own experiences as a dark-complexioned professional dressmaker taught her to assert a white identity in order not to be confused with free mulattos. She had come to the U.S. to prosper in business rather than to transform society, so even if she questioned the moral basis of racism, she would have seen acting against it as being against her self-interest.

This reinterpreted story makes me reflect on the work of teacher educators trying to prompt teacher candidates to examine themselves as culturally and historically located beings. A good thing to do, I believe. But like the story of my great-great-grandmother, when ancestors’ lives are interpreted within comfortable national narratives that air-brush out the construction of race and racism, students readily interpreted their lives within the narrative of people living in an open system, pulling themselves up by the bootstraps.

We cannot revise history, but we can learn from it. In order to do so, however, we need to situate historic events within a context of power relationships. The methodology of critical family history, described and illustrated here, offers a tool for doing so.

Installment #4 “Black People Don’t Float and Swim:” Unlearning Another Lie that Jim Crow Taught

(We've moved to: http://christinesleeter.org/black-people-dont-float-and-swim/)

By Dr. Sherick Hughes, Guest Writer

Unfortunately, the phrase “Black people don’t float and swim” has been interwoven as a deterministic lie deep within the fabric of this nation. There were skewed social science studies of our buoyancy and muscle density in relation to our White peers to suggest that we can’t float. From this conclusion, it was determined that my people are not born to swim like our White counterparts. In reality, neither buoyancy nor muscle density characteristics actually would prevent Black folks from swimming. I learned in a college water safety course in the early 1990s that each human can float by lying on her/his back or stomach in the water, filling up her/his lungs by inhaling air with the head above water, and then holding her/his breath in 5-10 second intervals. From there, humans must simply learn the kicks and arm movements that accompany the proper “strokes” that allow us to move most efficiently in the water.

Given these human facts about floating and swimming were ignored by Jim Crow in favor of a lie that my people can’t float or swim, how might critical family history assist folks in unlearning this falsehood? Nearly a decade after the college water safety course, I pursued ethnography and family history work as part of my dissertation 2001-2003. It was during this time that I first engaged three techniques that can be useful for critical family history: (1) revisiting the local libraries, (2) revisiting the local museums, and (3) listening for understanding. These three techniques provided fuel for me to challenge continuously the racialized floating and swimming lie that Jim Crow had spread throughout my family and in fact, throughout my birthplace in Northeastern, North Carolina. In this fourth and final installment, I describe how these three techniques can be quite useful for dismantling the Jim Crow lies that too often become faulty “common sense” in our families and communities.

Revisiting the Local Libraries
While we visit local libraries and read books as children and even young adults, I am encouraged by the practice of revisiting libraries for old and new texts that may shed new light on my family history. Cecelski's book The Waterman’s Song: Slavery and Freedom in the Maritime South (2001) was available in my local library, but I missed it during my initial online searches. Consequently, it was my wife who introduced me to the book after a conversation with her former employer about my dissertation research. Cecelski became a key piece of evidence to provide a context around my family’s coastal, rural experience. I learned from Cecelski that historians now estimate that over 900 free Blacks lived in the Albemarle region of Northeastern North Carolina (which, includes my hometown), more than anywhere else in the South during slavery. The Blacks who lived there like Moses Grandy (one of the few published slave autobiographers), were known for their skills on the water, for building ships, for their brick masonry, etc. A critical mass of them were escaped slaves living in my hometown’s Great Dismal Swamp in Maroon communities, while others were free Blacks, including those who literally bought their freedom and began to help slaves to escape to the North.  Revisiting another library book by Siddle Walker (1996), Their Highest Potential, although written about a different part of the state, reminds us of the ingenuity and intellectual feats of the segregated Black schools that counters the pre- and post-Brown narrative of how horrible they were for Black children. Moreover, in my book, Black Hands in the Biscuits Not in the Classrooms: Unveiling Hope in a Struggle for Brown’s Promise (Hughes, 2006), I describe finding in the state archives the fact that in 1955 one county’s segregated Black K-10 schools sent more youth to college than the local white high school.

