![]() Those who were able to pass as white often engaged in tactical passing or passing as white in order to get a job, go to school, or to travel. Passing was used by some African Americans to evade segregation. During Reconstruction whites tried to enforce white supremacy, in part through the rise of Ku Klux Klan chapters, rifle clubs and later paramilitary insurgent groups such as the Red Shirts. Abolishing slavery did not abolish racism. Although they would not secure "full" constitutional equality for another century until after passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, reconstruction promised African Americans legal equality for the first time. Reconstruction through Jim Crow ĭuring the Reconstruction era, black people slowly gained some of the constitutional rights of which they were deprived during slavery. Some fictional exploration coalesced around the figure of the "tragic mulatta", a woman whose future is compromised by her being mixed race and able to pass for white. Chestnutt, who was born free in Ohio as a mixed-race African American, explored circumstances for persons of color in the South after emancipation, for instance, for a formerly enslaved woman who marries a white-passing man shortly after the conclusion of Civil War. As passing shifted from a necessity to an option, it fell out of favor in the black community. Post-emancipation, passing as white was no longer a means to obtain freedom. If they were caught, white-passing slaves such as Jane Morrison could sue for their freedom, using their white appearance as justification for emancipation. If an escaped slave was able to pass as white, they were less likely to be caught and returned to their plantation. : 28 Once they had escaped, their racial ambiguity could be a safeguard to their freedom. ![]() : 4 However, once they gained their freedom, most escaped slaves intended to return to blackness-passing as white was a temporary disguise used to gain freedom. Once they left the plantation, escaped slaves who could pass as white found safety in their perceived whiteness. : 4 Antebellum America ĭuring the antebellum period, passing as white was a means of escaping slavery. Although reasons behind passing are deeply individual, the history of African Americans passing as white can be categorized by the following time periods: the antebellum era, post-emancipation, Reconstruction through Jim Crow, and present day. These same people that were able to pass as white were sometimes known for leaving the African American community and getting an education, later to return and assist with racial uplifting. įor some people, passing as white and using their whiteness to uplift other black people was the best way to undermine the system that relegated black people to a lower position in society. But there were other mixed-race people who were born to unions or marriages in colonial Virginia between free white women and African or African-American men, free, indentured, or slave, and became ancestors to many free families of color in the early decades of the US, as documented by Paul Heinegg in his Free African Americans of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland and Delaware. Īlthough these mixed-race people were often half white or more, institutions of hypodescent and the 20th-century one drop rule in some-particularly Southern-states classified them as black and therefore, inferior, particularly after slavery became a racial caste. For generations, enslaved black mothers bore mixed-race children who were deemed " mulattos", " quadroons", "octoroons", or "hexadecaroons" based on their percentage of "black blood". ![]() Rape of slaves was legal and encouraged during slavery to increase slave population. James Weldon Johnson, author of the Autobiography of an Ex-Colored ManĪlthough anti-miscegenation laws outlawing racial intermarriage existed in America as early as 1664, there were no laws preventing or prosecuting the rape of enslaved girls and women. ![]()
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