Posted on April 1, 2017, by renegadesouth/By Vikki Bynum.
Source: Blog entry posted on April 1, 2017 by renegadesouth/By Vikki Bynum-Photos courtesy of Kianga Lucas.
.
.
Continued from part 1.
Baldy Kersey’s resistance to authority took a political turn during the Civil War and Reconstruction. One can only imagine the formidable force that he and Newt Knight of Mississippi’s Free State of Jones would have presented the Confederacy had Kersey been part of a coalition of free people of color, slaves, and deserters fighting from the swamps of the Leaf River.

In 1868, Kersey joined a coalition from the Tally Ho district of Granville County to fight against the Ku Klux Klan’s overthrow of Reconstruction. He and six men from the Curtis, Williford, Anderson, and Tyler families petitioned Governor William Holden in the name of “the Colored Race and laboring class of white people” for aid against “outrages” committed by the Ku Klux Klan in Granville County. (you may read those petitions and my analysis here.)

People of color were powerless without a full commitment from Northern leaders to hold back the tide of violence and white supremacy campaigns that derailed Reconstruction and ushered in segregation and second-class citizenship for people of color.

The descendants of Granville’s free community of color, however, successfully resisted at least one method—the Grandfather Clause—devised by Southern white politicians to deny the vote to people of color.

During the late 19th century, poll taxes and literacy tests proved an effective means of disfranchisement, since many freed people were poor and illiterate. Even if one could read, literacy tests were designed to be failed. Some Southern politicians, however, objected to such laws because they also discriminated against poor white men (whose votes they needed). Enter the Grandfather Clause.

In 1900, North Carolina’s state constitution echoed those of other Southern states by exempting voters from taking literacy tests and paying poll taxes if their grandfather had legally voted in or before the year 1867.

As intended, this blatant act of racial discrimination disfranchised men whose fathers had been slaves.

In North Carolina, however, free men of color had legally voted until 1835, the year in which the state’s new constitution outlawed it.

Thus, the grandfathers of many people of color had voted! Accordingly, in 1902, 1904, 1906, and 1908, some eighty descendants of the Anderson, Boon, Mayo, Tyler, Taborn, Pettiford, Kearsey, Howell, Day, and Chavis families successfully registered to vote during the South’s most violent era of racial disfranchisement and segregation. (17)

The mixing of peoples from three continents of the world in the North American colony of Virginia was an unintended result of an international Commercial Revolution that eventually reshaped the world. The Andersons and other ambiguously labeled “free people of color” carry the DNA of diverse peoples who variously lost lands, were wrenched from homelands, were reduced to chattel slavery, or who became rich from all of the above.

Native peoples of early 17th century Virginia faced dispossession, enslavement, and slaughter by English entrepreneurs. Poor whites were uprooted from England as indentured servants to serve as menial laborers in America. By the second half of the century, these servants were replaced by African slaves, who represented a more stable economic investment for Virginia planters.

But colonization only begins to tell the history of America’s free people of color throughout the United States’ ongoing struggles over religious, racial, economic, and territorial hegemony. Their 19th century experiences are central also to understanding how conflicts over slavery led to the Civil War, how Reconstruction was thwarted by a violent and political corrupt counter-revolution that resulted in “redeemed” state governments committed to white supremacist doctrines.

By 1900, Southern literature and politics overflowed with the sentimental language of the South’s glorious Confederate “Lost Cause” version of the Civil War. The myth that states’ rights—not slavery—caused the war, leavened by “old timey” images of benevolent planters and contented slaves, provided a romantic origins tale for New South whites.

As the 20th century opened, Southern leaders entertained the belief that racial segregation protected “pure” bloodlines while they placed the governance of society in “superior” white hands.

The battle against legalized segregation and disfranchisement on the basis of race brought a constitutional victory against racism in 1955, but America’s understanding of racial identity—what it is, what it means, and who decides it—remains a hot button issue of debate in the 21st century.

As stated by historian Barbara Fields, “Racism is not the product of race. Racist actions produce the illusion of race.”
-End of part 2-
.
NOTES:
1. My work on communities of free people of color appears in Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South (1992), and The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies (2010).

