There he raised two separate families “in the same yard.” One family was by his wife, a white woman who bore him seven children, the other by my grandmother, who also bore seven.

Posted in Excerpts/Quotes on 2015-02-20 21:32Z by Steven

My mother was Martha Bell Smith, the daughter of Luanda Smith. Grandma Cindy, a fair-skinned slave, was the daughter of a slave by that slave’s master. As a teenager, she was purchased from a white family in Memphis, Tennessee. Her purchaser—a man known to my family as “Cap’n Anderson”—turned out to be my grandfather.


Ada Lois’s Mother, Martha Bell Smith Sipuel

Cap’n Anderson carried Grandma Cindy to his plantation near Belarie, Arkansas, in Chicot County. There he raised two separate families “in the same yard.” One family was by his wife, a white woman who bore him seven children, the other by my grandmother, who also bore seven. The two sets of children, each child born within two months of its counterpart, were delivered by the same black midwife. One set lived in a large white house in the middle of the plantation. The other, the group that included my mother, lived about a mile away in a small but tidy cabin.

The children of both families played together. In fact, I have heard my mother often speak of her white “brothers” and “sisters.” According to family legend, one of the white brothers became a prominent Arkansas politician, who went on to serve the state’s (all-white) voters for several years in the capitol at Little Rock. My mother told me that she once had called him when she passed through Little Rock.

According to her, his voice joyfully greeted her on the telephone. In fact, he invited her to come by the capitol for a friendly brother-sister visit; but, he added, she would have to keep her “little pickaninnies” away. Mother slammed down the phone. As far as I know, she never spoke to her brother again. His white wife sent her the newspaper clipping that announced the esteemed gentleman’s death.

Grandma Cindy’s seven children all kept the name Smith, perhaps in ironic tribute to an earlier master. The oldest was Frank, who was born a slave on his own father’s plantation in 1862, during the Civil War. The others were Kitty, Lucinda, Nan, Scott, and Gertrude. My mother, Martha Bell Smith, was the youngest, born in 1892.

My mother’s memory was that Cap’n Anderson’s black children had little use for their white father. When he would call on my grandmother, he often brought them little gifts of candy and the like, but the children all feared him. It was not that he ever beat or otherwise abused them. Instead, it seemed that they all instinctively distrusted the man and rejected what they took to be his immoral ways with their own mother. That attitude always troubled Grandma Cindy, who overlooked the circumstances of their relationship to proclaim that Cap’n Anderson was the only man that she had ever loved and the only man who ever had touched her.

When Frank was a very young man, he built a modest house and moved his mother and younger siblings off the plantation. Mother grew up in Dermott, Arkansas. The family baby, she had the best of what little was available, and she was the only one to receive any substantial education. After finishing Dermott’s public schools, she graduated from the little two-year teachers’ academy in the town and became a schoolteacher herself.


Ada Lois’s Father, Bishop Travis B. Sipuel

Stunningly beautiful, with light skin, hazel eyes, and hair that bore the slightest curl, she was teaching when she met my father, a handsome, very dark-skinned railroad man nearly fifteen years older than she. He was smitten hard and immediately. All of Grandma Cindy’s fair-skinned children married extremely dark spouses. His greatest drawback seemed to be his age. I remember her telling me that when he came courting she would tell her mother, “Mama, here comes your beau. He must be coming for you; he’s too old for me.”

Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher, A Matter of Black and White, The Autobiography of Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996). 7-10. http://www.oupress.com/ECommerce/Book/Detail/690/a%20matter%20of%20black%20and%20white.

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Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta: Celebrated California Bandit

Posted in Biography, Books, History, Media Archive, Monographs, United States on 2015-02-20 20:03Z by Steven

Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta: Celebrated California Bandit

University of Oklahoma Press
1977 (Originally published in 1854 by W. R. Cooke and Company)
210 pages
5″ x 7.5″
Paperback ISBN: 9780806114293

John Rollin Ridge (1827-1867)

In 1854, a Cherokee Indian called Yellow Bird (better known as John Rollin Ridge) launched in this book the myth of Joaquín Murieta, based on the California criminal career of a 19th century Mexican bandit. Today this folk hero has been written into state histories, sensationalized in books, poems, and articles throughout America, Spain, France, Chile, and Mexico, and made into a motion picture.

The Ridge account is here reproduced from the only known copy of the first edition, owned by Thomas W. Streeter, of Morristown, New Jersey. According to it, the passionate, wronged Murieta organized an outlaw company numbering over 2,000 men, who for two years terrorized gold-rush Californians by kidnapping, bank robberies, cattle thefts, and murders. So bloodthirsty as to be considered five men, Joaquin was aided by several hardy subordinates, including the sadistic cutthroat, “Three-Fingered Jack.” Finally, the state legislature authorized organization of the Mounted Rangers to capture the outlaws. The drama is fittingly climaxed by the ensuing chase, “good, gory” battle, and the shocking fate of the badmen.

Read the entire book (Courtesy of Three Rocks Researchhere.

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Is it still Interracial dating when you’re mixed?

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Autobiography, Media Archive, United States on 2015-02-20 18:58Z by Steven

Is it still Interracial dating when you’re mixed?

Fusion
2015-02-19

Simone Jacobson
Washington, D.C.

No matter where I live or whom I date, I will always be out of context.

Here’s how it all began: My mother and my maternal grandparents were born in Burma. My grandpa’s father was Chinese and my grandma’s father was British; both of their mothers were Burmese. Unlike many first generation Asian Americans, my mom’s first language was English. My paternal grandparents are first and second generation Americans of Eastern European ancestry with firmly established Jewish identities.

