Brown Babies Research Articles

An African American Anthropologist in Wales: St. Clair Drake and the Transatlantic Ecologies of Race Relations

AbstractIn summer 1947, African American anthropologist John Gibbs St. Clair Drake arrived in Tiger Bay, the port neighborhood of Cardiff in South Wales, to begin field work for his doctoral thesis, “Race Relations in the British Isles.” Drake's academic reputation had already been established by the publication of Black Metropolis (1945), a seminal study of Chicago's so-called Black Belt that Drake co-authored with researcher Horace Cayton. What attracted him to Tiger Bay for his next project was a scandal that erupted on both sides of the Atlantic around Britain's growing population of what were referred to as brown babies. These children were the product of sexual encounters that sometimes took place between local white women and some of the 200,000 African American GIs who were at different points stationed across the United Kingdom during the later part of the Second World War. Using the extensive field notes Drake kept during his sojourn in Cardiff, this article reconstructs the nature and feel of a neighborhood where, by the 1940s, half of all residents were from ethnic minority backgrounds. Drake's work serves as a window onto the nature of racism and ideas about race in late-imperial Britain, alongside the parallel presence of metropolitan community life in Tiger Bay, one of Britain's oldest multicultural communities.

Is My Child Racist? Supporting Caregivers in Conceptualizing Race for Children.

M is a 4-year-old White girl whose parents contact their primary care pediatric clinician with a behavioral concern: over the course of several months, M has insisted that she is pregnant with quintuplets. Although some of the quintuplets have light skin tones, others have darker skin tones. When elaborating about the fantasy, M often explains that the babies fight in her tummy, and the Brown babies are "acting badly" by spitting, scratching, and hitting the others. Although M can sometimes provide an explanation for why the Brown babies misbehaved (i.e., they ate chocolate), often she is not able to produce an answer. The child frequently reiterates the same story to her parents, which has left M's parents uncertain how to react.In terms of her life course thus far, M has had typical development and behavior. She has attended all her well-child visits and met the usual developmental milestones. Beyond general development, her exposure to diverse people has been ample because she is from a multiethnic household in which 2 languages are regularly spoken. Outside of her home, she has close Brown and Black friends in her preschool, and the school has discussed race and skin color in an affirming way with the children. At home, she has books that feature children of different skin tones.What advice can M's pediatric clinician offer? How can parents and pediatric clinicians support children who present with race-based thoughts or actions that seem discriminatory?

African American Adoptions and Expanding Visions of Family

Why do transnational adoption accounts depict adopters as white? Kori Graves delves into this question in A War Born Family: African American Adoption in the Wake of the Korean War. Centering on the obscured history of African American participation in practices of domestic, transracial, and transnational adoptions, Graves tells the story of Korean black children, the African American families that tried to adopt them, and the welfare professionals and nonprofessionals involved in this process of family making. Graves demonstrates that the relatively small number and sporadic nature of Korean black placements in the 1950s and 1960s reflect the impact of segregation and racial inequality upon adoption practices. This history is anchored in the politics of the Cold War and civil rights. After the Korean War, Cold War imperatives shaped narratives around the adoption of Korean children as acts that saved them from communism and disproved U.S. racism, while the ongoing efforts of the Civil Rights Movement brought many African American adoptive families to draw the connections between their struggles to adopt and the broader struggles for civil rights. Building upon the work of historians Brenda Gayle Plummer and Heide Fehrenbach, who examine the adoption of “brown babies” of Germany after World War II, and in conversation with existing studies on Korean transnational adoptions, A War Born Family takes its place as a seminal text on Korean black adoptions after the Korean War. Written in clear and accessible prose, this book will appeal to scholars and non-scholars alike, and will be of particular interest to students of U.S. history and the Cold War, race and civil rights, critical adoption studies, and family and childhood studies.

An Intimate History of Empire

Through a combination of critical memoir and family history, Hazel V. Carby’s Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands offers an intimate history of empire—an excavation of close connections across space and time, of empire’s presence in the most intimate spaces and relationships, and of the sedimented yet contingent racial logics underlying constructions of Englishness and Britishness. This brief discussion essay considers the book’s eccentric form and method as a challenge to imperial history, its methodological commitments, and its archival moorings. Carby offers a powerful critique of narratives of the black presence and racism in postwar Britain that center on the arrival of the HMT Empire Windrush in 1948. By way of conclusion, the essay follows Carby in revisiting the so-called Brown Baby debate at the end of World War II, an episode in the reracialization of Britain that offers glimpses of the diversity of perspectives and political imaginaries among people of African descent and their extensive ties to a wider black Atlantic.