My father added additional context to Cecelski (2001) and I paraphrase:

Back then (during Jim Crow), White folks didn’t want to work down at our local (the Unionized International Longshoreman’s Association). They were ashamed to due to the grueling schedule (4:30am-6:00pm includes commute) lifting and transfer of goods from ship to port to cargo trucks and trains, so David D. Alston, a Black man, recruited Blacks to do this work. Knowing that most of the youth came from poor Black families, David D. Alston persuaded the union to open more of its doors to Black workers. The higher than minimum wages and health insurance with over-time pay benefits and bonuses were a big deal for Black men then and they are a big deal now. Then, when he died, they named a scholarship after him from our union local…that scholarship that you got all of those years. Now White folks want to work down there. The last time I was down there on the waterfront, most of the folks were White and that’s not right.

Revisiting the Local Museum
While we visit local museums and see their local exhibits as children and even young adults, I am encouraged yet again, by the practice of revisiting museums for old and new displays that may shed new light on my family history. At one of the museums in the Albemarle are pictures in black and white photography of Black men who saved many lives as life guards in the very rough and sometimes unpredictably waters of the Atlantic. The sandbars alone sank many ships which led to it being known as the Graveyard of the Atlantic. Similar to their hinterland brethren of the Great Dismal Swamp, a group of Black lifeguards emerged, survived and thrived in their work to save others in the Atlantic Ocean. Anyone who visits this museum display would be remiss to dismiss the honor that those young men have brought to local, national and international Black families by troubling Jim Crow’s lies about our aquatic capabilities. These brothers piloted ships, they built boats, and yes, they floated and swam with the very best. Seeing their portraits again, for the first time in the local museum as an adult, gave me the chills, because they had become such powerful photographs for me on a critical historical level.

Listening for Understanding, Not Just to Reply
I am learning from experiences of collecting oral histories formally and informally, that when I listen, I must consider how to listen. Listening for understanding is quite different and can produce quite different results when researching family history critically, than listening just long enough to reply and to maintain my comfort level of knowledge with the topic without expansion. This point became quite clear from a discussion with my nephew back in 2001, when he was in high school and I was home pursuing the ethnography and critical family history work of my dissertation. I worried that during the encounter, he was not beginning to understand better how our family's story connects to larger stories. I remember telling him what I was learning from Cecelski (2001), Siddle Walker (1996) and the local museum. Several years later, he returned home from the Coast Guard with a proud look on his face with a brief personal encounter to share:

The first time I went into the galley (eating and social area on the ship), there were huge portraits of a bunch of Black men on the walls who were being celebrated as heroes for their service work on ships and in the water saving lives. I felt so proud to know that other Black mean had not only succeeded but also thrived in the Coast Guard, both on the ship and in the water. Seeing those celebrated black men in the galley helped to build my confidence, especially when times got tough.

While I was encouraged by his story, I recall feeling frustrated as I replied, “Don’t you remember me telling you about this information back when you were in high school, didn’t you believe me?” My nephew looked as if he sincerely did not remember. That exchange has been a key turning point in my approach to sharing and receiving family history. I am learning from that turning point that in addition to contexts and family liaisons, there is much to be learned at all ages about listening for understanding and not just listening to reply. A listener and receiver of ethnography and critical family history evidence must fight against being just critical, liberal and conservative enough to hear his or her own voice.

Concluding Thoughts 
The critical family history and critical ethnographic techniques in Hughes (2006) coupled with the work of Cecelski (2001) and Siddle Walker (1996) did seem to help my nephew, family and me to make more meaning out of what we already knew about the family's history with water in our coastal hometown, and to add to our limited knowledge about our family’s prowess in schooling and water-based entrepreneurship from slavery to segregation. Yet, my nephew and I must continue to ask ourselves, “Is this experience in the water and on the boat something for which I should be ashamed, because White people do it, or is it something for which I should be proud, because it is what my people used to do, before Jim Crow pushed us out of this part of the local economy?” Obviously, I am arguing here that the evidence suggests that the latter is the closest to (t)ruth for our family, a Black family with six generations on the coast with records dating back to the early 1800s. The next step includes continuing to check other family members in the appropriate contexts with necessary family liaisons; and to fight against passing on Jim Crow’s aquatic lies to our posterity.

