Legal History of the Color Line: The Rise and Triumph of the One-Drop Rule

540 Pages·2005·0.02 MB·English

by  Sweet

Dedicated to those courageous souls who reject
the madness, check off "other," and write in
"human."
L F
IST OF IGURES
L T
IST OF ABLES
Lable 1. First-Generation Biracial Children Recorded as White... 293 Lable 2. First-
Generation Biracial Children Recorded as Both or
Neither 295
Lable 3. Lhe Spread of the One-Drop Rule 322 Acknowledgements
Foremost among those who provided encouragement and support are the former
writers and editors of Interracial Voice magazine. Along with her advice, A.D. Powell
provided stacks of newspaper clippings and other documents on the plight of those who
do not fit comfortably on either side of the color line. The other members of the
Interracial Voice team also helped my research, but I am particularly indebted to
Charles Byrd, Javier Nelson, James Landrith, George Winkel, and Susanne Heine for
their encouragement and support.
The moderators of the OneDropRule discussion group also have my gratitude.
Barbara (Liana) Yanez, Tyrone (gemini072) Anderson, and Gordon (G-Man) Tapper
have helped me to see the sometimes-subtle contrast between ethnic self-identity and
biological ancestry. Among the group's members, John M. Hartley also stands out in my
appreciation. Although our opinions often clashed, his uncompromising anti-racism
often forced me to reconsider how best to express past events.
Mary Lee Sweet, my wife of 43 years, worked tirelessly researching court cases,
writing case summaries, and proofreading the text. Most of all, she provided a patient
and intelligent sounding board for ideas and arguments, without which this book would
have been impossible.
The book's cover shows the scales of justice weighing a bicolor feather in the
balance. The chains that suspend the scale tray are double helixes of DNA. This cover
design was created by Jerry Forney of Story Tree Productions in Melbourne, Florida
(http: //www. storytreeonline.com).
Finally, many of the court cases were researched online using the remote access
facilities of the George A. Smathers Libraries at the University of Florida in
Gainesville.
About the Author
Frank W. Sweet earned a Ph.D. candidacy in history at the University of Florida in
June 2003 and, at this writing, has completed all but his dissertation defense. He earned
an M.A. in History from American Military University in 2001 and a B.E.E. from
Cornell University in 1964. He is the author of eleven historical booklets and one trade
paperback currently in print, and numerous published historical essays. He was a
member of the editorial board of the magazine Interracial Voice, is a regular lecturer
and panelist at historical conferences, and moderates an online discussion group on the
history of U.S. racialism. His web site is at <http://backintyme.com/publishing.htm>.
This book is his dissertation.
Mr. Sweet was born Francisco R. Valiente in 1939 Ponce, Puerto Rico, the son of a
civil engineer father of Colombian and Mexican extraction and a schoolteacher mother
of Puerto Rican and Spanish descent. He took the name Frank W. Sweet after his
mother's remarriage to an officer in the U.S. Army Medical Corps who was based in
Puerto Rico during World War II. A National Merit finalist from St. John's Preparatory
School in Santurce, PR, he attended Cornell University on scholarships, and was
awarded a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering in 1964. He married Mary Lee Howard
(from North Carolina, of Irish extraction) in 1962 and joined IBM.
In 1972, he founded a software consulting practice. For 27 years, his firm served
clients in England, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Argentina, Venezuela, Brazil, and the
United States. He served as the national chair of a professional association of database
engineers, published nearly one hundred articles in the computer trade press, presented
over a dozen papers at national conferences, and published six books on database and
application design. He retired from consulting in 1999.
C 1.
HAPTER
I
NTRODUCTION
In October of 2003, Miramax Film Corporation released The Human Stain, a movie
starring Anthony Hopkins as a college professor named Coleman Silk. The character
was born into a Black family but spent 50 years living as a White man. Some 237
published reviews of this film are available at a moviesurvey web site.1 Most reveal the
above plot twist (a few do not reveal the "spoiler"). Of the former, virtually all describe
Silk as a light-skinned Black man who pretended to be White.
• [Silk's] personal life is infected with cancer of a lie he has been living with for fifty
years. http: //www. miramax. com/thehumanstain/
