Legal History of the Color Line: The Rise and Triumph of the One-Drop Rule

Front Cover
Backintyme, 2005 - History - 540 pages
One-Third of White Americans Have Recent Black Admixture Every Year, 35,000 Black-Born Youngsters Redefine Themselves as White Genealogists were the first to learn that America's color line leaks. Black researchers often find White ancestry. White genealogists routinely uncover Black ancestry. Molecular anthropologists now confirm Afro-European mixing in our DNA. The plain fact is that few Americans can truly say that they are genetically unmixed. Yet liberals and conservatives alike agree that so-called Whites and Blacks are distinct political races. When did ideology triumph over reality? How did America paint itself into such a strange corner? Americans changed their concept of race many times. Eston Hemings, Jefferson's son, was socially accepted as a White Virginian because he looked European. Biracial planters in antebellum South Carolina assimilated into White society because they were rich. Intermarried couples were acquitted despite the laws because some courts ruled that anyone one with less than one-fourth African ancestry was White, while others ruled that Italians were Colored. Dozens of nineteenth-century American families struggled to come to grips with notions of racial identity as the color line shifted and hardened into its present form. This 542-page book tells their stories in the light of genetic admixture studies and in the records of every appealed court case since 1780 that decided which side of the color line someone was on. Its index lists dozens of 19th-century surnames. It shows that: The color line was invented in 1691 to prevent servile insurrection. The one-drop rule was invented in the North during the Nat Turner panic. It was resisted by LouisianaCreoles, Florida Hispanics, and the maroon (triracial) communities of the Southeast. It triumphed during Jim Crow as a means of keeping Whites in line by banishing to Blackness any White family who dared to establish friendly relations with a Black family. Frank W. Sweet was accepted to Ph.D. candidacy in history at the University of Florida in 2003 and has completed all but his dissertation defense. He earned an M.A. in History from American Military University in 2001. He is the author of eleven historical booklets and numerous published historical essays. He was a member of the editorial board of the magazine Interracial Voice, is a regular lecturer and panelist at historical and genealogical conferences, and moderates an online discussion group on the history of U.S. racialism. Legal History of the Color Line, ISBN 0-939479-23-0, is available for $36.95 from Ingram, Baker & Taylor, www.amazon.com, www.barnesandnoble.com, and can be ordered at any bookstore.

From inside the book

Contents

INTRODUCTION
1
AMERICAS ADMIXED POPULATION
13
THE HEREDITY OF RACIAL TRAITS
37
THE PERCEPTION OF RACIAL TRAITS
55
THE RATE OF BLACKTOWHITE PASSING
71
THE ENDOGAMOUS COLOR LINE
89
1691
117
WHY DID VIRGINIAS RULERS INVENT A COLOR
133
THE ONEDROP RULE
263
THE INVENTION OF THE ONEDROP RULE IN
299
WHY DID NORTHERNERS INVENT A ONEDROP
325
THE ANTEBELLUM SOUTH REJECTS THE ONE
347
THE ONEDROP RULE IN THE POSTBELLUM
363
THE ONEDROP RULE ARRIVES IN
377
JIM CROW TRIUMPH OF THE ONEDROP RULE403
403
WHY DID ONEDROP BECOME NATIONWIDE
439

HOW THE LAW DECIDED IF YOU WERE BLACK
153
A CLASS
181
NO ENDOGAMOUS COLOR
215
THE COLOR LINE CREATED AFRICAN
235
APPENDICES
467
WORKS CITED
495
INDEX
529
Copyright

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