Light-skinned-ed Girl

Mixed Experience History Month 2012: Sally Miller, "Lost German Slave," a cause celebre

Sally Miller was enslaved woman who brought a freedom suit claiming that she was a German immigrant who had been unlawfully indentured. 

After serving a German immigrant one day in New Orleans, Salome (nee Sally) was identified as the lost daughter of the woman's German immigrant hometown friend, Daniel Muller.

Thereafter a protracted legal battle began to gain her freedom as well as her children's. 

In 1845, the Louisianna State Supreme Court ruled for her freedom stating that: "That on the law of slavery in the case of a person visibly appearing to be a white man, or an Indian, the presumption is he is free, and it is necessary for his adversity to show that he is a slave."  The following year the Louisiana State Constitutional Convention abolished the Louisiana Supreme Court.  John Bailey who has written the definitive account of the story concluded in The Lost German Slave Girl (2003) that Sally Miller was probably not Salome Muller, but an enslaved woman who "... seized the one chance of liberty that was ever likely to come her way, and she hung on to that chance with a tenacity I could only marvel at."

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Mixed Experience History Month is the annual blog post series created by writer Heidi Durrow celebrating the history of the Mixed experience. Established in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to highlight the long history of folks involved in the Mixed experience.  Please look for more profiles of people, places and events of the Mixed experience every weekday of May at Lightskinned-ed Girl, the blog!  Thanks for reading.  And check out some of the previous year's profiles: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011.

 

Is This an Interracial Relationship?

A brief interruption of Mixed Experience History Month.  (I hope you're continuing to enjoy the posts!)

I wanted to share my most recent Huffington Post piece on the new Census numbers that show interracial marriages are at an all-time high.  Here's the beginning:

I'm used to checking "other" to describe myself. As the daughter of an African-American Air Force serviceman and a white Danish immigrant, I have yet to find a form with an Afro-Viking box.

Still, imagine my surprise -- not at the recent headline that interracial marriages are at an all-time high -- but that my marriage is included among them.

Read the rest of the piece here.

Mixed Experience History Month 2012: Willie "the Lion" Smith, jazz pianist

Willie "the Lion" Smith was born William Henry Joseph Bonaparte Bertholoff Smith in 1893 to a woman of color of "Spanish, Negro, and Mohawk Indian blood" and a white Jewish father.

After Smith's father died, John Smith became his step-father.  Smith worked with his stepfather in a slaughterhouse when he was young.

When he was six-years-old, Smith started playing the organ.  As a young man, he won a piano in a department store contest and dedicated himself to playing it.  By 1910, he was playing in clubs throughout New York and New Jersey.

He was briefly married to Blanche Merrill who was white.  He also served in World War I.

After the war, he returned to playing in clubs as a soloist and also accompanying blues singers like Mamie Smith.  Though he never attained great fame, Smith was a great influence on Duke Ellington who wrote the songs "Portrait of the Lion"and "Second Portrait of the Lion" in honor of him.

Smith died in 1973.

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Mixed Experience History Month is the annual blog post series created by writer Heidi Durrow celebrating the history of the Mixed experience. Established in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to highlight the long history of folks involved in the Mixed experience.  Please look for more profiles of people, places and events of the Mixed experience every weekday of May at Lightskinned-ed Girl, the blog!  Thanks for reading.  And check out some of the previous year's profiles: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011.

Mixed Experience History Month 2012: Bessie Coleman, aviator

Bessie Coleman was born in 1892 to sharecropper parents of color.  Her father was African-American and  Cherokee.

In 1901, her father abandoned the family to return to Cherokee territory.  Life was difficult for the family but Coleman focused on her studies.  At 18, she used all of her savings to enroll in college.  After one term, she was forced to withdraw because she didn't have enough money to continue.

She moved to Chicago to find work.  As a manucurist in a barber shop, she heard the stories of many returning soldiers of World War I.  That was when Coleman's dream to become a pilot was born. 

Unable to train in the United States because of laws discriminating against her race, Coleman trained to become an aviator in France with the financial help of funding from a local banker.  The story of her journey was followed closely by The Defender newspaper.

She became the first female of African-American descent to become a pilot.  She was also the first person of African-American descent that earned an international pilot license.

In order to make a living as an aviator, Coleman became a barnstorming stunt flier. She became known as "Queen Bess" and was a huge crowd-pleaser.

