>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
>> ...her neighborhood, Ms. Alexander lives
on just the other side of the capital.
She'll be talking today not only about her new book
which is called Parallel Worlds: The Remarkable Gibbs-Hunts
and the Enduring Insignificance of Melanin; but also something
about now, about the district that she's called home for a long time,
about the extended family that she's a part of that's had such influence
in the district, in the culture, in the nation;
and also of note her daughter
who [inaudible] inevitably early this morning was seen just in front
of that white building over there
as Barack Obama's inaugural poet also interviewed Lonae [assumed
spelling] Anelle Parker's [inaudible] this morning.
So without hesitation, I want to welcome Adele Logan Alexander.
[ Applause ]
>> Adele Alexander: I thank you all so much for coming.
I've been writing history for a long time; studying history,
teaching history, writing history for a long time.
And we sometimes as academic historians feel as if we sort
of labor in caves; and very few people outside the academic world
knows what we're about, knows what we are writing about
and then you talk to groups of 12 people-- 12 enthusiastic people.
But then when we come across something
like this incredible National Book Festival and the support
from the Library of Congress, created by the Library of Congress,
supported by the Washington Post and my introducer and then
of course I was so thrilled, my daughter and I were so thrilled
when Lonae's piece came out in the Washington Post
and everybody's been coming up to me here I am obscure historian.
Everybody comes up to me and says I just saw your picture;
I just read about you and your daughter and so on.
And also it is so absolutely unique and wonderful that my daughter
and I have the privilege of appearing here together
at the National Book Festival; and of course she had a poem that kind
of made her famous that was heard by two billion with a b people
around the world so I come here standing before you most humbly
in appreciation.
I'm going to talk not for very long and I'll talk--
they didn't tell me until just now that I was also going to talk
about my family and our role in the District of Columbia.
But I'm going to talk to you a little bit about my book
and maybe we can get to the other stuff in questions because I'd love
to have some give and take with you and what you are interested in
or you might be interested in with this particular book;
and about African-American history and women's history
and whatever else you're thinking about.
So let me just talk to you about ten minutes about this book.
I have to put this down because the space
under here won't accommodate it.   Okay so here we go.
One of the things that is particularly enjoyable about talking
about this particular book which is called Parallel Worlds:
The Remarkable Gibbs-Hunts and the Enduring Insignificance of Melanin,
is that different readers, different audiences suggest
different approaches.
Different audiences come to it with different interests
and there's plenty of me here in the book to approach it
from a variety of different directions.
At George Washington University where I have been teaching
since 1994, they asked me last winter to fit this
in with their black history month's theme about the new Negro
in Washington, D.C. in the 1920's; and of course I did that;
I talked about black women's issues and black women's political activism
at the Women's National Democratic Club.
So I did that there, then just recently
at the D.C. Historical Society I joined a panel where we talked
about how things have changed and things have not changed in terms
of African American's and women's influence in foreign relations;
and foreign relations is a very important part of this book.
But the Library of Congress
when I spoke there last winter advertised this as being
about a remarkable mixed race family so this gives me an opportunity
to talk about those aspects of Parallel Worlds.
Given the great variety and accelerated discussions and debates
that we've had in the last few years about so-called mixed race people
in the United States, most obviously certainly our President,
plus the fact that relatively recently as of the 2000 census
and of course we've just taken another census,
but as the 2000 census, we could talk about mixed races
and claim ourselves as having all kinds of different racial heritage.
So I don't know whether any of you
in fact saw the Henry Louis Gates series
on television called Faces of America.
And one of the things that he is emphasizing
in that is how many interrelationships we have racially,
culturally and so on.
Just as a very amusing aside, Stephen Colbert
who interviewed my daughter after she was the Inaugural Poet,
and he is a neighbor of my son in Mt. Clair, New Jersey,
and they have been working on ellipticals together
and so they've known each other for some time.
And it turns out from Skip Gates' research
that in fact we are cousins;
and of course in his own driveway Stephen Colbert says, "No, no,
no I am the whitest man in America."
But it did introduce us to all kinds of different things.
So I'm going to inform you a little bit I hope and challenge you to some
of these questions as I talk.
And one of the things that I do know and that most of us in this room
who identify ourselves as African Americans know too,
at least this is true for those of us who are, shall we say, over 50,
that regardless of our physical features, skin color, hair texture,
all of those things, we always thought of ourselves
in my childhood the word of course was negroes.
More recently we became blacks, then we became African-Americans.
We didn't think of-- we old generation didn't think of ourselves
as being of mixed race; there was no question about that.
And this was a matter that was shaped by a lot of things.
It was shaped by custom, it was shaped by law,
and it was also very much shaped by pride in racial accomplishments.
That's not to say of course that we didn't know pretty much for sure
that in our families several generations back there was indeed a
complex racial history some place several generations back or more.