• Coleman Silk, a light-skinned black man able to pass for white in the segregationist
pall of the 1940s. - Rob Vaux, Flipside Movie Emporium
• Silk, whom most people assume to be Jewish, is actually a very light-skinned African-
American. - Craig Roush, Kinopio's Movie Reviews
1 See URL <http:// rottentomatoes.com/m/TheHumanStain1125977/reviews.php>.
• Setting aside the physical problems [Hopkins] of playing a light-skinned African-
American with a Welsh burr in his voice... - James Rocchi, Netflix
• This Job-like tale of Coleman Silk (Anthony Hopkins), a black man who has spent his
life posing as a Jew... Peter Travers, Rolling Stone
• Coleman Silk is a black man who has passed for white for most of his adult life... - A.
O. Scott, New York Times
• [Silk] is living a lie as a white Jewish intellectual with invented parentage when he
was actually born into a light-skinned African-American family... - Andrew Sards,
New York Observer
• Anthony Hopkins is a bewildering choice to play a black man in "The Human Stain."
Even a very, very fair-skinned black man, who has disguised his race... Paul Povse,
State Journal-Register, SpringfieldIL
• Silk is, as a matter of fact, an African American in disguise as a white upper-class
intellectual. - Jeffrey Overstreet
• Coleman Silk, a light-skinned African-American who has passed himself off as a
white Jew... - Austin O'Connor, Lowell Sun
• The professor is a light-skinned African-American who has been passing as white
since he was in school. - Nell Minow, Yahoo! Movies
• The Human Stain, which stars Anthony Hopkins as a light-skinned African-
American... - Marty Mapes, Movie Habit
• [Silk] is in fact an African-American who had decided early on to pass for
Caucasian... - Harvey S. Karten, Compuserve
• While the 50-year lie lived by Silk may be understandable in our racist culture... -
Erica Abeel, Film Journal International
Page after page, many dozens of reviews say the same thing: Silk is "Black." Try as
you might, you are unlikely to find even one that describes the character as "a White
man with a trace of African ancestry." What is going on here is the American practice
of labeling someone (and expecting a person to label himself) as "Black" if they have
any African ancestry at all, no matter how distant or invisible. You could call it the idea
of "invisible blackness."
The movie is fiction of course, but columnists are real people who earn a living
writing for real readers. Those who lose touch with the popular culture of their readers
see their columns dropped from publication. The public expects invisibleblackness
rhetoric, so movie review columnists write invisibleblackness rhetoric: "a light-skinned
Black man passing for White." Even scholars use the same rhetoric without noticing it.2
They do this so unconsciously, so naturally, and so off-handedly, that most Americans
do not see it until someone points it out to them. To someone from another country, it
reminds of a building with an odd smell, to which its residents have become so
accustomed that they no longer notice it.
This book traces the history of the idea of invisible blackness—the most extreme
manifestation of America's one-drop rule—in three major sections: Section I. America's
Admixed Population, Section II. The Endogamous Color Line, and Section III. The One-
Drop Rule.3 The one-drop rule (the idea of invisible blackness) became written law in
many states starting in 1910 in order to enforce and maintain the oppression of Blacks
by Whites during the Jim Crow era. But the very definition of the two groups, "Blacks"
and "Whites," depends on the existence of an endogamous color line.
2 A particularly instructive example can be found in Julia M. Klein, '"Human Stain'
From Page to Screen: Self-Invention to Self-Revelation," Chronicle of Higher
Education, October 31, 2003.
3 Some people use the term "one-drop rule" as synonymous with Marvin Harris's
term "hypodescent," [see Marvin Harris, Patterns of Race in the Americas (Westport
CT, 1964)] meaning that Americans of visible African admixture are considered
Black, even if that admixture is less than 50 percent. In much of the Caribbean, in
contrast, you are White if you look mostly European. This book instead focuses on
the most extreme form of one-drop. It examines the history of the idea that
Americans who look completely, utterly European, without even a hint of Africa, are
still classified as members of the Black endogamous group. That is, they are seen as
unsuitable marriage partners by Whites but suitable by Blacks because of an invisible
touch (one drop) of Black ancestry.
Americans have many overlapping names for demographic groups, names like:
"Jews," "liberals," "Hispanics," "Blacks," and the like. Many of the groups