I continue to learn more about my family history of swimming, boating and Black life in the home of my birth, the county of The Great Dismal Swamp. It is the home of escaped and free Blacks, of Maroons, and of brave Black lifeguards, as revealed from my revisiting of local library books and displays in the local museum and in my listening for understanding. I find this evidence toward my critical family history troubling Jim Crow, my nephew and me with respect to our previous assumptions about possibilities and limitations of our family in maritime North Carolina from the late 1800s to the present. It is my sincere hope that information from this final installment (both alone and in conjunction with the previous installments) will inspire readers to initiate, sustain, and augment evidence from their own critical family histories in ways that keep troubling Jim Crow and the lies Jim Crow taught.

References 

Cecelski, D. (2001). The Waterman’s Song: Slavery and Freedom in the Maritime South. Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press.

Hughes, S. A. (2006). Black Hands in the Biscuits Not in the Classrooms: Unveiling Hope in a Struggle for Brown’s Promise. New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishers. (Also see http://www.peterlang.com/download/datasheet/46083/datasheet_67431.pdf)

Siddle Walker, V. (1996). Their Highest Potential: An African American Community in the Segregated South. Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press.

Dr. Sherick Hughes, MA, MPA, Ph.D. is Associate Professor with Tenure, and Founder and Director, Interpretive Research Suite & Carter Qualitative Thought Lab Graduate Program Coordinator/Chair, Cultural Studies & Literacies Program Founder and Director, Black Alumni of the School of Education (BASE), School of Education, University of North Carolina, CB #3500, Peabody Hall, Chapel Hill, NC 27599

Installment #3 “Did You Know Yo’ Mama was White?” Using New Interracial Family Evidence to Trouble Jim Crow and Me (and You)

(We've moved to: http://christinesleeter.org/using-new-interracial-family-evidence/)

By Dr. Sherick Hughes, Guest Writer

In this installment, I will use a pseudonym to protect the anonymity of the subject of my critical family history. I am related to the “Kayfred” family of North Carolina by marriage. “Grandpa Kayfred” was a widower and the patriarch of the very large family in a rural region of North Carolina. He was born in 1917 and he lived to be 93 years old with his mental capacity well intact, so he was a wealth of humor, knowledge, and family history. When I spoke with him in the summer of 1993, he was approximately 76 years old and I remember his kindness, his very light brown skin, curly hair, mechanic’s hands and green eyes. I assumed there was some admixture in his African ancestry, but it was not unusual due to the One Drop Rule for many Black folks in my family to have facial features, skin and eye colors, and/or hair types typically associated with Europeans. For years, I heard stories from “Grandpa Kayfred” and others about his violent arguments and exploits with White folks during Jim Crow. While I didn’t wonder about the admixture, I did wonder how “Grandpa Kayfred” survived such experiences within the southern rural territory of the Ku Klux Klan without being jailed, beaten, or worse. It was the county courthouse archives in search of his next of kin, when Grandpa Kayfred was about 90 years old in 2007, that would add a context and credibility to the stories.

I will attempt to demonstrate how learning from key episodes of what Zeus Leonardo calls race-class relations within the informal oral histories of elders like “Grandpa Kayfred", and seeking archival evidence to support that evidence, may give important revelations. Important secrets were indeed revealed about Grandpa “Kayfred” in relation to his family and Black-White race relations. I will conclude by considering how such information from family evidence can keep troubling Jim Crow and me (and you).