There often were add mixtures of white blood and I use
that word blood which we all know is a metaphor; it doesn't really mean
and I always see quotation marks whenever I say blood
in that context.
And we also, many of us, had Native American so-called blood as well.
We also knew and know that in most cases this whiteness had intruded
on our Africanness through white male per genitors,
and it was not always something that came consensually.
I recently heard a lecture at the National Endowment
for the Humanities in which a grantee has developed a massive
database of the Atlanta Slave Trade almost 400 years.
And one of the statistics gleaned from that
and this is totally amazing to me --
I've done history for more than 20 years,
that until the mid 1800's the ratio of black women being brought
to this country, in other words African women, to white women--
the women who came here voluntarily,
that that ratio was 9 to 1-- amazing.
So obviously what we know from this is that most of the European men
who cross the Atlantic did not come with their wives so some
but few Native American women were available to them so in many cases
of course their sexual partners were African slaves.
The other interesting and unique thing that happened
in the new United States
in the 1800's was there was a virtual reversal
of the old tradition that was so prevalent in English common law
which determined that the condition--
the legal condition of a child followed the condition
of the mother.
Now that meant that when we turned that concept upside down,
the child of a slave woman was also therefore enslaved in perpetuity.
That determination did a lot of things.
It both saved white men from having any moral
or financial responsibility for their offspring,
and it also ensured an ever-growing, ever-sufficient enslaved population
for a new country that grounded its economy and much
of its wealth enslaved labor.   Especially that was true after 1807
when the International Slave Trade was banned;
in other words you couldn't bring anymore enslaved Africans
into the country.
So that dramatically curtailed the availability,
the supposedly limitless supply of those people.
Another factor soon crept into this complex equation
and that was again something that's unique in the United States,
sort of a binary definition of race itself.
In other words in the United States anybody who is not certifiably
"white" all white so to speak, anyone with any so-called trace
of Negro blood was designated both in law
and in practice to be a Negro.
So this is very different from the situation even
in the Western hemisphere where various degrees
of so-called Negro-ness gave people varying amounts of privilege,
varying amounts of protections under the law;
sometimes that included getting your freedom; So I tell you this
to introduce some of the specific circumstances
in which the two intertwine families-- the Gibbs and the Hunts,
whom I write about in Parallel Worlds found themselves
in the 19th Century which is when my story takes place.
So let me tell you a little bit more about the book
and how these people that I write about.
My main protagonists are Ida Gibbs-Hunt and William Henry Hunt;
how they came to be part of these mixed race families.
Both of these are fascinating people to whom I was drawn
in the first place because I love biography; I love family history;
I have written two family history books before this one;
my first one was Ambiguous Lives and my second one was the American Saga
of Homelands and Waterways: The American Saga of the Bond Family.
I saw in their marriage, this marriage of Ida and William,
a remarkable balance of power, balance of gender power.
That was singular in their era but certainly it's hard to document
and certainly that was an era when women
for the most part played very subservient roles to men.
I also wanted of course to tell a good story because what I love to do
with history is the story part of it and telling good stories
because that's what attracts me.
and I think that's what attracts a lot of you as well.
William Henry Hunt actually became the first African American
to have a full career with the State Department.
And thus he lived around the world for 35 years,
most of it with his wife.
Ida also was a significant intellectual.
She was a major organizer of W.E. B. Dubois' Pan African Congresses
in Europe in the 1920's so there was plenty
of heft to both of their lives.
These people also provided me with a lot of documentary evidence to help
in recreating their stories.   Ida's father, Mifflin Gibbs,
wrote and published an autobiography in 1902.
She herself published extensively and she left scads
of personal letters as did her sister and her brother-in-law.
Now William Hunt wrote but he didn't manage to get it published,
a memoir of his own, as well as a number of articles
and he too left a plethora
of personal professional correspondence.
William and-- I'll call him Billy now
because he becomes Billy early in my narrative.
He was born into slavery in 1863 in rural Tennessee.
He apparently never felt the need
to say specifically a white man was my father, but he knew from family
and friends that his father did live in the nearby so-called big house,
that being of course the phrase that was always used
for the master's house in the antebellum south.
And as I write about Billy's account of his paternity he says,
"Stories like these offer anecdotal the credible confirmation
that my wielding their physical, sexual, economic
and emotional powers, such white men have significantly lightened
so-called black America's collective complexion while
with apparent indifference, they contributed
to widespread illegitimacy in that community."
So one of the things that we talk about all the time now
and appropriately so is illegitimacy in the Black community;
but one of my arguments in this is to say
that this was first an imposed illegitimacy that came
out of the traditions of slavery.
His mother, Billy's mother, I determined belonged
to a slave-owning widower whose name was William H. Hunt.
