Mixed Race Studies

He risked his life to become a founding father of civil rights. Why was he forgotten?

The Los Angeles Times
2022-02-09

Stuart Miller

Mention Walter White and it will likely conjure an image of Bryan Cranston from “Breaking Bad,” playing the man who snarled, “I am the danger.”

But there’s a real-life Walter White who deserves to be a household name — a Black man who faced unfathomable danger in pursuit of truth and justice as he did battle with the American way. White should rank alongside Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X as a founding father of the civil rights era. Yet he is all but forgotten today.

That oversight gets an overdue correction in A.J. Baime’s engrossing new biography, “White Lies: The Double Life of Walter F. White and America’s Darkest Secret.”…

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All Tangled Up: Intersecting Stigmas of Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Mariana Rondón’s Bad Hair

Black Camera: An International Film Journal
Volume 9, Number 1, Fall 2017
pages 47-61

Reighan Gillam, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
University of Southern California

The film Pelo Malo / Bad Hair (dir. Mariana Rondón, 2013) depicts the story of Junior, a mixed-race young boy in Venezuela who wishes to straighten his curly hair. This essay shows that the stigmatization of black hair is part of Venezuela’s racial aesthetic regime and thus contextualizes the actions and desires of the main character. Moreover, while much of the literature on race and beauty in Latin America focuses on women’s experiences, this essay examines men’s and boys’ experiences of aesthetic regimes that value whiteness. Junior’s continual fussing with his hair, as well as his other actions, informs his mother’s fears that he is gay. I argue that the main character, Junior, is subject to shifting forms of stigma that inform his attempts to straighten his curly hair and in turn inform Junior’s mother’s perception that he is gay.

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Black soldier who crossed Delaware with Washington will be honored in New Jersey

Courier Post
Cherry Hill, New Jersey
2022-02-09

Matthew Korfhage, USA Today Network

New Jersey’s Oliver Cromwell, who crossed the Delaware with George Washington and lived to nearly 100, will at long last receive a historical marker.

Since they were children, cousins Arianna Murray and Jane Fox Long had known the story of Oliver Cromwell.

His story wasn’t taught in schoolbooks. But in Burlington, New Jersey, and across the country, nine generations of his family helped keep it alive.

“We knew that our great-great-great grandfather — I forget how many greats — had crossed the Delaware with Washington,” Fox Long said. “It was the story that my mom had told, and it was also passed down to her.”

“Every Fourth of July, it was always a conversation piece,” said Murray, from her home in Philadelphia. “How could it not be?”

Cromwell was a decorated hero of New Jersey, they knew, a representative of an American history that had gone unheralded for much of this nation’s lifetime: an African American patriot of the Revolutionary War…

…Against this backdrop, Cromwell was born on the farm of tavernkeeper John Hutchin on May 24, 1753, in present-day Burlington County, an area whose taverns “Burlington Biographies” author Richard L. Thompson described as a hotbed for American revolutionary sentiment.

Cromwell’s parentage is not known with certainty, but multiple records refer to him as being of mixed race, likely African and white heritage. Late in life, he referred to himself as being “in the family of John Hutchin.”

Cromwell joined the New Jersey militia in 1775, where he was listed as “Indian,” leading to speculation he may have had Native American heritage. This is far from definitive, said Burlington County historian Jeff Macechak, who noted that other soldiers he believed to be of African descent were also listed the same way…

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