Light-skinned-ed Girl

Mixed Experience History Month 2014: Laura Matilda Towne, abolitionist & pioneering educator

Laura Matilda Towne (1825-1901) was a pioneering white woman educator of the first newly freed enslaved people of the South.

Towne was born in 1825 to abolitionist parents.  She grew up mostly in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.

She was educated in homeopathic medicine and education theory and practice.

A year after the Union Army had taken over South Carolina's Sea Islands, Towne moved to St. Helena Island to be a part of the Port Royal Experiment, the first large-scale project designed to help the freed men, women and children transition from bondage.  It was 1862, and after beginning her work as a medical healer, Towne founded the Penn School along with her lifelong friend and companion Ellen Murray. 

The Penn School had a rigorous curriculum and ultimately a teacher training program.  Towne ran the school for 40 years and during that time she and Murray adopted several African-American children who they raised as their own.

Towne died in 1901 of influenza.  She was a beloved figure of the community and greatly missed.--Heidi Durrow

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Mixed Experience History Month is the annual blog post series created by The New York Times best-selling author 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 and events 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, 2012,  2013. Copyright 2014.

Mixed Experience History Month 2014: Toshi Seeger, filmmaker and activist

Toshi Seeger (1922-2013) was a filmmaker and activist who brought attention to the importance of America's folk music including traditional African-American work songs and the music of her husband, the singer, Pete Seeger.

Seeger was born in 1922 in Germany; she was the daughter of a Japanese exile and an American mother.  The family moved to New York when she was six-months old.  Toshi graduated from a Manhattan high school in 1940.

In 1943, Toshi married Pete Seeger who she had met four years earlier.  They had three children.  Pete Seeger called his wife "the brains of the family," according to the New York Times.

Toshi was an activist who wanted to preserve America's folk music  as well as the environment.

She helped create the Newport Folk Festival in 1960 and later the Clearwater Festival designed to bring awareness to the Hudson River clean-up.

Filmmaking became a natural extension of her efforts to preserve the history of American folk music.  Her films included Afro-American Work Songs (1966) and the Emmy-winning documentary Pete Seeger: The Power of Song (2007).  She also produced the TV show Rainbow Quest which her husband hosted from 1965 to 1966.

Toshi died in July 2013 just nine days shy of her 70th wedding anniversary.  Her husband died six months later.  

Toshi is survived by her children, grand-children and one great-grandchild.  Seeger Fest will be held this summer to celebrate Toshi and her husband and their important work.--Heidi Durrow

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Mixed Experience History Month is the annual blog post series created by The New York Times best-selling author 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 and events 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, 2012,  2013. Copyright 2014.

Related articles

A Seeger Fest to Honor Pete and Toshi, and It's Free

Mixed Experience History Month 2014: Let's Begin

Mixed Experience History Month 2013: A Recap

Mixed Experience History Month 2014: Anita Reynolds, actress/model/psychologist

Anita Thompson Dickinson Reynolds (1901-1980) was an actress, model and bon vivant who traveled in the circles of the affluent and influential in the 1920s and 1930s and later with the white bohemians of New York City.

Reynolds--who was a cousin of Langston Hughes--was the daughter of politically engaged African-American parents and grew up in Los Angeles.

Reynolds' mother enrolled Reynolds in a prestigious all-white dance program when she was young. Reynolds "passed" as the sole "Mexican" pupil.

As an adult, Reynolds capitalized on her racial ambiguity.  She worked as an actress and played an Arab servant as well as a transracial adoptee in films.  She also worked as a model for Chanel, and was sketched by both Man Ray and Matisse.

Reynolds enjoyed an expatriate life in Paris and Morocco.  She hobnobbed with a cast of distinguished characters including James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Claude McKay, Paul Bowles, Gertrude Stein, E. E. Cummings, and Picasso.

Reynolds never denied her African-American heritage but seemed to delight in the many racial identities that others assigned her.  

Later in life she became a psychologist and worked in the Virgin Islands where she died in 1980. She had no children.

Cornell University Professor George Hutchinson discovered her unpublished memoir which was recently published by Harvard University Press as American Cocktail: A Colored Girl in the World.--Heidi Durrow

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Mixed Experience History Month is the annual blog post series created by The New York Times best-selling author 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 and events 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, 2012,  2013. Copyright 2014.

Related articles

Mixed Experience History Month 2012: George Herriman, cartoonist

Mixed Experience History Month 2013: A Recap

Mixed Experience History Month 2014: Let's Begin

Mixed Experience History Month 2012: Merle Oberon, actress

Mixed Experience History Month 2012: Yone Noguchi, Poet

Mixed Experience History Month 2012: Elmer Imes, physicist & husband of Nella Larsen

Mixed Experience History Month 2014: Jean-Michel Basquiat, artist

Jean Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) was a celebrated American artist who started his career as a graffiti artist.

