Passing for Black: White Planters, “Mulatto” Migrants, and “All-Black” Borderlands

In their overlapping efforts to establish a black nation, a black state, black towns and institutions in Indian Territory and beyond, freedpeople trumpeted a promising racial future in the West at a decibel intended to drown out the rhetoric of racial inferiority and the reality of racial violence that dominated the South. Journalists and town boosters focused narrowly on the “all-black” towns as prideful experiments in racial self-determination and domestic black enterprise. However, this destinarian message also drowned out the complexities of freedpeople’s lives in ways that shaped contemporary headlines and the subsequent archive. Closer listening to turn-of-the-century black West reveals story after story of a westward “escape” of planters’ sons whose origins straddled the color line.

This paper explores the participation of children of former slaveowners and enslaved women in racial destinarian emigration movements in the post-emancipation era. It suggests that the westward migration of “mulatto” freedpeople constituted a telling response to the racial revolution that accompanied the demise of Reconstruction. At the same time, the growing impossibility of this increasingly visible population was a harbinger for the racialization of southern class structure that would ultimately shape the lives of all freedpeople after Reconstruction. While the communities these men and women joined within and beyond the American West were promoted, narrated, memorialized, and ultimately historicized as exclusively “all-black” and self-consciously “domestic,” such an image stands in contrast to the racial realities of the period. As their life stories illustrate, “the relentless search for the purity of origins” produced a thoroughgoing, painstaking erasure of the multiracial, multinational South.