Learning Race-Class Relations from Elders: Key Episodes from an Informal Oral History 
“Grandpa Kayfred” was a mechanic by trade. In fact, he taught any family member willing to learn how to do everything from routine car maintenance to fixing and changing major car parts. He tended to charge on a fraction of the cost. When I was in college, my old Pontiac 6000 (passed down from my mother during my Junior year) was on the fritz again with a major repair. While I can’t recall that repair, I do recall that the car had over 200,000 miles on it when I received it from my parents and that “Grandpa Kayfred” only charged me about $20 for a repair estimated over hundreds of dollars in the mid-1990s. It was about this time that I learned of what I felt at the time, was the most implausible episode of “Grandpa Kayfred’s” negative interactions with White folks. “Grandpa Kayfred,” who prided himself on his word, his work and his integrity apparently got into an argument with a White man in the 1950s about the price of a repair and what he was owed for it. The White man called him several expletives; however, when called a liar, “Grandpa Kayfred” smacked the man in the face.

Now, such a gesture was a death sentence for Black men in the Jim Crow south at that time, but not only was “Grandpa Kayfred” spared his life, he was neither jailed nor arrested. I knew that lighter-skinned, more European–looking Black folks sometimes earned dubious privileges from Whites, but a slap in the face was well beyond any credible story that I had known for that time period. I also knew that “Grandpa Kayfred” was quite faithful and spiritual and giving and forgiving. Yet, something else must have protected him from Jim Crow justice.

Family Revelations in the County Archives 
County archives, including county census data and birth records, can provide useful and free resources for critical family history researchers, formal and informal. For example, I just learned that the 1860 census for Camden County, NC, the county of my maternal and paternal relatives bears a mistake. The census enumerator responsible for collecting the data erroneously noted the names of the slaves and the names of their respective owners. It is quite rare to find this in archival data and it has launched a firestorm of questions and blogs about the motives of the enumerator. While this “error” produced rare data, county census data can offer rich resources and surprises for professional and lay family historians. In search of next of kin and inheritance information, two family members went to the county archives when “Grandpa Kayfred” was about 90 years old. Much to their surprise, the records identify his father as “Negro” and his mother as “White.” They immediately went home and rather than await a family liaison and an appropriate context, they excitedly approached “Grandpa Kayfred” and asked, “Did you know yo’ mama was White?” While I was not present for this conversation, each time it is retold, there is a consistent replay of “Grandpa Kayfred,” “Hell yeah, I knew my mama was White, I just never told y’all.”

Rethinking Black-White Race Relations in the Family? 
The Kayfred family including Grandpa, are not known for their interracial friendships to put it lightly. Moreover, it is not unusual to hear a Kayfred say, “I don’t like White people,” not moving to the harsher word “hate,” out of respect for their Christian beliefs that counter “hating” any of “God’s children.” The “don’t like” seems to operate as a “hatred” in practice, from my purview. “Grandpa Kayfred’s” stories about White people, including the one he smacked and the circumstances leading up to the smack, certainly support the heavy dislike for White folks. Like most people of color in rural, North Carolina, the Kayfred family have a history of frequent and intense negative events, encounters, and episodes initiated by privileged White folks who consistently infantilize, devalue and deskill them. With this context considered, it became understandable why “Grandpa Kayfred” never shared the fact that his mother was White with his children and grandchildren. He also likely wanted to protect them by not have a family example for them to follow into interracial dating and marital relationships of their own. Once unveiled, “Grandpa Kayfred” offered more clarity to this story to his grandchildren and they shared the following narrative with me:

Born in the late 1800s, his White mother and Black father fell in love. She was from a very wealthy and powerful family, which is why she and her husband and children were not targets of the Ku Klux Klan or any other local racists. One condition of her marriage is that she had to give up all of her fortune except for the plot of land for her home. So while her family didn’t like her marrying a Black man, they didn’t completely disown her. The white Kayfred’s are Grandpa’s first cousins and they all knew it. This explains why he got into arguments and fights with White folks and was never arrested or anything.

