Light-skinned-ed Girl

Mixed Experience History Month: Norris Wright Cuney, politician

Norris Wright Cuney (1846-1898) was the son of a wealthy white plantation owner & politician and an enslaved African-American woman.

The fourth of eight children, Cuney was spared the duties and cruelties of enslavement.  He was sent to school in Pittsburgh at age 13.  The outbreak of the Civil War prevented him from attending Oberlin.  Instead, after years of working on steamships traveling between the North and South, he took up self-study of law and literature.  Soon he became involved in politics with the Republican Party.

In 1870, he became sergeant at arms in the Texas legislature.  Cuney went on to hold several important political appointments.  He became chairman of the Texas Republican Party, but was ultimately removed in 1892 when President Grover Cleveland was elected.  Historians have dubbed the years from 1884-1896 as the "Cuney Era" for all of his accomplishments particularly with regard to empowering the black community.

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Mixed Experience History Month is an annual blog post series celebrating the history of the Mixed experience.  Established on Heidi Durrow's blog Light-skinned-ed Girl  in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to illuminate achievements of multiracial and multicultural individuals (not tragic mulattoes) and people and events central to 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, or Mixed Chicks Chat blog, the blog for the weekly award-winning podcast about being racially and culturally mixed!  Thanks for reading.  You can also read past year's series: 2007, 2008, 2009.

Mixed Experience History Month: Antara Ibn Shaddad, poet

Antara Ibn Shaddad (525-615) was the son of a pre-Islamic Arabian father and an enslaved Ethiopian mother.  

As a young man, he excelled as a warrior and was granted his freedom.  Antara went on to become a folk hero and one of the greatest pre-Islamic Arab poets.  He is known for his poem contained in Mu'allaqa.  He is still the subject of many Arab storytellers today.

(Thanks to Lani S. for the introduction to this historical figure!)

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Mixed Experience History Month is an annual blog post series celebrating the history of the Mixed experience.  Established on Heidi Durrow's blog Light-skinned-ed Girl  in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to illuminate achievements of multiracial and multicultural individuals (not tragic mulattoes) and people and events central to 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, or Mixed Chicks Chat blog, the blog for the weekly award-winning podcast about being racially and culturally mixed!  Thanks for reading.  You can also read past year's series: 2007, 2008, 2009.

Mixed Experience History Month: Louise Marie Therese, nun & royal mystery daughter?

 Louise Marie Therese (1664-1732), a French nun, was known as the "Black Nun of Moret" and rumored to be the illegitimate daughter of the Queen of France, Maria Theresa of Spain.

Speculators point to the Queen's African dwarf, Nabo, who entertained the Queen, as the possible father of Louise Marie Therese.  The Queen did give birth to a baby with dark skin (perhaps caused by cyanosis) that died within a month.  According to Wikipedia: "Some say that the baby remained black, and had been changed with a dead girl, to avoid scandal."

A portrait of Louise Marie Therese hangs in the Bibliothèque Sainte Geneviève in Paris.

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Mixed Experience History Month is an annual blog post series celebrating the history of the Mixed experience.  Established on Heidi Durrow's blog Light-skinned-ed Girl  in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to illuminate achievements of multiracial and multicultural individuals (not tragic mulattoes) and people and events central to 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, or Mixed Chicks Chat blog, the blog for the weekly award-winning podcast about being racially and culturally mixed!  Thanks for reading.  You can also read past year's series: 2007, 2008, 2009.

Mixed Experience History Month: Isaac Payne, scout and military hero

Isaac Payne (1854-1904) was a Black Seminole.

He served in the US Army and became part of the Seminole-Negro Indian Scouts.  He received a Medal of Honor, the military's highest honor for his part when serving as a trumpeter in 1875 he charged "hostiles" who attacked during a scouting patrol.