Coleman died in April 1926 when she was thrown from a plane in a nose dive caused by a plane malfunction.  She was mourned by 5000 funeral-goers and many more around the world.

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Mixed Experience History Month is the annual blog post series created by writer Heidi Durrowcelebrating the history of the Mixed experience. Established in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to highlight the long history of folks involved in the Mixed experience.  Please look for more profiles of people, places and events of the Mixed experience every weekday of May at Lightskinned-ed Girl, the blog!  Thanks for reading.  And check out some of the previous year's profiles: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011.

 

Mixed Experience History Month 2012: Paschal Beverly Randolph, Spiritualist & Sex Magician

Paschal Beverly Randolph was born in 1825 to a wealthy white Virginia man (who abandoned him) and a woman of color named Flora.

His mother died when he was six or seven and Randolph ended up homeless.  A half-sister took him in but didn't care for him, and let him beg on the street for the cost of his upkeep.

At 15, he started working on ships to support himself and traveled widely throughout Europe and as far as Persia.  It is believed that he was introduced to occultists in England and Paris, France.

He returned to America when he was in his twenties and started to make his living as a speaker and writer.  He wrote more than 50 books on medicine, magic and spiritualism.

As a spiritualist, he spoke out against slavery and after the war he worked for literacy for the formerly enslaved.  He is credited for being the first to promote a system of occult beliefs and practices (the magic mirror, hashish use and sexual magic) that had been unfamiliar to Americans.

Randolph eventually founded the Fraternitas Rosae Crucis, the oldest Rosicrucian organization in the United States.

Randolph died at 49 under mysterious circumstances.  Did Randolph die from a self-inflicted wound to the head as a contemporary news story reported or had he been killed by a fellow Fraternitas member accidentally? 

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Mixed Experience History Month is the annual blog post series created by writer Heidi Durrowcelebrating the history of the Mixed experience. Established in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to highlight the long history of folks involved in the Mixed experience.  Please look for more profiles of people, places and events of the Mixed experience every weekday of May at Lightskinned-ed Girl, the blog!  Thanks for reading.  And check out some of the previous year's profiles: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011.

 

Mixed Experience History Month 2012: Etta James, singer extraordinaire

Born Jamesetta Hawkins in 1938, Etta James was the daughter of an African-American single teenage mother.  Her biological father was rumored to be Caucasian.  James believed her father to be a pool player of Swiss descent named Rudolf Wanderone.  James was raised in foster families.

James began singing at an early age.  When she was five-years-old, she began singing at church and wowed audiences.

When she was 12, her foster mother died and James moved with her mother to San Francisco.  There she formed a girl group called The Creolettes.  The group soon had the attention of musician Johnny Otis.  He helped the group sign a record deal.  The song "Dance with Me, Henry" hit the top of the charts and earned the group the gig to open for Little Richard on his national tour.

James signed with Chess records in 1960 as a solo artist and became the Chicago label's biggest female star with hits like “All I Could Do Was Cry,” “Trust in Me”and "At Last."

James continued to record many more hits over the years, but also battled her own personal demon of addiction.  She found re-newed success in the 1990s with the popularity of her jazz standard albums.

During her career, the singer won six Grammys and countless other awards and was honoured with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

She died in January 2012 after a long illness.

On a personal note, James had a huge impact on me when I first saw her perform in 1994.  She became one of my all-time favorite singers and I saw her in concert another dozen times.  She became a figure in my novel, The Girl Who Fell From the Sky, as well.  I only wish I had sent her a copy of the book--so she could know about that tribute.

“A lot of people think the blues is depressing, but that’s not the blues I’m singing. When I’m singing blues, I’m singing life. People that can’t stand to listen to the blues, they’ve got to be phonies.” -Etta James

 

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Mixed Experience History Month is the annual blog post series created by writer Heidi Durrowcelebrating the history of the Mixed experience. Established in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to highlight the long history of folks involved in the Mixed experience.  Please look for more profiles of people, places and events of the Mixed experience every weekday of May at Lightskinned-ed Girl, the blog!  Thanks for reading.  And check out some of the previous year's profiles: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011.

Mixed Experience History Month 2012: Cyrus Bustill, baker/educator/activist

Cyrus Bustill, the son of a white slavemaster and an enslaved woman of color, was born in 1732.  He was sold to a Quaker named Thomas Prior who taught Bustill the bread-making trade.

