Mixed-Race Communities
Excerpted from Forbidden Love by Gary B. Nash.
While couples such as Albert and Lucy Parsons, Tye and Charles Schulze, and Frederick and Helen Douglass kept aflame the torch of a mixed-race America, entire groups lived in mixed-race communities. Learning to mingle peacefully began in the late teenage years of a small number of young Americans who attended colleges specifically founded as interracial institutions. The most notable of them were Oberlin College in Ohio and Oneida Institute in New York, both established by radical abolitionists in the 1830s.
Neither school began experiments in interracial living without a fight. In 1835, when he heard that brand-new Oberlin was to be integrated, New England's financial agent warned that "to place black and white together on precisely the same standing will not most certainly be endured," and he predicted that Oberlin "will be blown sky high" if "the darkies begin to come in in any considerable number, unless they are completely separated . . . so as to veto the notion of amalgamation." But generations of Oberlin students, including one of Frederick Douglass's daughters, learned that prejudice dissolved when people studied together, ate together, lived together, and learned together.
At Oneida Institute, the same was true. One white student (for whom Grinnell College was later named) described the student body he found when he entered Oneida: "a motley company of emancipators' boys from Cuba; mulattoes; a Spanish student; an Indian named Kunkapot; black men who had served as sailors, or as city hackmen, also the purest Africans escaped from slavery; sons of American radicals, Bible students scanning Hebrew verse with ease, in the place of Latin odes; enthusiasts, plowboys and printers." Oneida produced many of the African-American leaders of the nineteenth century and fulfilled the dream of its founder, Beriah Green, who wrote that "the red sons of the Western forest, the sable sons of the sunny South have here found a home together, and . . . have lived in peace and love with their pale-faced and blue-eyed brethren."
Farther west, mixed-race communities defied the notion that racial amalgamation would be America's downfall. In the 1880s, when the traveler William Barrows passed through the old beaver-trapping country in Montana and Wyoming, he found towns inhabited almost entirely by people who were thoroughly mixed--French, Indian, English, and Spanish. Impressed by the "color blindness" of these northern Rockies people, Barrows hoped that "we are building a nation, not only in a new world, and under a new system of government, but with a new people.... We are no longer English; that expresses but one of our polygenous ingredients. We are Americans." If Barrows had traveled in the Southwest, especially in New Mexico, he would have found similar communities predominately populated by people of Mexican-lndian descent. To this day, the New Mexico highlands are dotted with towns inhabited mainly by Indian-Mexican families, celebrated in such novels as John Nichols's The
Milagro Beanfield War (1974).
The Sikh immigrants to California in the early twentieth century tell a story of a new combination of previously unacquainted people. When new laws in 1882 excluded Chinese immigrants and in 1907 banned Japanese as well, California's cotton, fruit, and vegetable growers turned to Korea, the Philippines, and South Asia for labor. Among these immigrants were nearly 7,000 Sikhs from the Punjab. Arriving as single men, the Punjabis were socially stranded. They could not bring Sikh women with them, and California's 1901 law prohibited marriage between a white person and a"Negro, Mulatto, or Mongolian." But by the end of World War I, the Sikhs were finding that California's county clerks would issue marriage licenses to people of different races as long as their skin color seemed reasonably close. It was this looseness in the application of the law that soon led to marriages between Punjabi men and Mexican women. "Cotton was the crop that brought most [mixed] couples together," says the historian who has studied this type of interraciality. The Mexican Revolution of 1911 propelled Mexicans across the border into U.S. cotton fields from Texas to California, and there the women found Punjabi, Korean, and Filipino partners.
Between 1913 and 1948 (the latter date marks the overturning of California's law prohibiting racial intermarriage), 80 percent of the East Indian men in California married Mexican women. To this day, several thousand of the children and grandchildren of these Punjabi-Hispanic marriages can be found in every Imperial and San Joaquin valley town. Many of the families can still be found under the name of Singh--the most common Sikh surname--but most have Hispanic first names. The Sikh immigrants built temples all over California's agricultural valleys where the families of Jesus Singh or Alejandro Singh worshiped and married. Finding loopholes in the ruling system of racial division and classification, those who picked the fruit and vegetables served on dinner tables all over the country brought new life to the old dream of a mestizo America.