Born in 1960, Basquiat was the son of a woman of Puerto Rican descent and his father was originally from Haiti.  He grew up mostly in Brooklyn and was a junior member of the Brooklyn Museum of Art.  He demonstrated great artistic skill as early as 8-years-old.  When his parents split up, Basquiat's father raised him.  His mother struggled with mental illness which would lead to multiple stays in mental institutions when Basquiat was in his teens.

At 15, he dropped out of high school.  

Basquiat would go on to gain notiriety for his graffiti art that appeared on Lower Manhattan buildings tagged SAMO.  But it was when he was part of the noise rock band, Test Pattern, that Basquiat met the artist, Andy Warhol, with whom he would colloborate on many projects.

Basquiat's solo career took off in the 1980s.  His art was featured in Artforum magazine in 1981.  He went on to become an art world celebrity and a successful artist, but struggled with a growing addiction to heroin.  In 1988, he died of a heroin overdose in his studio.-Heidi Durrow

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Mixed Experience History Month is the annual blog post series created by The New York Times best-selling author 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 and events 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, 2012,  2013. Copyright 2014.

Related articles

Mixed Experience History Month 2012: George Herriman, cartoonist

Mixed Experience History Month 2014: Let's Begin

Mixed Experience History Month 2013: A Recap

The Mixed Experience Podcast - Heidi W. Durrow

Mixed Experience History Month 2014: Dido Elizabeth Belle, mixed-race British aristocrat

Dido Elizabeth Belle (1761-1804) was an upper-class mixed-race Brit who it is believed helped shape the views against the slave trade of England's most powerful judge, her great-uncle who raised her.

The daughter of an enslaved African woman and Admiral Sir John Lindsay, Dido grew up in the home of her father's uncle, William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield along with her (white) cousin Lady Elizabeth Murray who was around the same age.

Dido's social position is not entirely known, but it is thought she was raised as her cousin's companion.  However, she was not always allowed to dine with the family, and yet would socialize with them over tea and dessert.  She received a stipend that was much greater than a domestic servant but less than half the amount her cousin received.

Dido is depicted in a 1779 painting with her cousin that now hangs in Scone Palace in Pert Scotland.  The painting inspired the current feature film, Belle (dir. Amma Asante), about Dido's life.

Upon her father's death, Dido received a small outright inheritance and even smaller annuity.  Most importantly, however, her freedom was finally documented.  (As the daughter of an enslaved mother, Dido would legally be considered enslaved too.)

In 1793, she married a Frenchman and had three sons.  She died in 1804. -Heidi Durrow

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Mixed Experience History Month is the annual blog post series created by The New York Times best-selling author 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 and events 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, 2012,  2013. Copyright 2014.

Mixed Experience History Month 2014: Hilarius Gilges, Afro-German activist and actor

Hilarius Gilges (1909-1933) was an Afro-German amateur actor and political activist who was killed by the SS.

Gilges, known as "Lari," was the son of a Dusseldorf textile worker and an African man (unidentified) who likely worked on a boat on the Rhine.  Gilges was given his stepfather's name when his mother married in 1915.

Gilges joined the Communist Party a a young man.  He was an activist and worked to share his political views through agitprop theatre.  He served a one-year sentence from 1931 to 1932 after a skirmish related to his activism.

In 1933, he was tortured and killed by SS officers and Gestapo after he was discovered despite being in hiding.  He was survived by a wife, Katharina Hubertine Laatsch, and their two children.  Today, a Dusseldorf plaza is named after him to commemorate his life.--Heidi Durrow

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Mixed Experience History Month is the annual blog post series created by The New York Times best-selling author 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 and events 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, 2012,  2013. Copyright 2014.

Related articles

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

Mixed Experience History Month 2012: Elmer Imes, physicist & husband of Nella Larsen

Mixed Experience History Month 2014: Let's Begin

Mixed Experience History Month 2014: Joseph Nassy, Holocaust survivor and painter

Joseph Johan Cosmo Nassy (1904-1976) was a portrait painter and Holocaust survivor.  He was born in Surinam to a father of a Jewish family that had fled Spain during the Inquisition.

He moved to New York City in 1919 to join his father.  After finishing school, he went to England in 1929 where he worked as a sound system installer for a film company.  He worked through Europe in similar jobs until 1934.  That year he entered a fine arts school in Belgium.  In 1939, he married a Belgian woman.  As an expatriate, he was working as a portrait artist when the Germans occupied Belgium in May 1940.  Two years later he was arrested as an enemy national (he had a US passport).  He was detained for the rest of the war--part of the time in German internment camps.

Nassy was able to create a substantial visual diary of daily life in the internment camps and even was encouraged to teach art to other detainees.