She gave her oldest son his name with whom she had six children.
I judge from that account combined with census documentation
of both Billy and his mother;
and from Billy's appearance he was quite light-skinned, light-haired--
- light eyes, curly hair that to use our metaphor again he probably had
considerably more so-called white blood and so-called black blood.
Nonetheless as I also explained before for purposes of law
and in practice, he was in fact designated a Negro
and he never tried to seriously circumvent
that identification although he could have.
Another question arises because I think he perhaps may have had Native
American ancestors when he was a council in France in the 1920's.
There was an article written in a French newspaper
that said he was a po rouge [assumed spelling]--
that common but ugly designation of a redskin.
Perhaps Billy Hunt heard that rumor and repeated it in his host country
but anyway it became common news in France.
So the French it seemed in the 1920's really wanted
to differentiate him and his wife Ida
from the truly black colonial Africans whom they knew something
about and whom they considered very primitive.
They didn't consider-- they thought
that Billy Hunt was a sophisticated man.
He was an American; he was educated and so forth.
Ida Alexander Gibbs came from another such mixed race family
and her story as I document it is perhaps ever more intriguing
although we do hear these stories from time to time.
Family lore combined with other anecdotal
and census records reveals a lineage that's very interesting
on her maternal side.
I argue that Ida's maternal grandfather was a man named Richard
Mentor Johnson.   You probably don't know that name;
I didn't know it before I undertook this endeavor and I should know
such things because I'm supposed to be an historian.
But he was very well known in his time because from 1837
to 1841 he was Vice President of the United States--
Martin Van Buren's Vice President.   Before that period, during
that period Johnson was a Kentucky slave owner, he had been a Senator.
He officially remained a bachelor throughout his life.
There's a lot of documentation, a lot of speculation
about his relationships especially with a woman named Julia Chinn
with whom he had two daughters whom he acknowledged and supported.
But according to many accounts Julia Chinn was not the only slave woman
with whom he had sexual relations, and sometimes he kept more
than one mistress of color at the same time.
Several biographies suggest that he also had liaisons with
and prepare yourselves for this--
this one sort of shocked me-- with Julia's two nieces.
One was named Patience Chinn
and the other was named Lucy Chinn Alexander, Lucy being the mother
of my protagonist Ida Gibbs.
One such story which I quote in my books suggests that Lucy had
"about the complexion of Shakespeare's worthy Othello.
Who knows what this worthy Othello's complexion was like?
But in any case she at least had one child by that white man,
Maria, who was Ida's mother.
Most evidence suggests that it was Richard Mentor Johnson,
Vice President, who was her father.
I think that these stories are true and they also lead me to suspect
that the Chinn family had Native American forbears as well.
Several accounts suggest that Maria ran away from our R.M. Johnson
with assistance of a Chaukta [assumed spelling] Indian man.
So descriptions of the women in the family also say
that they were copper-skinned
and they had straight black hair and so on.
So I think that they probably had Native American blood as well.
My book accounts the early life of Ida's father, Mifflin Gibbs,
but his experiences while equally remarkable do not include any
such accounts of white men who used or misused their slave women
and father their children.
So those are some of the stories about Ida Gibbs
and William Hunt's ancestries that I account in Parallel World;
which leads to the designation of them in today's Lexicon
as being so-called mixed race family.
Now let's fast forward a little to the early 20th Century.
Billy Hunt first followed his very successful father-in-law
to the Consulate in colonial Madagascar in 1898 and then
after ten years in Madagascar he went on to 20 years in France,
then he was sent to Guadalupe and in 1929 he found himself
in the mid-Atlantic Portuguese Azores,
a local that he found to be quite idyllic.
At that time and here we get into some of the personal stories
that are intertwined, he had correspondence
with a young Negro woman named Caroline Bond-Day whose mother was a
close friend of Billy's wife, Ida.
Caroline wanted a photograph of Council Hunt to add
to the collection that she was pulling together
at Harvard University
for her pending Master's Degree in Anthropology.
When her work was complete,
she became the first self-identified Negro anywhere in the country
to earn a graduate degree in that field.
In 1932 Harvard published her thesis under the title,
a Study of Some Negro White Families in the United States.
The work seems a bit primitive by today's standards of anthropology,
but it was far in a way the earliest study of its kind
and I know a great deal about it
because Caroline Bond-Day was my mother's older sister,
she was my aunt and my mother worked on this thesis
in the book during her college summers.
It was a treasured fixture in my house as I was growing up and that's
where I first saw the photograph of William Henry Hunt.
One reason it intrigued me was because he looked so much
like members of my father's maternal family
and they too had the surname Hunt.
My mother assured me that that Hunts were not related to Council Hunt.
I'd like to be able to tell you that I definitely learned otherwise
in this book but I didn't; I don't think we're related.
