Light-skinned-ed Girl

Mixed Experience History Month: A Recap & Pledge to Soldier On!

We've reached the end of the 3rd Annual Mixed Experience History Month!  Here are some of my favorite posts this year: Paula Gunn Allen, Charles Curtis, and William H. Johnson.

It has taken an extraordinary amount of research to find these forgotten, hidden or erased stories of the Mixed experience: many of the people I profiled this month were "new-to-me" biracial--maybe they were for you too.  In any event, I love mining the history books for these stories--more to come next year.  In the meantime, please send recommendations my way of people/events/ideas that you'd like to know more about.

I leave you with this wonderful email I received last week from the brilliant actor Stephen McKinley Henderson who recently directed the amazing show, Zooman and the Sign, at Signature Theatre in New York.  I am a huge fan of his work and was floored when I received this email from him in response to my August Wilson post.  I share it here with you with his permission:

Hello Heidi,

I was moved to write you because of the August Wilson entry that Google sent my way.  Your premise for the website is inspired.  The ancient literary staple of the tragic mulatto has long been eclipsed by the contributions and personal missions of mixed blood perspectives.  Every war that has been fought, perhaps even the war on terrorism soon, has produced children born across enemy lines.  Nothing human is foreign to us.

Thank you for your piece on August.  I traveled with him during the last ten years of his life as an actor in several of his plays here and abroad.  Freeing ones self and others from negative perceptions of the self and the world is a noble mission.  Soldier on, Sister.  Soldier on.


Stephen McKinley Henderson

I soldier on!  Thank you Stephen, and thanks to all of you who have followed Mixed Experience History Month this year.
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Mixed Experience History Month is a yearly blog post series celebrating the history of the Mixed experience.  Established in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to show that we have long been a nation of multiracial and multicultural individuals of achievement (not tragic mulattoes).  Please look for more profiles of people, places and events of the Mixed experience every weekday of May right here at Lightskinned-ed Girl, the blog!  Thanks for reading.

Mixed Experience History Month: Casta Paintings

Casta paintings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries featured mixed-race people in the post-Conquest period.

Done by many of Mexico's great artists including Miguel Cabrera, the paintings were often comprised of several family group scenes which showed the progressive dilution of 'pure' Spanish blood,
with Indian, and African blood.

In casta paintings, Spaniards have the highest social standing; in successive scenes, the families become darker and increasingly poor.  Beneath the paintings are inscriptions, such as "From Spaniard and Black, Mulatto," which essentially: "narrat[e] the process of miscegenation."

More information: Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth Century Mexico.

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Mixed Experience History Month is a yearly blog post series celebrating the history of the Mixed experience.  Established in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to show that we have long been a nation of multiracial and multicultural individuals of achievement (not tragic mulattoes).  Please look for more profiles of people, places and events of the Mixed experience every weekday of May right here at Lightskinned-ed Girl, the blog!  Thanks for reading.

Mixed Experience History Month: Garcilaso de la Vega, historian & writer

The product of a mixed marriage between a Spaniard and a royal Incan princess, Garcilaso de la Vega was born in 1539 in Cusco, Peru.

Garcilaso spoke both Quechua and Spanish and traveled to Spain in 1560 with money inherited from his father.  There, he was educated but only after presenting his case to the Spanish courts to receive recognition for the rights of his father--mixed marriages were not recognized in Spain at the time.

Garcilaso took the name "El Inca," thereafter, as a proud statement of his heritage.

Garcilaso published Comentarios Reales de los Incas in 1609.  The book serves as the most detailed document of Incan history and early colonial rule of its time.

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Mixed Experience History Month is a yearly blog post series celebrating the history of the Mixed experience.  Established in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to show that we have long been a nation of multiracial and multicultural individuals of achievement (not tragic mulattoes).  Please look for more profiles of people, places and events of the Mixed experience every weekday of May right here at Lightskinned-ed Girl, the blog!  Thanks for reading.