This additional context explained not only Grandpa’s European phenotype, but also his ability to escape the fate of most Black men in the rural south who slapped a White man in the face who publically questioned his integrity. Now, the family has to grapple with having more immediate heritage to local White Kayfred family members. Distant admixture and the One Drop Rule are one thing, but realizing that your light brown skin and hazel eyes are from the mother of the man who raised you is quite another thing. Clearly, his mother passed away before any of the children or grandchildren would know her and there were likely few pictures of her, especially if she sacrificed her family fortune for love and equity. Still, the family who consistently repeat the family mantra of “I don’t like White people,” continues to come to terms with that statement because they are related to one of those people. Apparently they are related to one of those people with a level of courage, humility, commitment and a sense of equity and sacrifice for love that few people of any color possess then or now, in my opinion.

Where will race relations in the family go from here? How will the White grandmother be incorporated into family pedagogy and oral traditions, particularly with the death of Grandpa Kayfred in 2010? Right now, they seem to be living the contradiction and responding to the news with ambivalence. Irrespective of the White grandmother, they are still largely poor, Black and in the rural South in social times that Dr. Alexander calls The New Jim Crow.

Concluding Thoughts
This archival finding did seem to help my Kayfred family members and me to make more meaning out of what we already knew about the family's history, particularly “Grandpa Kayfred’s” history with local White folks. How can I lean forward with what I am learning from the Kayfred family to keep troubling Jim Crow? We might begin discussing this White woman as a unique part of the family and without the White savior narrative attached, we may begin understanding what White race-class privileges she gave up, which White race-class privileges she was able to share, and what White race-class privileges she continued to hold. What can we learn from our local White relatives with the same last name as ours, including the children and grandchildren of the White man that Grandpa slapped? What can we learn from her and them about the pitfalls and potential of authentic, critical White family allies? What can the Whites we know learn from her life about naming race-class privileges and finding ways to share them with the ultimate goal of undermining their own privileges toward a more perfect union? I continue to learn from the Kayfred family’s informal oral history and archival evidence. I find their critical family history troubling Jim Crow and me with respect to our previous assumptions about interracialization, classism and family ties in rural, North Carolina form the late 1800s to the present. It is my sincere hope that information will inspire readers to initiate, sustain, and augment the race-class evidence from their own critical family histories in ways that keep troubling Jim Crow.

Dr. Sherick Hughes, MA, MPA, Ph.D. is Associate Professor with Tenure, and Founder and Director, Interpretive Research Suite & Carter Qualitative Thought Lab Graduate Program Coordinator/Chair, Cultural Studies & Literacies Program Founder and Director, Black Alumni of the School of Education (BASE), School of Education, University of North Carolina, CB #3500, Peabody Hall, Chapel Hill, NC 27599

Installment 2: “I Don’t Think That’s My Daddy:” Preparing to share and receive sensitive family history

(We've moved to: http://christinesleeter.org/sensitive-family-history/)

By Dr. Sherick Hughes, Guest Writer

We talk a lot today in the U.S. about the symptoms of poverty, but little about how families became poor in the first place. Edmund Hughes, my grandfather was not always a poor Black man in Camden, NC, but Old Jim Crow would see to it that his family would lose so much of what they had gained economically, that there wouldn’t even be enough cash for a family photograph. With that, Jim Crow robbed me for years of ever knowing the face of my grandfather, until a chance interaction with a female cousin, an Iraq war veteran from California in 2011. Upon receiving the photo of my father from my cousin via http://www.ancestry.com I printed it from a color printer and stored in a safe and dry place away from my dog and children, until the next appropriate context to share it with my father for his feedback.

Finding an Appropriate Context
The appropriate context for sharing is a key consideration. I have found it necessary to prepare to share and to anticipate what information I might receive in return when sharing sensitive family history information from my research. An emotionally charged context like a wedding, funeral, holiday, day of hospitalization, etc., tends not to provide the most conducive context for sharing sensitive new information in my family, such as the photo, at least not when that type of information is coming from me. So, while I wanted to send the photo to my dad immediately to check to see if it was his father, I waited for an appropriate context, which happened to be an innocuous moment during a planned visit.

