No right to one’s own ancestry?

Conversation with Stephanie Bryant
The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition
Yale Center for International and Area Studies

Stephanie thought she had no right to her Irish heritage. As an adult, Stephanie has thought more about her Irish side and says that her daughter, Rachel, taught her to acknowledge her whiteness and her Irish heritage.

Stephanie is a light skinned African American, as our many of her family members. She was listed as white on her birth certificate which she guesses was a mistake made by a nurse who saw her alone, not with other family members. Years earlier, Elijah and his family were listed as white on the 1920 census, perhaps because the census taker met Mary and assumed the other family members were white. Stephanie grew up in Roxbury, a predominantly black area of Boston, and later West Roxbury, an area that was predominantly white. She and her family left Roxbury during the 1960’s when blackness dominated the identity of African Americans. In the 1960’s, she was stoned/attacked in Roxbury when she walked through because other African Americans assumed she was white. In what Stephanie calls “Old Boston”, she says that most African Americans were light skinned. Many “Old Boston” African Americans were light skinned, and many were blue-eyed. Their color ranged from Stephanie–nearly white to medium brown. When she was growing up, Roxbury was structured by color, profession and economics. Professional blacks were light skinned. Darkest were poorest. The Franklin Park area of Roxbury was where the light skinned lived and the economic path went down all the way to Dudley and Northampton Streets where the poorest, darkest lived. Then in the 50’s and 60’s, an influx brought “very dark” African Americans to Boston, to Roxbury. Light skinned were no longer welcome. Stephanie thinks that it never occurred to newer black residents that people so light skinned were also black.