American Fathers, German Mothers, and “Brown Babies”: The Intersection of Race, Empire, and Kinship in U.S. Transnational Adoption

American Fathers, German Mothers, and “Brown Babies”: The Intersection of Race, Empire, and Kinship in U.S. Transnational Adoption

Born to black GIs: from the demonisation of father and child to the search for American roots

It is estimated that roughly 2000 children were born to black GIs and British women during the Second World War. They were labelled by the African-American press the ‘brown babies’—a name far preferable to that given by Britons, namely ‘half-castes’. All the children were born illegitimate as the US army would not allow black GIs to marry their white girlfriends. For nearly every British ‘brown baby’ their American father was a total mystery. Whether or not they were in a children’s home or living with their mother or grandmother, most of Britain’s ‘brown babies’ were told little or nothing about their birth fathers, and the little they were told was often inaccurate or misleading. This led many of them, once they were older, on a search for their fathers. This article charts that search and the love affair they developed with the USA. In the process, it reveals what being part-American means to these GI offspring in terms of their identity and allegiance.

Brown Baby Lullaby by Tameka Fryer Brown

Brown Baby Lullaby by Tameka Fryer Brown

Interracial Relationships and the “Brown Baby Question”: Black GIs, White British Women, and Their Mixed-Race Offspring in World War II

Interracial Relationships and the “Brown Baby Question”: Black GIs, White British Women, and Their Mixed-Race Offspring in World War II

That was the Worst Day of My Life: Recrafting Family through Memory, Race, and Rejection in Post-WWII Germany

This research project is a historical and narrative study of cross-racial, international couplings between Black U.S. servicemen and White German women during WWII and the children who resulted from these relationships. Once pejoratively referred to as “Brown Babies,” or worse, often both the U.S. and German governments collaborated in the destruction of families through forbidding interracial coupling and encouraging White German women to either abort mixed raced babies or give up these children for international adoption in an effort to keep Germany White. Using my own family’s history to show that mixed race children are the dross that needed to be removed from Germany, I employed memory and post-memory as my theoretical framing, coupled with authoethnography, family interviews, and narratives as my methodological tools. Of primary concern is what place Black German children and their mothers were allowed to occupy in the German national imagination and to what extent their individual rights and interests were superseded by the assertion of state interest in managing the German citizenry. Ultimately, it is argued that different tactics of constituting Germanness as homogenously White comes at the expense German women’s rights over their bodies and the exclusion of mixed race Black German children.

“A Darker Hue”: Race and Adoption in Richmond, Virginia, 1959

Abstract This article examines the intersecting issues of race, identity, and colorism in African American adoptions and state adoption policies during the 1950s and early 1960s through the case study of the contested adoption of David Alexander Rowe in Richmond, Virginia, in 1959. Rowe was born to a fourteen-year-old African American mother, who, while working as a prostitute, became pregnant by a twenty-seven-year-old married white father of two. Confined to a home for wayward girls until her eighteenth birthday, the mother requested that her son be adopted by her aunt. Instead of authorizing this seemingly noncontroversial adoption, the Virginia Department of Welfare officially opposed it on the grounds that the baby was “too fair” to be adopted by a dark-skinned family member. Outraged, the aunt brought her story and her case to the black press and to the state courts. Within the complicated, legislative racial policies of 1950s Virginia, the liminal status of mixed-race children (who under antimiscegenation laws should not exist) threatened the strict racial binarism through which the state operated its segregationist policies. By placing David’s story within a larger discussion of adoption drives for foreign-born “brown babies” and the Baby-Boom commodification of white babies, this article interrogates the competing narratives about racial identities offered by state policies, adoption workers, and individual families.

“John Brown's Baby Had a Cough”: A Central Role for TRPV1?

“John Brown's Baby Had a Cough”: A Central Role for TRPV1?

“John Brown's Baby Had a Cough”: A Central Role for TRPV1?

“John Brown's Baby Had a Cough”: A Central Role for TRPV1?

HEIDE FEHRENBACH. Race after Hitler: Black Occupation Children in Postwar Germany and America. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2005. Pp. xiii, 263. $29.95

This thoughtful and carefully researched book represents some of the best scholarship being done on postwar Germany today. Taking as her topic the “brown babies” fathered by American GIs, Heide Fehrenbach explores the broader cultural themes of sexuality and national identity that inform her subject. As the subtitle indicates, this book is not a history of all Africans in Germany but only of those few thousand fathered by black American GIs in West Germany, mostly in the years 1945 to 1960. These were not the only blacks in West Germany—students, diplomats, and entertainers were among the others—but they were the largest group until the African political refugees of the 1970s and 1980s arrived. The story of blacks in East Germany is an entirely different one; they were largely African university students or, later, guest workers from Mozambique. Fehrenbach takes as her focus the years from 1945 to about 1960 in West Germany. For her this is a formative period for later attitudes. As Fehrenbach writes, in these years race changed from something associated first and foremost with Jews to something related to blacks. Fehrenbach points out the irony of the U.S. arriving to bring democracy and freedom using a military that was only integrated in 1948. She notes, “the American occupation and democratization of Germany coincided with a postwar push by African Americans and white liberals at home to democratize American society and its institutions” (p. 3), including the army.