Mixed Experience History Month: Nicolas Guillen, poet & activist

Nicolas Guillen, an Afro-Cuban born in 1902, became known as Cuba's national poet.

Of African and Spanish descent, Guillen studied law in Havana but abandoned a legal career to pursue journalism.

Guillen founded a literary magazine with his brother and wrote for several Cuban newspapers and magazines.  In 1930, he published his ground-breaking collection of poetry, Motivos de Son.  Guillen's poems were informed by his multicultural background.  In Songoro Cosongo, published in 1931, he emphasized the importance of mulatto culture in Cuban history.  Langston Hughes translated Guillen's poetry in a collection called Cuba Libre.  Guillen's writing became increasingly political; and in 1937, he joined the Communist party. 

Guillen spent much of the 1940s and 1950s in exile but was welcomed back to Cuba by Fidel Castro.  Guillen published more than a dozen books in his lifetime.  He died in 1989 after a long illness.

 

Mixed Experience History Month: Ann Plato, essayist and poet

Ann Plato, born free in 1820, was African-American and Native American.

The details of her life are culled mostly from her book, Essays: Including Biographies and Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose and Poetry, published in 1841.  It was the second book published by a woman of color in America.

Plato's writing focused on living a pious and industrious life dedicated to education.  She wrote: "A good education is another name for happiness." 

Plato's essays also dealt with European colonization of Africans and Native Americans and one that concerned her father, a Native American seaman.

However, Plato was criticized for not addressing slavery in her work. 

Nothing is known of her life after 1845; the date of her death is unknown as well.

More information: Essays: Including Biographies and Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose and Poetry.

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Mixed Experience History Month is a yearly blog post series celebrating the history of the Mixed experience.  Established in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to show that we have long been a nation of multiracial and multicultural individuals of achievement (not tragic mulattoes).  Please look for more profiles of people, places and events of the Mixed experience every weekday of May right here at Lightskinned-ed Girl, the blog!  Thanks for reading.

Mixed Experience History Month: August Wilson, playwright

August Wilson--born in 1945 Frederick August Kittel, Jr. in Pittsburgh--was the son of a German immigrant baker and an African-American cleaning woman.

Wilson's mother raised August and his siblings as a single parent until marrying in the 1950s when Wilson was a teenager.
The transition which included a move from a mostly black and Jewish neighborhood to a working class white neighborhood and school proved difficult for Wilson.

He eventually dropped out of high school but continued to educate himself reading the great African-American writers at the Carnegie Library.

Wilson joined the military serving for a year before he left.  In 1965, he changed his name to honor his mother after his father's death.

In 1968, his first play was produced.  He is best known for his Pulitzer-Prize winning plays Fences (1985) and The Piano Lesson (1990), which were both part of the ten-play cycle that secured his legacy as one of America's greatest playwrights.

August Wilson died in 2005 of liver cancer at the age of 60.

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Mixed Experience History Month is a yearly blog post series celebrating the history of the Mixed experience.  Established in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to show that we have long been a nation of multiracial and multicultural individuals of achievement (not tragic mulattoes).  Please look for more profiles of people, places and events of the Mixed experience every weekday of May right here at Lightskinned-ed Girl, the blog!  Thanks for reading.

Mixed Experience History Month: Paula Gunn Allen, writer & scholar

Paula Gunn Allen, born in 1939 in New Mexico, was the daughter of a Lebanese-American man and a Laguna-Sioux-Scotch woman.  She once described herself as a "multicultural event."

Her early education was at mission schools; she went on to earn several advanced degrees including a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Oregon and a Ph.D. from the University of New Mexico in 1976.

Allen was a pioneer of Native American literary scholarship.  With the publication of her book, The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (1986), she helped define the canon of Native American literature.

Allen was also a prolific writer of poems, fiction and essays publishing 17 books during her lifetime.  She received several awards for her work including the American Book Award, and the Hubbell Medal.

Twice married and twice divorced, Allen identified herself as a lesbian at one point, but later said she was a "serial bisexual." 