Finding Family Liaisons
Another component of this strategy is finding family liaisons to communicate your intentions and the sensitive information that you are planning to share. Such liaisons tend to be the folks who are trusted and respected the most by the family member(s) with whom you are intending to share your sensitive family history materials. That family liaison can help you gauge the most appropriate context for sharing and they can help you anticipate the type of feedback you may receive. In the case of Edmund Hughes, the best possible family liaison was my mother. My parents have been married over 55 years and to say they understand the best and worst times to approach each other or to have anyone else approaching would be an understatement. With anywhere from a few minutes to one week of prior notice, my parents seem to be brilliant at preparing themselves and their spouses for sensitive family information sharing and at helping me anticipate what I may receive in return.

Anticipating Going Back to the Evidence and New Searches for Contextual Information
I wasn’t prepared for what my father would say when he saw the photo. When the appropriate context came, I said, “Dad, I went on the computer to a program that helps families learn about their history, and with that program, I met a cousin who gave me a picture of a man that she thinks is your dad, would you like to see it?” My dad, Jessie Hughes, Sr. replied, “Yeah, Yeah, bring it here.”  Dad’s confused stare and momentary silence was deafening, and after a long 5-7 seconds of viewing the photo, he said something that neither I nor mom could have anticipated, “I know that’s my Aunt Becky, but I don’t think that’s my daddy…I don’t know who that man is….” I felt terribly unprepared in the irony that my well-planned sharing was failing miserably. Then, it dawned on me. To this day, my nearly 78-year old father shares one consistent historical narrative about my grandfather in several unplanned, but appropriate contexts each year that I can remember:

A victim of the Jim Crow racist farming debt system, his father was once a wealthy, ingenious and hot tempered man who lost the four fields that he once owned because the system charged extremely high interest rates to Blacks that would make it nearly impossible for them to ever repay any debt, small or large. Edmund Hughes found no other way to clear the family of 12 of the debt beyond paying the ultimate sacrifice, his life. When my father was a little boy, my grandfather committed suicide in one of the fields that he lost to Old Jim Crow. Soon after his father was dead, he had to quit school to work and he used to cry often, because he wanted to go to school rather than to work with adults in the fields.

When my father didn't recognize my grandfather 100% in the photo, I was compelled to go back to the historical evidence that I had collected to provide a historical context around the photo that may help me understand what had just happened. Each time I went back to the evidence with new answers and new questions. Additional searches at http://www.ancestry.com to augment the artifact from my cousin indeed provided further insight into the context of the photo.

From the 1940 census, I found my grandfather at 50 years old and my father at 4 years old. The death information for my grandfather suggests that he committed suicide near the age of 57. These documents together put my father at only 11 years old when his father died. My birth records note my father as having only been schooled to grade 6. It was beginning to make sense why my father recognized his aunt, but not his own father. First, his father and Aunt Becky looked to be in their 20s or maybe even early 30s in that photo. My father would have never seen his father at that age, because he would have been in his 50s and under extreme stress by the time my dad was old enough to really recall his father’s face. Second, Aunt Becky apparently aged quite well in Virginia Beach, VA and lived to reach a much older age than my grandfather, so my father saw her in adulthood more regularly and thus, could identify her easily in the photo. Third, my father was 76 years old in 2011, when I showed him that photo, which means he hadn’t seen my grandfather in 65 years. I thought to myself, “my peers and I temporarily forget faces we haven’t seen in 5-10 years, even the faces of family members, so temporarily forgetting a face after 65 years is certainly not only plausible, but probable.”