In 1769, Prior freed Bustill who went on to become a successful baker on his own.  During the Revolutionary War, he was commended for supplying American troops with baked goods at the Burlington docks, and reportedly given a silver piece by General Washington.  In 1787, Bustill became one of the founders of Philadelphia’s Free African Society.  He was also actively involved in the Underground Railroad in Philadelphia.

Bustill retired in 1797 and then built and opened a school for African American children in 1803.  He died in 1804.  His descendants include actor/activist Paul Robeson (great-great grandson) and grandson David Bustill Bowser was an abolitionist and an artist best known for his portraits of Abraham Lincoln and John Brown.

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Mixed Experience History Month is the annual blog post series created by writer Heidi Durrowcelebrating the history of the Mixed experience. Established in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to highlight the long history of folks involved in the Mixed experience.  Please look for more profiles of people, places and events of the Mixed experience every weekday of May at Lightskinned-ed Girl, the blog!  Thanks for reading.  And check out some of the previous year's profiles: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011.

 

Mixed Experience History Month 2012: Orindatus Wall, soldier & activist

Orindatus Simon Bolivar Wall was the son of a white planter and an enslaved black woman.  Born in the 1820s, he became the first regular commissioned African American captain in the U.S. Army during the Civil War.

Wall--who would eventually go by O.S.B.--was freed by his father In 1838, and sent to southern Ohio.  There he was raised and educated by Quaker abolitionists.

Wall cycled through many identities in his lifetime.  He was an accomplished bootmaker, an outspoken abolitionist in 1850s, and military recruiter.  According to author of The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White Daniel Sharfstein: "In 1865, he became the first African-American to be regularly commissioned a captain in the Union Army."

Wall was active in integrating a church, and recruiting for Howard University after the war.  He continued his work in service of the people of D.C. in various positions such as a police magistrate, justice of the peace, legislative representative.  He died in 1891 and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

Although Wall and his wife had five children, he was largely lost to history until Daniel Sharfstein's scholarship was published.  His subsequent generations eventually chose to break ties with the black community.

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Mixed Experience History Month is the annual blog post series created by writer Heidi Durrowcelebrating the history of the Mixed experience. Established in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to highlight the long history of folks involved in the Mixed experience.  Please look for more profiles of people, places and events of the Mixed experience every weekday of May at Lightskinned-ed Girl, the blog!  Thanks for reading.  And check out some of the previous year's profiles: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011.

 

Mixed Experience History Month 2012: Julien Hudson, painter

Born in 1811, Julien Hudson was the son of a British ship chandler and a free woman of color from New Orleans.

Hudson studied painting with Antoine Meucci for a couple of years before continuing his training in Paris with Alexandre Abel de Pujol.  In 1831, he returned to New Orleans and opened his own studio.  Not much more is known of his life.  He died in 1844.

 

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Mixed Experience History Month is the annual blog post series created by writer Heidi Durrowcelebrating the history of the Mixed experience. Established in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to highlight the long history of folks involved in the Mixed experience.  Please look for more profiles of people, places and events of the Mixed experience every weekday of May at Lightskinned-ed Girl, the blog!  Thanks for reading.  And check out some of the previous year's profiles: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011.

Mixed Experience History Month 2012: Abbie Mitchell, soprano

Abriea "Abbie" Mitchell was born in 1884 to an African-American woman and German-Jewish man.  Raised by her maternal aunt, Mitchell was educated in a convent school.

In 1897, she started taking voice lessons.  Just a year later, Paul Laurence Dunbar and Will Marion Cook cast her in a show called Clorindy which was considered at the time the most important musical featuring an all-black cast.  Mitchell married Cook a year later and continued to appear in the shows Cook composed.  They had two children together.

In 1903, Mitchell appeared in In Dahomey in London which garnered her international acclaim.  Mitchell sang “Brownskin Baby Mine” which became one of the most popular songs of the era. She was invited to and did perform for the King and Queen of England at Buckingham Palace.

Mitchell continued performing into the 1930s and also taught at the Tuskegee Institute.  She died in 1960.

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Mixed Experience History Month is the annual blog post series created by writer Heidi Durrowcelebrating the history of the Mixed experience. Established in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to highlight the long history of folks involved in the Mixed experience.  Please look for more profiles of people, places and events of the Mixed experience every weekday of May at Lightskinned-ed Girl, the blog!  Thanks for reading.  And check out some of the previous year's profiles: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011.