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Mixed Experience History Month is an annual blog post series celebrating the history of the Mixed experience.  Established on Heidi Durrow's blog Light-skinned-ed Girl  in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to illuminate achievements of multiracial and multicultural individuals (not tragic mulattoes) and people and events central to 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, or Mixed Chicks Chat blog!  Thanks for reading.  You can also read past year's series: 2007, 2008, 2009.

Mixed Experience History Month: Rhineland "Bastards" of Nazi Germany

Children born to black soldiers and German women during the period after World War I came to be known as the "Rhineland Bastards."  They were considered a threat to the purity of the German "race."

According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum: "By 1937, the Gestapo (German secret state police) had secretly rounded up and forcibly sterilized many of them. Some were subjected to medical experiments; others mysteriously 'disappeared.'"

The autobiography of Hans Massaquoi, Destined to Witness, a mixed-race German who survived Nazi rule of Germany provides an unique insight.  He was shunned but never persecuted by the Nazi regime.

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Mixed Experience History Month is an annual blog post series celebrating the history of the Mixed experience.  Established on Heidi Durrow's blog Light-skinned-ed Girl  in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to illuminate achievements of multiracial and multicultural individuals (not tragic mulattoes) and people and events central to 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, or Mixed Chicks Chat blog!  Thanks for reading.  You can also read past year's series: 2007, 2008, 2009.

Mixed Experience History Month: Jose Watanabe, poet

Jose Watanabe (1946-2007) was a Peruvian poet.

The son of a Japanese immigrant father and an Andean Peruvian mother, Watanabe was born on a sugar plantation in Peru.

He is recognized today as one of the all-time best Peruvian poets. In his poetry, he fused his cultural backgrounds.

He published several books of poetry during his lifetime.

Mixed Experience History Month: Frederick Jones, inventor

Frederick Jones (1893-1961) was the son of an Irish-American railroad worker and an African-American mother.

It's not known whether his mother died or abandoned the family, but at age 7, Jones' father sent his son to live with a Catholic priest in Kentucky who educated him and encouraged his interest in mechanics.

At age 12, he ran away to work in a garage--fascinated by the ways cars worked.  He soon became a foreman of the garage.

He left to become the the chief mechanic on a Minnesota farm, and then enlisted in the military serving as an electrician and mechanic in WWI.

Around 1935, Jones patented a refrigeration system for trucks that was compact and shock-proof that some say revolutionized the food industry because it eliminated food spoilage on long hauls.  It is the invention for which he is best known.  The invention also was incredibly timely and important because it allowed for blood transport during WWI.

Jones received 60 patents in all in his lifetime for everything from a box-office device that automatically issued tickets and change to customers as well as a self-starting gas motor.

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Mixed Experience History Month is an annual blog post series celebrating the history of the Mixed experience.  Established on Heidi Durrow's blog Light-skinned-ed Girl  in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to illuminate achievements of multiracial and multicultural individuals (not tragic mulattoes) and people and events central to 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, or Mixed Chicks Chat blog!  Thanks for reading.  You can also read past year's series: 2007, 2008, 2009.

Mixed Experience History Month: Anatole Broyard, writer & critic

Anatole Broyard (1920-1990) was born in New Orleans.  He was part of an extended Lousiana Creole family.

Broyard moved to New York after World War II.  He wrote articles for journals and magazines such as The Partisan Review and The New Republic.

His first marriage to a black-Puerto Rican woman ended in divorce.  He married a white woman of Norwegian origin and they had two children together.  He passed the rest of his life as "white."  His daughter, Bliss Broyard, learned that he was "colored" when he was on his death bed.  She has written a moving account of his life and the after-effects of his revelation on her own take on identity called One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life: A Story of Race & Family Secrets.

Broyard once wrote: "My mother and father were too folksy for me, too colorful . . . Eventually, I ran away to Greenwich Village, where no had been born of a mother and father, where the people I met had sprung from their own brows or from the pages of a bad novel . . ."

