{"id":5317,"date":"2004-07-31T23:13:13","date_gmt":"2004-07-31T23:13:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/multiracial.com\/?p=5317"},"modified":"2021-06-09T23:10:10","modified_gmt":"2021-06-09T23:10:10","slug":"black-continental-soldiers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/multiracial.com\/index.php\/2004\/07\/31\/black-continental-soldiers\/","title":{"rendered":"“Black” Continental Soldiers"},"content":{"rendered":"

We Need to Learn More About Our Colorful Past<\/a>
\nThe New York Times
\nMaurice A. Barboza and Gary B. Nash
\nJuly 31, 2004<\/p>\n

Back in 1925, American society tended not to advise young white males about the consequences of intimacy with the black maid. Even if the 22-year-old Strom Thurmond considered himself a father, the standards of the time did not require him to give the daughter born of that intimacy any love, support or acceptance. He did, however, irretrievably give her his bloodline.<\/p>\n

Essie Mae Washington-Williams, the offspring of Mr. Thurmond and his family’s black maid, 16-year-old Carrie Butler, recently announced that she intended to join the Daughters of the American Revolution based on her Thurmond bloodline. Reared apart from her father, Ms. Washington-Williams did not have the same privileges as Mr. Thurmond’s white children during his life, yet she is seeking the right to some of the privileges of her lineage.<\/p>\n

She is not the first to do so. Ms. Washington-Williams said she was motivated by the battle of Lena Santos Ferguson to join a Washington chapter of the organization and by Ms. Ferguson’s quest to honor black soldiers. Ms. Ferguson’s grandmother, a black Virginia woman, had married a white man from Maine whose ancestor, Jonah Gay, was a patriot. In the 1980’s, Ms. Ferguson fought a four-year legal battle for full membership and to enter her local chapter. It wasn’t until the organization was faced with the potential loss of its tax-exempt status in Washington that she was permitted to join.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I have no love for snobbish organizations like the DAR, but aren’t Barboza and Nash demanding too much? Do they want the DAR to track down every darker than average soldier in the Continental Army? Every white soldier with some black ancestry? They argue for a definition of “black” that is TOO BROAD. What is the standard that defines a “black,” anyway? There is no agreement on it and no logical criteria. The search for more “glory” to pad the black racial resume encourages the “one drop” myth because there are never enough blacks to satisfy the psychological need. The temptation is to make more of them via extreme hypodescent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We Need to Learn More About Our Colorful Past The New York Times Maurice A. Barboza and Gary B. Nash July 31, 2004 Back in 1925, American society tended not to advise young white...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":7988,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[63,141],"tags":[129],"class_list":["post-5317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-a-d-powells-view","category-news-clips","tag-evolution-and-human-migration"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p89tuq-1nL","jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/multiracial.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/06\/AD-Powell.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/multiracial.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/multiracial.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/multiracial.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/multiracial.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/multiracial.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5317"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/multiracial.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5317\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7090,"href":"https:\/\/multiracial.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5317\/revisions\/7090"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/multiracial.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7988"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/multiracial.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/multiracial.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/multiracial.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}