Based on late-20th century DNA analysis and a preponderance of historical evidence, it is generally accepted that U.S. President Thomas Jefferson fathered the six mixed-race children with his slave Sally Hemings, who is herself three-quarters white and was a paternal half-sister to his wife, Martha Wayles Jefferson. [reference 1] Four of them survived to adulthood. [7] Under Virginia law at the time, their seven-eighths of European ancestry would have legally whitewashed them if they had been free, but the birth of a slave mother automatically enslaved them from birth. Jefferson allowed the two eldest children to escape in 1822 (their legal discharge was a public action he wanted to avoid because he would have had to seek permission from the state legislature); He released the two most recent ones in his 1826 will. Three of the four entered white society as adults. Subsequently, their descendants identified as white. After reconstruction later in the 19th century, the South acted to impose racial segregation and restrict the freedoms of blacks, especially laws to exclude them from politics and elections. From 1890 to 1908, all former Confederate states passed such laws, and most retained the right to vote until federal civil rights laws were passed in the 1960s. At the South Carolina Constitutional Convention in 1895, anti-miscegenation legislation and amendments were proposed that would disenfranchise blacks.
Delegates discussed a proposal to incorporate a one-drop rule into these laws. George D. Tillman, on the other hand, said someone with Sidney Poitier`s deep chocolate complexion would be considered white if his hair was straight and he made a living in a profession. That may not sound so strange, Brazilians say, given that light-skinned actresses Rashida Jones from the TV series “Boston Public” and Lena Horne are identified as black in the United States. [27] According to Jose Neinstein, a white Brazilian of American origin and executive director of the Brazilian-American Cultural Institute in Washington, USA, “If you`re not completely white, you`re black.” In Brazil, however: “If you`re not completely black, then you`re white.” Neinstein recalls a conversation with a man of Poitier`s skin color when he was in Brazil: “We were discussing ethnicity and I asked him, `What do you think of your point of view as a black man? He turned his head towards me and said, “I`m not black.” It just paralyzed me. I couldn`t ask another question. [27] During the Spanish colonial period, Puerto Rico had laws such as the Regla del Sacar or Gracias al Sacar, according to which a person of black descent could legally be considered white as long as they could prove that at least one person per generation in the previous four generations was also legally white. Thus, people of black ancestry with known white ancestry were classified as white, the opposite of the “drop rule” in the United States. [29] Although racial segregation was legally adopted by the southern states of the former Confederation in the late 19th century, legislators opposed the definition of race by law as part of the prevention of interracial marriage.
In 1895, George D. Tillman of South Carolina stated during the discussion: The word negro is used in the English-speaking world to refer to a person of black origin or appearance. Its use was accepted as normal until the civil rights movement, even by people classified as black. During the American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, some African-American leaders in the United States rejected the word, favoring blacks because they associated the word negro with the long history of slavery, segregation, and discrimination. In the 1960s, the term Negro was considered a so-called “ethnic insult.” Prior to 1930, individuals with visible mixed European and African ancestry were generally classified as mulattoes, or sometimes black and sometimes white, depending on appearance. Previously, most states had limited attempts to define ancestry before the “fourth degree” (great-great-grandparents). But in 1930, the Census Bureau stopped using the mulatto classification due to lobbying by Southern legislators. Documentation of the long social recognition of half-breeds has been lost and they have only been classified as black or white. In 1865, Florida passed a law that prohibited miscegenation and defined the amount of black ancestry that was to be legally defined as a “person of color.” The law states that “any person who has one-eighth or more of black blood shall be considered and kept as a person of color.” (It was the equivalent of a great-grandparent.) In addition, the law prohibited fornication, as well as the marriage of white women to men of color. However, the law allowed for the continuation of marriages between whites and people of color, which were contracted before the law was enacted.
[22] In the 1940s, Walter Plecker of Virginia[25] and Naomi Drake of Louisiana[26] had an outsized influence. As registrar of statistics, Plecker insisted on labeling mixed-race families of European-African descent as black. In 1924, Plecker wrote: “Two races as materially different as whites and blacks, in terms of morality, spiritual powers, and cultural form, cannot live in close contact without hurting superiors. In the 1930s and 1940s, Plecker ran offices under him to alter vital records and reclassify some families as black (or colored) (without informing them) after Virginia established a binary system under its Racial Integrity Act of 1924. He also classified as blacks who had previously identified as Indians. When the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Virginia`s law prohibiting interracial marriages in Loving v. Virginia (1967) also declared it unconstitutional for Plecker`s Virginia Racial Integrity Act and the One-Drop rule.
This concept has been codified in the law of some American states. States at the beginning of the 20th century. [4] It was associated with the principle of “invisible blackness”[5] which developed after the long history of racial interaction in the South, which included the hardening of slavery as a racial caste system and later segregation. “Negro” replaced “colored” as the most polite terminology, at a time when “black” was more offensive. The U.S. Census Bureau announced that blacks would be included in the 2010 census, alongside “blacks” and “African Americans,” as some older black Americans still identify with the term. Although the Virginia legislature tightened restrictions on free blacks after Nat Turner`s rebellion of 1831, it refrained from introducing a one-drop rule. When a proposal from Travis H. Eppes was made and discussed in 1853, supporters realized that such a rule could harm whites, as they were aware of generations of race relations. During the debate, one person wrote to the Charlottesville newspaper: Jim Crow laws reached their greatest impact in the decades from 1910 to 1930. These included hypodescent laws that defined anyone of black descent or with a very low proportion of black or black ancestry.
[3] Tennessee passed such a “one-drop” law in 1910, and Louisiana soon followed. Then Texas and Arkansas in 1911, Mississippi in 1917, North Carolina in 1923, Alabama and Georgia in 1927, and Virginia in 1930. Meanwhile, Florida, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Utah retained their former de jure “blood faction” status, changing these factions (one sixteenth, one thirty-second) to correspond de facto to a drop of thumb. [23] Professor J.B.