The good news related to this point was that the names of two of the three people in the photo had been labeled Rebecca (Aunt Becky) Hughes and Edmund Hughes, seemingly in Aunt Becky’s handwriting, in a space that was close to the person pictured in the photo. The third person was not named, but bore no resemblance to any other Hughes family member that my father knew and the names were not positioned, seemingly to name that third person. For me, the picture that corresponded to the name Edmond Hughes bore an uncanny resemblance to my father, particularly his very stylish pleated khakis and pressed shirt, his lean sturdy build, dark skin and the way he positioned his large, work-beaten hands on his lap. Once I put all of this information together in my head, I found a moment before bedtime, when the house was not so busy with people, to share it with my mother and father. Sharing this more complete historical context surrounding the photo eased my guilt from the initial sharing and confusion and it seemed to be actually quite well-received and appreciated by my parents, as well.

Concluding Thoughts
In the photo, my grandfather’s demeanor was the epitome of what Claude Steele describes as “a valuable person with good prospects,” and apparently he was such a person, until he met the cruel farming system of old Jim Crow. My findings trouble Jim Crow, because they tell me how the Hughes family became poor. It was not because they were invaluable folks without good prospects. It was not because they failed to be particularly ingenious or studious. It was not because they were lazy and dependent upon government assistance. The Hughes family became poor, because they were robbed. They were victims of dignity theft. They were victims of social identity theft and U.S. policies of the Jim Crow south sanctioned the robbery with little recourse beyond suicide and little Black male children who quit school to work.

My preparation to share and receive this sensitive artifact and related information was paramount to my willingness and ability to share it with the Hughes family and with readers today. The photo revealed a piece of the puzzle that continues to illuminate and clarify horrible episodes of death and dropping out of school in the Hughes family history. From my purview, suicides and dropouts are horrible episodes of any family history, and they are episodes that most people within my sphere of influence ignore, deny, or refuse to discuss publicly for fear of humiliation and suffering.

A critical family history/critical ethnography perspective supported my pang to confront and explore the sources of these episodes in the Hughes family. Somewhere along the road of confrontation and exploration toward these sources of pain, I was overwhelmed by the fact that I am still here and with the legitimized authority to share this story in this venue to an audience that may read it and hopefully decide that the current repackaged discourse on resegregation, privatization and separate-but-equal are welcoming invitations back to Jim Crow’s house. I hope sincerely, that readers can be inspired by my critical family history enough to embrace and act upon their own family histories critically and to receive and share the sensitive information from them in ways that keep troubling Jim Crow.

Dr. Sherick Hughes, MA, MPA, Ph.D. is Associate Professor with Tenure, and Founder and Director, Interpretive Research Suite & Carter Qualitative Thought Lab Graduate Program Coordinator/Chair, Cultural Studies & Literacies Program Founder and Director, Black Alumni of the School of Education (BASE), School of Education, University of North Carolina, CB #3500, Peabody Hall, Chapel Hill, NC 27599

Peopling a White Nation

(We've moved to: http://christinesleeter.org/peopling-a-white-nation/)

While it is common knowledge that the Founding Fathers envisioned the U.S. to be a white nation, most of us of European descent shy away from situating the history of our own families within an intentional project to do just that. A very common story among white people (not only in the U.S. but also in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) focuses on impoverished European immigrant ancestors who underwent great hardship for a fresh start in a new land.

Without diminishing hardships many European ancestors endured, it is important to place European immigration within the context of policies and practices designed to create and people a white nation, not for the purpose of fomenting guilt, but rather to understand how we are part of the historical construction of white privilege. I believe we cannot dismantle white privilege without examining closely how our families have participated in its construction (even if they did not realize that), and benefited from it.

To create a white nation, European colonists and their descendants decimated the indigenous peoples; another blog will look at that process in more detail. People of African descent were recruited, then captured and enslaved, as laborers rather than citizens. At the same time, during the 1700s and 1800s, the U.S. and state governments recruited and welcomed Europeans; there were no restrictions on immigration until 1874.

That much, you probably already know. An interesting question that is discussed much less is this: After the Revolutionary War, how did Europeans know to come to the U.S., trusting there would be land and opportunity for them when they got here? What role did official policies play in the process of getting them here?