What I learned is that Ida Gibbs Hunt
and William Henry Hunt definitely did meet one of my relatives,
a great uncle in Paris in 1921.
This sort of expands our ideas of all the things
that African-Americans did at that point.
They had mutual friends in Washington
and probably met again n the 1930's when Billy Hunt had retired
from the State Department.
Henry Hunt, a well known educator arrived here in 1934 to serve
as what was then called Franklin Delano Roosevelt's black cabinet.
I don't know whether you know that term.
Of course they were really cabinet members; the first cabinet member--
real cabinet member was Robert Weaver who was appointed
by Linda Johnson in 1965.
But it was the first time that any sizeable number
of African Americans held positions of substance
in the Federal Government.
I'd like to close my formal presentation with a little
of what Dubois wrote posthumously [assumed spelling]
about Henry Alexander Hunt which I include
in the epilogue of Parallel Worlds.
He asked rhetorically why Hunt, my great uncle,
had stayed so resonantly within the African American community,
never taking the easier path and opted to become the white man
that his physiog [assumed spelling] declared him.
When, as Dubois wrote, thousands of men and women like him have done so.
Those thousands who chose to pass for white included several members
of the Hunt family I write about there, and my Hunt family as well.
The overwhelming and I'm continuing with Dubois opinion
of white Americans, is that one black ancestors in 8
or 16 makes a tremendous difference of identity
of treatment of opportunity.
And then he went on to take a stand in America, however; as anything
but a Negro would have made him extremely unhappy
because here was an opportunity for battle on the highest plane.
Life is primarily friends and family
and one cannot lightly cast off this enveloping and intriguing bond
of love and affection to create a new place in a strange world.
So I've barely touched on 30 years of living, working and adventuring
around the world that's at the core of this book
about the remarkable Gibbs-Hunts.   But I hope that this discussion
of mixed race families has given you a taste of what's in my book;
something to think about, something to chew over and I hope
that you will be stimulated to ask questions.
We don't have terribly much time but I would love it and I thank you
so much for your attentiveness.   This is wonderful.
[ Applause ]   Adele Alexander: Yes Sir?
>> Audience question: In your significant study
of African-American families and I guess particularly mixed families,
how often did you come across the use of skin products--
skin lighteners or whiteners or even darkeners; or was that something
that you were able to research or was that something that was talked
about at all or written about?
>> Adele Alexander: Certainly I don't write about it
because I never found it in any of the people
that I happen to write about.
However, I've done a lot of work with a woman you may know
about whose name is A'lelia Bundles whose great grandmother was Madame
C.J. Walker who developed hair straightening--
she called them hair health products, skin health products
that also served to create a more-- a whiter appearance.
But I guess that one of the things is that it almost seems remarkable
to me not that so many people did these things,
but that so many did not.
Because in our culture there was so much of a premium
that has been placed on whiteness-- day to day inconveniences,
legal restrictions and everything else.
It's easy for me to understand why a number of black people wanted
to be part of the majority in this country because they were
so discriminated against and any steps
in that direction I think were understandable.
>> Audience question: I've enjoyed your presentation very much.
My friend and I came here from Georgia;
we're both from the Deep South, rural Georgia,
and wonder about your connection to Georgia given your earlier book,
Ambiguous Lives, and just wondered if you'd comment about that.
>> Adele Alexander: I'm a big city girl.
I'm a total Northerner, I grew up in New York City
and I didn't know anything whatsoever
about Georgia beside Atlanta, the world of the Deep South,
sort of began and ended for me
with the Atlanta suburbs when I was growing up.
And then in the 1980's, the early 1980's I was--
also I should add sort of on my own bio, that I went back
to graduate school when my children were going to graduate school
so I was a very old graduate student--
And so in case you all got confused about my age and my white hair.
But so this was in the 1980's that I went down to rural Georgia
and the ruralness of it was a revolution to me.
The degree to which the South was still-- much of the rural south,
not Atlanta, that's one of the big differences.
The rural south was still held captive by its traditions
of segregation but also how community
and family retain traditions that we-- when we move to urban areas,
we move to the North, we sometimes lose these things.
And I just totally became engrossed in this family of mine that came
out of Hancock County, Georgia
which at one time was the most populous county in the State;
and it is now just such a total sad backorder.
But there I found the most wonderful family and friend so that's a lot
of my connection with Georgia.   Oh thank you so much.
They're holding up a big sign in here that says overtime.
I think they're going to cut off my mic any time, any moment now
so let me once again thank you for coming.
[ Applause ]
>> Adele Alexander: And if I can just add one quick thing.
For some reason they scheduled my book signing before and not
after my talk which is crazy,
but if any of you do want books signed I would be more
than delighted to do so.   Thank you again.
[ Applause ]
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.