Broyard worked as a critic for the New York Times Book Review and became a central figure in the Bohemian set, counting among his social circle many writing superstars.  He wrote two books during his lifetime and two were published posthumously including the excellent, Intoxicated by My Illness. 

He died in 1990 of prostate cancer.

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Mixed Experience History Month is an annual blog post series celebrating the history of the Mixed experience.  Established on Heidi Durrow's blog Light-skinned-ed Girl  in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to illuminate achievements of multiracial and multicultural individuals (not tragic mulattoes) and people and events central to 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, or Mixed Chicks Chat blog!  Thanks for reading.  You can also read past year's series: 2007, 2008, 2009.

Mixed Experience History Month: Sadakichi Hartmann, writer & critic

Carl Sadakichi Hartmann (1867-1944) was the son of a German trader and a Japanese woman.  Born in Japan, Hartmann grew up in Germany after his mother died in childbirth when she had his younger brother.  His grandmother and uncle served as his guardians in a luxurious Hamburg home.

When his father remarried, Hartmann was sent to a military school where he refused to comply with the strict discipline.  His father sent Hartmann to live with an uncle in the United States and disinherited him.

He arrived in Philadelphia in 1882 and took up menial jobs in printing shops, but at night would study at the library as he became more interested in a career in the arts.  Hartmann came to know Walt Whitman, sometimes visiting with him and translating German documents for him.  He wrote about his visits with the famous poet in a book Conversations with Walt Whitman (1895).  Later he would count among his friends Ezra Pound and John Barrymore.

Hartmann became a poet (deeply influenced by the Symbolists); a critic (he launched a magazine, Art Critic, and was one of the first critics to write about photography); and dramatist.

He once wrote of himself: "I was always somewhat of an aesthetic sybarite, looking primarily for manifestations of Plato's fine frenzy, Aristotle's purification of thought and sentiment, and Schopenhauer's moments of cognition."

During WWII, Hartmann, a citizen since 1894, was questioned about his Japanese-German background.  Hartmann lost his place in his social circle because of the government's continued harassment, and pleaded with the government in letters not to intern him.

He died in 1944 at his daughter's home.

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Mixed Experience History Month is an annual blog post series celebrating the history of the Mixed experience.  Established on Heidi Durrow's blog Light-skinned-ed Girl  in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to illuminate achievements of multiracial and multicultural individuals (not tragic mulattoes) and people and events central to 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, or Mixed Chicks Chat blog!  Thanks for reading.  You can also read past year's series: 2007, 2008, 2009.

Mixed Experience History Month: Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance

Chief Buffalo Long Lance (1890-1932) was a writer, journalist, actor and activist for Native American causes.  He was of mixed black, white and Native American ancestry and spoke English and Cherokee.

As a young man, he traveled with the Wild West Show, but then finally enrolled in a Native American school and got in because of his language ability and by faking his age.  In 1912, he graduated at the top of his class.

Lance fought in France during World War I.  He left the military in 1919 and moved to Canada where he worked as a reporter chronicling the issues affecting Indians.  It was then, as a spokesperson for Indian causes, that he began to claim his connection to the Blackfoot people although his Native American background was Cherokee and Croatan.

In 1928, he published his autobiography, Long Lance, with great success.  The book became an international bestseller and Lance became an international celebrity.

He went on to give speaking engagements around the world.  In 1929, he started a film career as an actor portraying Native Americans more realistically.

When rumors circulated that Lance wasn't really Blackfoot but "black" as the one-drop rule dictated of the time, his life began to crumble around him.  His "career as an Indian" ended.  He died in 1932 (apparently a suicide).

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Mixed Experience History Month is an annual blog post series celebrating the history of the Mixed experience.  Established on Heidi Durrow's blog Light-skinned-ed Girl  in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to illuminate achievements of multiracial and multicultural individuals (not tragic mulattoes) and people and events central to 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, or Mixed Chicks Chat blog!  Thanks for reading.  You can also read past year's series: 2007, 2008, 2009.