2. The historical origins and racial identities of free people of color were far more complex than communicated by contemporary labels such as “black,” “Negro,” “Indian,” “Mustee” or “Mulatto” The Basses self-identified as Indian and English. In 1727, William Bass Sr. obtained court documentation swearing that he was of English and Indian heritage, with no admixture of African. In 1742, his son, William Bass Jr., did the same. According to family historian Kianga Lucas, the Andersons, likely of Indian, English, and African heritage, shared the Basses’ Nansemond Tribal connections. On the erasure of Native American ancestry by white authorities in the age of segregation, see Lucas, https://nativeamericanroots.wordpress.com/tag/evans/page/2/

3. On Fulcher’s manumission of his slaves, see Lucas, “The Norfolk, VA, Origins of the Anderson Family of Granville County,” June 14, 2015, Native American Roots: https://nativeamericanroots.wordpress.com/?s=anderson.  For Lt. Gov. Nicholson’s court order, click here: http://www.virginiamemory.com/.../this_day_in.../april/06.

4. On Southern patriarchal law and its effects on divorce and charges of interracial sex as grounds for divorce, see Bynum Unruly Women, pp. 59-87.

5. Colonial Granville County marriage records include the names of many free people of color. Before 1800, the Bass name was most common, followed by Chavis, Anderson, Mitchell, Evans, Day, Pettiford, and Kersey. These families would remain the most visible of Granville’s free people of color before and during the Civil War Era. Published in Brent Holcomb, Marriages of Granville County, NC, 1753-1868 (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company, Inc. 1981.)

6. George Anderson will reprinted in Thomas McAdory Owen, Granville County: Notes in Preparation for the History and Genealogy of. Montgomery. AL.

7. William L. Saunders, The North Carolina Colonial Records (Raleigh: Josephus Daniels, 1890)

8. In September, 1668, Virginia passed the first colonial taxation statute that specifically targeted free people of color, including women, on the basis that all people of color were agricultural laborers: “WHEREAS some doubts, have arisen whether negro women set free were still to be accompted tithable according to a former act, It is declared by this grand assembly that negro women, though permitted to enjoy their ffreedome yet ought not in all respects to be admitted to a full fruition of the exemptions and impunities of the English, and are still lyable to payment of taxes.” Hening, ed., The Statutes at Large, vol. 2, p. 267. Petition signer Lewis Anderson is likely the same man who left a will in 1814 that named the following free people of color as heirs: Isaac Anderson, Abel Anderson, Augustine Anderson, Wright Anderson, Zachariah Anderson, Thomas Anderson, John Anderson, Darling Bass, Sarah Anderson (from Owen, Granville County Notes, vol. 2)
-End notes-

9. Criminal Action Papers, Criminal Actions Concerning Slaves and Free People of Color, and Miscellaneous Records of Slaves and Free People of Color, Granville County, NC State Archives. Discussed in Bynum, Unruly Women, pp. 78-82

10. On poor white women and interracial mixing in Granville County, see Bynum, Unruly Women, 88-99, and Lucas, https://nativeamericanroots.wordpress.com/.../poor-white.../

11.State v. Nancy Anderson, County Court, May 1856, Criminal Action Papers, Granville County, NC State Archives.

12. State v. Dickerson Peace, March 1854, Criminal Action Papers, Granville County, NC State Archives.

13. In 1826, the state legislature passed a law that empowered county courts to apprentice any child of a person of color who did not have “honest industrious occupation.” This meant that even married couples of color might lose custody of their children if the court deemed it advisable. Between 1830 and 1860, Granville County’s free children of color were bound out in far greater numbers than were white children.

14. Apprenticeship records, Granville County, NC State Archives; Bynum, Unruly Women, pp. 99-103.

15. According to Kianga Lucas, the Kersey family arrived in Granville County in the early 1800s. Their tribal origins, she notes, are with the Algonquian speaking Weyanoke tribe who later intermarried with the Iroquois speaking Nottoway and Tuscarora tribes.

16. On Archibald Kersey, see Bynum, Unruly Women, pp. 78, 123, 153, and Lucas, https://nativeamericanroots.wordpress.com/.../the-legend.../.

17. On the Grandfather Clause and for names of those who voted in Granville County despite it, see Lucas,
.
Read part 1/2 here: https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=901403558655003&set=a.358128488245073

Source: https://nativeamericanroots.wordpress.com/.../grandfathe.../