Gismondi on Coleman, 'That the Blood Stay Pure: African Americans, Native Americans, and the Predicament of Race and Identity in Virginia'

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H-SAWH Gismondi on Coleman, 'That the Blood Stay Pure: African Americans, Native Americans, and the Predicament of Race and Identity in Virginia'

Review published on Monday, January 5, 2015

Arica L. Coleman. That the Blood Stay Pure: African Americans, Native Americans, and the Predicament of Race and Identity in Virginia. Blacks in the Diaspora Series. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014. xxii + 300 pp. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-253-01043-8.

Reviewed by Melissa Gismondi (University of Virginia)Published on H-SAWH (January, 2015) Commissioned by Lisa A. Francavilla

Virginia's "Racial Purity Campaign" and Afro-Indian Identity

Arica L. Coleman traces the political, legal, and ideological efforts of white Virginians to advance rigid definitions of race—defined as a “racial purity campaign”—from the eighteenth century to the present (p. xv). She argues that this campaign masked kinship links between black and Native American Virginians, and by considering Native Americans, Coleman challenges the common tendency simply to depict American race relations within a black/white dichotomy. She identifies key developments, especially 1860s blood quantum laws and the 1924 Racial Integrity Act, that defined racial purity as an “absence of Blackness” and hardened racial identities (p. xvii). Coleman’s book joins notable studies, such as Tiya Miles’s Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom (2006) and Barbara Krauthamer’s Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South (2013), in considering Native American and African American relations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Yet, by taking her analysis into the twentieth century, she demonstrates the state’s enduring power to redefine and restrict racial identities.

Coleman examines the racial purity campaign during the antebellum and Civil War eras. For Coleman, this campaign consistently revealed a “manipulation” of fluid racial identities (p. 23). For example, she considers Armstrong Archer, a free “mulatto” from Virginia who moved to New York. In 1844, Archer published an antislavery pamphlet that discussed his descent from an African king and Chief Powhatan. While scholars usually focus either on Archer’s black or his Indian roots, Archer emphasized both races in his identity. He confirmed the “place of my nativity” as “Kamao” in West Africa and described his lineal descent from the Powhatan tribe, then located on the Pamunkey reservation (pp. 27, 34). In 1866, the Virginia General Assembly hardened racial identities by declaring someone to be “Indian” only if they did not possess more than one-fourth of “Negro blood” (p. 86). When Virginia began defining Indian identity in relation to an absence of black blood, Archer began passing as white in the federal census. Coleman recognizes that many factors influenced Archer’s decision to pass, including the hope that it might enable him to provide better opportunities for his children. For Coleman, Archer’s passing was proof that Virginia’s racial hierarchy “imposed alternative identities on people of color” (pp. 40-41).

Coleman points to the 1924 Racial Integrity Act (RIA) as a major twentieth-century development in

Citation: H-Net Reviews. Gismondi on Coleman, 'That the Blood Stay Pure: African Americans, Native Americans, and the Predicament of Race and Identity in Virginia'. H-SAWH. 01-05-2015. https://networks.h-net.org/node/2295/reviews/56688/gismondi-coleman-blood-stay-pure-african-americans-native-americans-and Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-SAWH

Virginia’s racial purity campaign. She argues that this act had catastrophic results for Afro-Indians by hardening already restrictive racial categories. The act implemented a system whereby the state recorded residents’ race based on blood quantum. Legislators believed that these records would help officials enforce the state’s ban on marriage between whites and blacks. Employing personal correspondence, Coleman shows how that the RIA’s most vigorous enforcer, state registrar Walter Plecker, believed that Native Americans had become extinct in Virginia through intermarriage and cohabitation with African Americans. Consequently, Plecker maintained that no resident could claim an “Indian” identity, and that those who did were, in fact, blacks “exploiting the Indian claim so that they could marry Whites” (p. 93). This narrow definition of “Indianness” as devoid of black ancestry prompted many Native American nations to enforce strict racial guidelines of their own. Taking a cue from the RIA, the Chickahominy tribe enacted a racial purity bill that voided all marriages between blacks and Native Americans in an attempt to preserve tribal recognition and Indian status in the state of Virginia.

This culture of “Negrophobia” led some Afro-Indian Virginians to deny their black ancestry, as Archer had in 1860 (p. 121). In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Virginia’s antimiscegenation laws in Loving v. Virginia. The case proved a landmark victory against antimiscegenation laws throughout the country, and Mildred Loving, who had married a white man, became a symbol of the civil rights movement. Coleman notes that throughout the 1960s, Loving claimed an Afro-Indian heritage, although most media outlets identified her simply as black. However, in a 2004 interview, Loving declared, “I am not Black. I have no Black ancestry. I am Indian-Rappahannock” (p. 153).

As with her discussion of Archer, Coleman recognizes that many factors influenced Loving’s declaration of racial identity. She notes that Loving may have felt comfortable, or even pressured, to identify as black during the heyday of the civil rights movement. Still, Coleman identifies the state’s enduring, and intensifying, power to impose monolithic racial identities. By tracing the development of Virginia’s racial purity campaign through the late eighteenth to early twenty-first centuries, she identifies change over time in the construction of racial identity and challenges historians to consider the continual processes by which both the state and the individual construct (and reconstruct) racial identity.

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Citation: Melissa Gismondi. Review of Coleman, Arica L.,That the Blood Stay Pure: African Americans, Native Americans, and the Predicament of Race and Identity in Virginia. H-SAWH, H-Net Reviews. January, 2015. URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=42485

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.