Remembering Race and Making Race Malleable: Toward a New History of African-, Indian-, and European-Descended Multiracial Families in the Midwest

Around 1900, women in the Schmidt family, who had come to rural Wisconsin from Denmark, started a rumor. Aunt Maggie, they claimed, was not the daughter of Bohemian immigrants as some believed; instead her mother was a black cook from Chicago or, perhaps, part-Indian. Around the same time, another Wisconsin family, the Revels, began describing their ancestry in diverse ways, including Cherokee, Creek, Scottish, or Portuguese. When, in 1998, the town near which the Revels had farmed erected an historical marker honoring their role in a rural black community, some descendants spoke at the unveiling ceremony; others threatened to sue. Midwesterners have told many stories about mixed-race people and those whose race was fluid or ambiguous. I argue that these stories, which circulated within families, the press, and commemorations, expressed anxieties that accompanied slavery’s end, large-scale immigration’s beginning, and efforts to educate people about these events today. In contrast to scholarly and popular accounts that treat the Midwest as a race-less region of European immigrants and white settlers, I contend that rural Midwesterners fundamentally shaped American race concepts. I challenge binary characterizations of Midwestern race (urban blacks v. rural whites; Indians v. whites) by arguing that rural African-, Indian-, and European immigrant-descended families, who converged in the region in the nineteenth century, created unstable, malleable notions of race. They did so through migration, work, and family narratives. In the twentieth century, museums and historical markers created by city officials, historians, and families’ descendants helped forge the binary race concepts that persist in America today. Overall, the larger project from which this paper stems aims to construct a complex, inclusive history of the Midwest, to reveal the mechanisms through which race is celebrated or denied in this region, and to understand how Midwestern race concepts interact with global ones.