Because I was raised in the racially intolerant Southwest, the fact that I developed my own strong Asian American identity is somewhat of a miracle. After all, Phoenix, Arizona is home to the nation’s strictest anti-immigration policies and state university fraternities that host “dress like black people”- themed MLK celebrations. And unlike “majority-blackWashington, D.C., my current home of 14 years, nearly 70 percent of the Phoenician population self-identified as white as of the 2010 Census.

Fortunately for me, I was immersed in a loving community of Asian Americans as early as kindergarten. Outside of my immediate family, the most influential people in my young life were my Thai American best friend (26 years together now, and counting) and my Korean American dance teacher, a strong, handsome man who never raised his voice, showered me with love as if I were his own daughter, and taught me I should always reach across to open the car door for a man whenever he opens mine.

Fast forward to the recent present: I turned 30 last year and was single and freshly broken-hearted for the first time in ten years after investing half a decade in a relationship that did not end up in what I had hoped would be a lifelong commitment. After a decade of back-to-back monogamous relationships throughout my 20s—first with a white Frenchman (three years), then with a black Jamaican Belizean American (five years)—I went on an online dating binge to get over a bad breakup with the latter.

After many continuous, failed attempts at love in the digital space, I was left disappointed and slightly lonelier than when I began. But my yearlong experience of dating strangers (of all races) revealed something more unsettling than the process itself: I’ve never culturally aligned with anyone I’ve dated.

During the online dating binge, I met an exceptionally diverse cast of characters vying for my attention. But one gentleman in particular, a sartorial East Asian dandy, shattered my post-breakup confidence when he said abruptly one day: “I’m a romantic guy, despite what you think. I just don’t see myself falling in love with you.”…

Read the entire article here.

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Giuliani: Obama Had a White Mother, So I’m Not a Racist

Posted in Articles, Barack Obama, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2015-02-20 16:10Z by Steven

Giuliani: Obama Had a White Mother, So I’m Not a Racist

The New York Times
2015-02-19

Maggie Haberman, Political Reporter

Nicholas Confessore, Political Reporter

Former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York on Thursday defended his assertion that President Obama did not love America, and said that his criticism of Mr. Obama’s upbringing should not be considered racist because the president was raised by “a white mother.”

Mr. Giuliani’s remarks — made at a New York fund-raising event for Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin on Wednesday night and first reported by Politico — set off an uproar.

“I do not believe, and I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do not believe that the president loves America,” Mr. Giuliani said at the event. “He doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me. He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up, through love of this country.”

Critics suggested that Mr. Giuliani’s description of Mr. Obama’s upbringing reflected a prejudiced view that Mr. Obama was different from other Americans…

Read the entire article here.

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Memories of Metis Women of Saint-Eustache, Manitoba — (1910-1980)

Posted in Articles, Canada, History, Media Archive, Women on 2015-02-20 15:53Z by Steven

Memories of Metis Women of Saint-Eustache, Manitoba — (1910-1980)

Oral History Forum/Forum d’histoire orale
Volumes 19-20 (1999-2000)
pages 90-111

Nicole St-Onge, Professor of History
University of Ottawa

Introductory Comments

In an article entitled “Hired Men: Ontario Agricultural Wage Labour in Historical Perspective” Joy Parr wrote the following, telling,  words:

Scholars too have claimed that from the beginnings of the province, agriculturalists’ desire for independence combined with the rigorous seasonality of rural work to determine that “no hierarchical labour organization would persist ilz Canadian agriculture.” Yet in each successive generation from the settlement phase onward, rural wage labourers have been essential to the functioning of the province’s persistent and unmistakably hierarchical agricultural system. Through two centuries of clearing, tilling, seeding, and harvesting, the relationships between land and labour and capital and labour have changed, but the reality of the rural hierarchy has been as enduring as the season.

The ‘rural hierarchy’ examined by Parr for Ontario also existed and endured in the Prairie region of Canada. Census data available since 1891 reveal that hired men, over the age of fourteen, were always an important component of farm labour on the Prairie; they represented 13% (6,000) of all rural workers in 1891, 19.4% (84,000) in 1931 and 14.1% (46,000) in 1951. Yet, standard histories of North American agriculture have had difficulty probing beyond the positivist myth that surround the ‘Family Farm’. Few studies discuss in any detail the existence of an impoverished underclass of rural wage workers. Even oral history projects dealing with rural inhabitants have tended to be celebratory; charting the progress of a community since its pioneering days without much regard or analysis to the price paid by some individuals for this ‘success.’ Or, other rural oral history have been apocalyptic lamenting the demise of the Family Farm again without much regard for the consequences ofthis economic and social restructuration for people other than the owners of farms or the businesses that service them…

Read the entire article here.

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Association of Mixed Students hosts celebratory ‘Loving Week’

Posted in Articles, Campus Life, Media Archive, United States on 2015-02-20 15:41Z by Steven

Association of Mixed Students hosts celebratory ‘Loving Week’

Student Life: the independent newspaper of Washington University in St. Louis since 1878
Volume 136, Number 38 (Thursday, 2015-02-12)
Page 3

Noa Yadidi, Staff Reporter

Featuring speed dating, free cupcakes and a co-programmed dance, this year’s Loving Week, hosted by the Association of Mixed Students, kicked off Monday in commemoration of the landmark 1967 Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia.

The group organized a week’s worth of activities to celebrate the case, which invalidated laws prohibiting interracial marriage. Mixed decided to hold the event in proximity to Valentine’s Day because it fit in well with the themes of love and acceptance.

In continuing the weeklong celebration, students can participate in a speed-dating event at Ursa’s Stageside Thursday night and a dance on Friday night.

Students in Mixed feel that it is especially important to celebrate the individuality and uniqueness of mixed-race students at Washington University…

Read the entire article here.

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