Nassy survived the camps and displayed his works after the war in expositions of Holocaust art.  Nassy separated from his wife in 1952.  He died of cancer in 1976.  He had no children.  - Heidi Durrow

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Mixed Experience History Month is the annual blog post series created by The New York Times best-selling author 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 and events 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, 2012,  2013. Copyright 2014.

Mixed Experience History Month 2014: Toto Koopman, model & spy

Toto Koopman (1908-1991) was a famous model and spy for the Italian resistance during World War II.

Koopman--born with the first name "Catherine"--in 1908 to a Dutch father and a half-Dutch and half-Indonesian mother.  She grew up in an Indonesia under colonial rule.

She went to high school at a boarding school in the Netherlands.  She had an ease with languages and became fluent in six during her lifetime.

At 19, she landed in Paris to pursue a modeling career.  She became the house model for Coco Chanel and thereafter her career progressed quickly. She was a favorite subject of several Vogue photographers.  

When she moved to London, she purused a career in films.  She famously dated Tallulah Bankhead for a few months.  During her liaison with Bankhead, she met many more influential people including a billionaire newspaper owner, Lord Overbrook, who would become her lover.

Koopman acted as a spy for Overbrook eavesdropping for him in Germany and Italy under the guise of working as a traveling performer.  Koopman who was not know for monogamous relationships began an affair with Overbrook's son, Max Aitken during this time which enraged Overbrook.

When her relationship with Aitken ended, she left for Italy where she worked for anti-fascist causes.  She was eventually sent to a concentration camp for women, Ravensbruck for seven months until the Russians freed the camp.

Koopman--who had suffered greatly during her time in the camp--moved to Switzerland and then eventually England to be with an influential art dealer, Erica Brausen who was an early champion of Francis Bacon.  The two continued a tumultuous relationship until Koopman's death in 1991. --Heidi Durrow

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Mixed Experience History Month is the annual blog post series created by The New York Times best-selling author 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 and events 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, 2012,  2013. Copyright 2014.

Mixed Experience History Month: John Punch, first documented slave

John Punch (mid 1600s)--an African man--served as an indentured servant to a Virginia planter.  Researchers have concluded that he likely fathered a child with a white woman.  That child, John Bunch, was born in 1637.  In 1640, Punch ran away with two other (white) indentured servants.  All three were caught in Maryland.  The two white men were sentenced to an additional four years to their servitude; Punch was sentenced to a lifetime.

Today scholars have noted that Punch essentially became the first documented slave; the sentence is thought to be the first legal formalization of distinguishing servitude between whites and blacks.  

In 2012, Ancestry.com announced that through historical documents and Y-DNA analysis, it is highly likely that President Barack Obama is related to Punch through his mother Stanley Ann Dunham.  The Bunch descendants (as the family became known) became landowners as free people of color.  Another family line continued to intermarry and eventually assimilated into the white population.--Heidi Durrow

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Mixed Experience History Month is the annual blog post series created by The New York Times best-selling author 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 and events 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, 2012,  2013. Copyright 2014.

Mixed Experience History Month 2014: Stanley Ann Dunham, anthropologist & mother of President Obama

We kick off 2014 Mixed Experience Month with a profile of President Barack Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham (1942-1995).

Dunham was born in 1942 in Wichita, Kansas.  

After a series of moves during her childhood (California, Oklahoma, Texas, and Washington state), Dunham's family moved to Honolulu after she graduated from high school.

Dunham attended University of Hawaii at Manoa where she met Barack Obama Sr. in her Russian class.  The two married in 1961 when she was 3 months pregnant.  Dunham was 18 when her son and future president, Barack Obama was born.

Dunham divorced in 1964 after living apart from her husband for much of their marriage.  She continued her studies in Honolulu and raised her son as a single mother with the help of her parents.  In 1965, Dunham married Lolo Soetoro.  She moved to Indonesia with her son in 1967 upon graduating.  She had a daughter with Soetoro in 1970. 

In her professional life, Dunham worked as a teacher of English, a crafts instructor, consultant and researcher among other things.  In 1992, she received her doctorate in anthropology.  She died of uterine cancer in 1995.

Dunham was often portrayed as President Obama's "white mom from Kansas" who was of English ancestry as well as German, Swiss, Scottish, Irish, and Welsh.  However, in 2012, Ancestry.com announced that there is evidence that Dunham had an ancestor of African origin, John Punch.  Punch was an identured servant who fled his servitude only to be captured in a neighboring state and sentenced to a lifetime of enslavement.  The New York Times reported that "some historians to regard him as the first African to be legally sanctioned as a slave, years before Virginia adopted laws allowing slavery."  It is believed that Punch had a family with a white woman.  The family eventually went by the name Bunch and continued to intermarry.  Dunham is believed to be part of this family line.--Heidi Durrow

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Mixed Experience History Month is the annual blog post series created by New York Times best-selling author 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 and events 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, 2012, 2013. Copyright 2014.