Brown Babies at Stanford in the Early 1970s

Brown Babies at Stanford in the Early 1970s

"Germany's 'Brown Babies' Must Be Helped! Will You?": U.S. Adoption Plans for Afro-German Children, 1950-1955

This essay explores the debate that arose around the adoption of Black German children by African American parents and the subsequent immigration of these children to the United States. Using a comparative approach, the article probes the underlying internal social and political controversies in postwar Germany and the United States that led to and accompanied these events, concluding that both the plans for and practical implementation of the adoption of these Black German children abroad was an complex and contradictory attempt to solve the "problem" a German-born Black population was seen to pose.

Along the Color Bar

The doctor had said I would not arrive for another two weeks.When my mother went into labor, only Benedicto Kiwanuka, an elderly Muganda, was there to assist. The world of women was alien to Benedicto, yet he held my mother's hand and reassured her during the delivery. mother vividly recalls the moment of my birth: she was exhausted, covered with blood, wondering which one of us would die first. Benedicto reached my father in his chambers. father rushed home. At the sight of the two of us, he remarked in his characteristically laconic fashion, My that was quick. Since neither man had any idea what to do next, my father went out to find an ambulance. mother, who was German, was taken to the European hospital in Kampala, and her English obstetrician was summoned. The doctor was all business: he cut the cord, cleaned us up, and pronounced both mother and son none the worse for the ordeal. The unplanned home birth solved a rather thorny problem. Neither of the hospitals in Kampala had been willing to bend the rules for us. At the African hospital, they were hesitant to admit a white woman. Likewise, while the European hospital was happy to deal with my mother under normal circumstances, they were loathe to deliver an infant of mixed race. (My father was born in Kericho, Kenya, but his ancestral home was in Goa, India.) As it happened, we did not require much from the European hospital. Besides, the nurses there were mostly nonwhite, and they delighted in administering to a brown baby.

When Jim Crow met John Bull: Black American Soldiers in World War II Britain.

Preface. 1. Prologue: The Great War - Black Americans in Europe. 2. The Early War Years: First Encounters. 3. Attitudes and Anxieties: Jim Crow and the British Government. 4. Jim Crow in Britain: The US Army and Racial Segregation. 5. Novelty to Familiarity: The Home Front. 6. Dixie Invades Britain: The Racial Violence. 7. The Watchdogs: Jim Crow Under Close Scrutiny. 8. 'No Mother, No Father, No Uncle Sam': Sex and Brown Babies. 9. The Black GI in Britain: Reflections and Results. Notes. A Select Bibliography. Index.

The Clowns of Shipolovi

It is mid-afternoon. The dances have been going on since dawn. Women in bright shawls, women with fat brown babies in their laps, old women with white hair and pearly eyes, younger women with black hair cut and curled and permed by the hairdressers of Flagstaff and Winslow, old men with braided hair and turquoise or lavendar strips of cloth tied around their foreheads and deep creases at the corners of their eyes from a lifetime in the sun, younger men with crew cuts and large bellies, and even younger men with the long hair of their grandfathers, and children, many blackhaired children, all laughing at the clowns.

Just another day

The day is cold and bleak. It is November, and I groan a futile protest against the ruling that all public health nurses go to work at eight o'clock. It's such an uncompromising hour. Seven, now, is early enough to be interestingly different, and nine is rather a leisurely hour to start work-indicating a status a little above the rank and file, so to speak-but eight is ordinary, common-place, and unexciting. I definitely do not like eight o'clock. Coffee and toast are swallowed in a sleepy, automatic sort of way. I grab my car keys and hope the car will start without coaxing, letting me get to the office on time. It does, for once. Cars have character. When you practically live in one all day, you come to realize the idiosyncrasies which your particular model can display, and learn to respect its moods. On the way to the office, I begin to think about what has to be done-provided no emergencies have arisen. The road to Beeville will be bad, but maybe dry enough to get through. Typhoid clinic there at 3:00. Home visiting in District II. That tuberculosis patient must have sputum specimens sent in to the laboratory, and Mrs. Smith must be visited to see if the baby is doing all right on the formula the doctor gave her at the well-baby conference Friday. Such a scrawny, pale little baby! The office door is open, and the clock says 7:59. Not bad. There are notes on my desk from the clerk: Dr. Blank called to say that Mrs. Brown's baby was delivered yesterday afternoon, and will the nurse please go by and see about them? Mrs. Toll, chairman of the Marvel Home Demonstration Club would like for the nurse to