Abstract
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.
Highlights
Race is one of the determinants of how far back people can follow their ancestors through the United States census
My thesis argued that it was full-blown fear that public officials, eugenicists, and white society held of racial passing
Did I gain even more understanding of why people passed for white and what that meant for their lives and the lives of their descendants, but I realized that the U.S Census change created a hurdle that many people cannot clear
Summary
Race is one of the determinants of how far back people can follow their ancestors through the United States census. Each of these sources connect the U.S Census Bureau’s removal of the “mulatto” category to the lack of information gleaned from that data point, segregation, and the growing “anxieties” of white people losing power. My thesis argued that it was full-blown fear that public officials, eugenicists, and white society held of racial passing. These works do not comment on the effects of this erasure of mixed-race identities on the descendants of “near whites”. This piece explores the difficulties of my genealogical research and how I learned to piece together my ancestor’s story using the historical context of his time
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