I can piece answers to these questions together, but finding clear documentation of intent written in policies is difficult. (I welcome anyone who wishes to elaborate more on what I've been able to find, in the form of a guest blog.) Many histories simply mention that European immigrants were actively recruited, without specifying who recruited them and how this was done. An example is the Agricultural History of North Carolina.

European immigrants were offered land, or recruited for work. The Land Ordinance of 1785 set out the process for surveying land, dividing it into parcels, and selling it. First buyers could get land for a nominal fee, using a homestead process under which a head of household only had to live on the parcel (40 acres was common) and improve it for a given number of years. Subsequent laws, such as the Preemption Act o 1841 and the Homestead Act of 1862, extended this process. The overwhelming majority of homestead land went to white people, a large percentage being European immigrants. (For more information about land policies, see The Great American Grid or Andro Linklater's Measuring America.)

After the Civil War, Black Freedmen, supported by a few white allies such as Thaddeus Stephens, tried to get the same policy of access to land (known as "40 acres and a mule"). Indeed, toward the end of the Civil War about 10,000 newly freed slaves were temporarily granted defeated slaveholders' land, but it was subsequently given back to the former slaveholders, and land for Freedmen never became policy.

Land speculation is another line of inquiry that can be traced. Speculators obtained land from a variety of sources, such as government-issued land warrants in payment for military service, or purchase of large tracts from the U.S. government or state governments. Looking to make a profit, speculators, sometimes working with transportation companies, then recruited potential farmers to buy smaller parcels of land, which had the effect of funneling Europeans and white Americans westward. In the library, using the search term "land speculation" for a history database will yield many articles, usually reporting studies of specific counties during specific points in time.

Many industries recruited European workers. I've been able to do some tracing of industry-based recruitment by identifying the work immigrant ancestors did, then going to the academic library to find out more about that industry during that timeframe and place. For example, on cotton plantations in Mississippi, slaves initially worked both in the fields and in the mills. By the 1850s, however, as plantations expanded, planters increasingly working slaves in the fields, leading to labor shortages in the mills. Looking elsewhere for workers, some mill owners began to import workers from Europe as well as from the North, although, as R. M. Miller explained in "The fabric of control: Slavery in antebellum Southern textile mills" (published in The Business History Review in 1981) mill owners still preferred slave labor over white labor mainly because slaves were cheaper and could be controlled more firmly than whites. This library digging, however, helped me understand how a European ancestral family wound up in Mississippi right before the Civil War, and how their arrival was supported by racism and labor policies.

Some information about advertising to potential European emigrants is available. The poster to the left appears in Houghton-Mifflin social studies material for classroom use. The teachers' guide "The Forgotten Gateway," which details immigration into Texas, features several more great examples of recruitment posters that were used both in the U.S. and in Europe. In addition, individual states worked with transportation companies to recruit immigrants, who often came in a group with a leader. Jonathan Wagner, in his book A History of Migration from Germany to Canada, 1850-1939, briefly notes that German immigrants went mainly to the U.S. rather than Canada because U.S. states worked with transportation companies to publicize, recruit, and create transportation packages, while Canada did not. In some cases, whole villages were recruited from Europe and transplanted to the U.S., such as the German village of Esperke documented by Robert Frizzell in his book Independent Immigrants.

After some of the first European immigrants acquired land, letters they wrote to family and friends in Europe also served as recruitment devices. For example, a widely published German account, Bericht über eine Reise nach den westlichen Staaten Nordamerikas, written by Gottfried Duden and published in 1829, eloquently romanticized the bounties and freedoms of farm life in Missouri, encouraging countless Germans to follow in his wake.

What I would like to emphasize here is that most of us who are white descend from people who benefited from explicit policies and practices to recruit Europeans and settle them on land from which indigenous peoples were dispossessed, or give them jobs in industries people of color did not have access to, in order to people a white nation. What European ancestors did after they arrived varies widely -- some prospered, some lived modestly, and some bungled opportunities badly. But there was a policy context that must be taken into account when considering the histories white people inherit because white privilege is a definite part of that inheritance.