She died in 2008 of lung cancer.  She was 68.

"I have noticed that as soon as you have soldiers the story is called history. Before their arrival it is called myth, folktale, legend, fairy tale, oral poetry, ethnography. After the soldiers arrive, it is called history." Paula Gunn Allen

More information: interview; on-line memorial.

Mixed Experience History Month: Olivia Ward Bush Banks, poet & journalist

Olivia Ward Bush Bank, born in 1869, was of African-American and Montaukett Native American descent.

Olivia married Frank Bush in 1889; they had two daughters.  As a working mother, Olivia still managed to find time to write. She published her first book of poetry, Original Poems, in 1899.  It was met with a great review by poet Paul Laurence Dunbar.  Olivia published her second poetry book, Driftwood, in 1916.

Olivia's career spanned many decades and professions:  she worked as a tribal historian for many years and also as a journalist writing for the Colored American magazine.  In the 1920s, she created a salon for artists in Chicago called the Bush-Banks School of Expression.  In the 1930s, she returned to live in New York and counted among her friends central figures of the Harlem Renaissance including W.E.B. DuBois and Langston Hughes. 

Olivia was proud of her mixed heritage and celebrated her mixed-race background in her writing.  Much of her work was unpublished in her lifetime because of the interracial themes.  She died in 1944. 

More information: Original Poems by Olivia Ward Bush Banks.

 

Mixed Experience History Month: Charles Curtis, U.S. Vice President

Born in 1860, Charles Curtis was the first person--with non-European ancestry--to serve in the nation's Executive Branch as Vice President of the United States under President Herbert Hoover.

Curtis was the son of a woman of mixed Native American descent and a man of English ancestry.  He grew up speaking French and Kansa and lived for a time on his mother's tribe's reservation.  Curtis' childhood was marked by tragedy: his mother died when he was three and his father was sent to a military prison, a result of an incident during the Civil War.

Curtis was raised by both his maternal and paternal grandparents --on the reservation and off.  Both sets of grandparents stressed the importance of an education and Curtis decided to study law.

Curtis became an attorney who served as an elected member of Congress (beginning in 1893) and then the Senate (beginning in 1907) representing Kansas for many terms.  He was a passionate advocate for Native American rights but also believed that education and assimilation were important to elevate the status of Native Americans.

In 1929, Curtis was sworn in as Vice President under Hoover.  In 1933, Curtis' term ended.  He died in 1936 of a heart attack.

More information: Official Charles Curtis Website; Charles Curtis Museum in Topeka, KS; NPR story about Charles Curtis.

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Mixed Experience History Month is a yearly blog post series celebrating the history of the Mixed experience.  Established in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to show that we have long been a nation of multiracial individuals and importantly multiracial and multicultural individuals of achievement (not tragic mulattoes).  Please look for more profiles of people, places and events of the Mixed experience every weekday of May right here at Lightskinned-ed Girl Blog!  Thanks for reading.

Mixed Experience History Month: William Wells Brown, writer

William Wells Brown, born into slavery in 1816, was the son of a white plantation owner and black slave.  Brown attempted to escape from slavery several times as a young man.  He succeeded New Year's Day 1834.  Brown became the husband of a free African-American woman and father to three daughters.  During the late 1830s and into the 1840s, he was a conductor of the Underground Railroad in New York state.

He was an active abolitionist and orator.  In 1847, he published his memoir, Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Written by Himself, which was second in popularity to Frederick Douglass' autobiography.

Brown was also a novelist and playwright.  His novel Clotel, or the President's Daughter: a Narrative of Slave Life in the United States (1853), gained much attention because of the parallels to the secret affair between Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemmings (who bore several of Jefferson's children.)

Brown who had moved abroad returned to the U.S. in 1854 when a friend "purchased" his freedom--as an escaped slave he was subject to the Fugitive Slave laws. 

He continued to write focusing on historical works. Brown died in 1884 in Massachusetts.

More information: Wikipedia;