The Clamorgans
One Family's History of Race in America
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The Damning, Absurd, and Revelatory History of Race in America Told through the History of a Single Family
Historian Julie Winch uses her sweeping, multigenerational history of the unforgettable Clamorgans to chronicle how one family navigated race in America from the 1780s through the 1950s. What she discovers overturns decades of received academic wisdom. Far from an impermeable wall fixed by whites, race opened up a moral gray zone that enterprising blacks manipulated to whatever advantage they could obtain.
The Clamorgan clan traces to the family patriarch Jacques Clamorgan, a French adventurer of questionable ethics who bought up, or at least claimed to have bought up, huge tracts of land around St. Louis. On his death, he bequeathed his holdings to his mixed-race, illegitimate heirs, setting off nearly two centuries of litigation. The result is a window on a remarkable family that by the early twentieth century variously claimed to be black, Creole, French, Spanish, Brazilian, Jewish, and white.
The Clamorgans is a remarkable counterpoint to the central claim of whiteness studies, namely that race as a social construct was manipulated by whites to justify discrimination. Winch finds in the Clamorgans generations upon generations of men and women who studiously negotiated the very fluid notion of race to further their own interests. Winch's remarkable achievement is to capture in the vivid lives of this unforgettable family the degree to which race was open to manipulation by Americans on both sides of the racial divide.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
There's enough roguishness and propriety, fakery and deceit, true love and abandonment in Winch's history of the Clamorgan clan to sustain a TV miniseries. Although, the French "adventurer," Jacques Clamorgan (c. 1730 1814) left his substantial property to his "four natural children,' " his ownership of those large tracts of Missouri land was dubious to begin with. Added to that, the "irrefutable fact that Clamorgan had cohabited exclusively with women of color" (and that several other descendants were illegitimate) sparked generations of litigation over the inheritance. "Matters became very murky indeed," writes historian Winch (A Gentleman of Color), as the Clamorgan land claims played out on a national stage, stretching into the 1990s. As Jacques' descendants become more numerous, and distinctly white in appearance, ironies abound: some "passing" out of inertia or even ignorance, others maintaining ties to African-American groups. Although presidents get drawn in, and cases rise to the Supreme Court, this is essentially the saga of a singular American family and their dynasty-like preoccupation with the acquisition of land, money, and power, and later attempts to recoup (or at least leverage) them. Winch serves up more detail than casual readers may want to know, but she keeps the story moving, partly because where much "depends on whose versions of events one believes," she wisely leaves it to the reader to decide.
