Hypodescent

While customs, practices and systems of belief emphasizing the value of purity of descent are arguably as old as mankind, few societies systematically codified them, or legally enforced their outcome.

The North American practice of applying a rule of hypodescent began during the colonial era when indentured servants and transported convicts working at the direction of European colonists and colonial authorities were joined by enslaved Africans that from the 16th century onwards were transported to the Americas via the Atlantic slave trade.

Her English father had acknowledged her as his daughter, had her baptized as Christian, and, falling ill, established a legal guardian to care for her after his death, arranging a limited-term indenture for her as a girl.

[citation needed] The Southern author Mary Chesnut wrote in her famous A Diary from Dixie, of the Civil War-era, that "any lady is ready to tell you who is the father of all mulatto children in everybody’s household but her own.

"[3] Fanny Kemble, the British actress who married an American slaveholder, wrote about her observations of slavery as well, including the way white men sexually abused slave women and left their mixed-race children enslaved.

Sometimes the white fathers freed the children and/or their mothers, or provided education or apprenticeship, or settled property on them in a significant transfer of social capital.

If they were illegitimate and mixed race, they were apprenticed in order to avoid the community being burdened with upkeep, but such people gained a step in freedom.

[5] By the turn of the nineteenth century, many of these families of free African Americans, along with European-American neighbors, migrated to frontier areas of Virginia, North Carolina, and then further west.

Mixed-race people of African-European descent are believed to have been the origin of some isolated settlements, which have long claimed or were said to be of American Indian or Portuguese ancestry.

[5] As an example, a 21st-century DNA study of a group of Melungeon families in Tennessee and Kentucky, long rumored to be descendants of Turks or Native Americans, showed they were overwhelmingly of African and European ancestry.

From 1890 to 1908, beginning with Mississippi, the state legislatures passed new constitutions and laws that created barriers to voter registration by such means as the poll tax, literacy tests, record requirements and others.

African Americans and whites established the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909 to fight against legal discrimination and disenfranchisement.

Each time they won a court case, for instance, against the use of white primaries, white-dominated legislatures would pass new laws to exclude blacks from the political system.

In the 20th century, under influences of eugenics and racial discrimination, states enacted laws classifying people as black who had any traceable evidence (or perception of any African ancestry).

Under Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924, the 'One-drop' rule defined as black a person with any known African ancestry, regardless of the number of intervening generations.

At the same time that Virginia was trying to harden racial caste, African Americans were organizing to overturn segregation and regain civil rights, that had been lost to Jim Crow laws and disfranchisement of the majority of the black community.

[7] This was part of a continuing social hardening of racial lines after the turn of the century, when southern states imposed legal segregation and disfranchised African Americans.

But, in a case exemplifying the complex racial history of the United States, Obama is believed to be descended through his maternal line from John Punch, the first African documented historically as a slave in Virginia.

The US late-19th century author Charles Chesnutt, who grew up free in Ohio and was of mixed African-European ancestry, wrote numerous stories set in the post-Civil War South.

Passing is a 1929 novel by Nella Larsen, dealing with mixed-race African-American women who choose alternate paths for marriage and identity.