Racial Passing off the Record: A Journey in Reconnection and Navigating Shifting Identities
McQuade Library, Merrimack College, North Andover, MA 01845, USA
Genealogy 2022, 6(1), 8; https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy6010008
Received: 20 October 2021
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Revised: 2 January 2022
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Accepted: 12 January 2022
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Published: 18 January 2022
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Joys and Challenges of Record-Keeping for and Tracing African American Ancestry)
Anyone of African descent or with African ancestry who engages in a genealogy project soon learns that the U.S. Census is a helpful yet frustrating tool. In 2016, equipped with my history degree and an online ancestry search engine, I searched for my great-grandfather Leroy in census records after I saw a picture of him as a young man at work in Philadelphia. This image would have been unremarkable had it not been for the fact that my African American ancestor was so light skinned that he seemed to blend in with his co-workers at Kramer’s Fruit and Vegetables. I thought there had to be a story behind this. Classified as, “Mu”, for mulatto in most of his records, Leroy became “Black” on the census in 1930. My first thought was to question whether this categorization changed for other folks like him. My research led me to my master’s thesis “From ‘Mulatto’ to ‘Negro’: How Fears of ‘Passing’ Changed the 1930 United States Census”. Through this research, I also became closer to my father’s family. This piece will take you through this journey of discovery and my frustrations along the way.
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Keywords:
African American family; African American ancestry; African American history; passing; united states census; mulatto; mixed-race
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited
MDPI and ACS Style
Womack, G.C. Racial Passing off the Record: A Journey in Reconnection and Navigating Shifting Identities. Genealogy 2022, 6, 8. https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy6010008
AMA Style
Womack GC. Racial Passing off the Record: A Journey in Reconnection and Navigating Shifting Identities. Genealogy. 2022; 6(1):8. https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy6010008
Chicago/Turabian StyleWomack, Gabby C. 2022. "Racial Passing off the Record: A Journey in Reconnection and Navigating Shifting Identities" Genealogy 6, no. 1: 8. https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy6010008
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