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Current Projects
Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations: Mixed-Heritage Families in Brooklyn
Project Description
Project Background
Scholarly Advisors
Project Funders
Project Staff
Project Contact
Public Programs
Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations (CBBG) is a public programming series and oral history project about mixed-heritage families, race, ethnicity, culture, and identity, infused with historical perspective. CBBG is currently in the planning phase (April 2011 – March 2012) and will result in a multi-faceted interpretive website expected to be completed in 2015.
 By providing a public forum for conversations about mixed-heritage families, Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations will inform the dialogue with historical perspectives on social constructions of race, ethnicity, and community; changes in immigration and citizenship laws and practices; and changes in marriage and partnership laws and practices. Through an interpretive website, online discussions initiated and led by scholars, public programs and events, Brooklyn Historical Society (BHS) will invite the public to share their own stories, respond to other people’s stories, react to, and learn from scholarly interpretations of these stories.
“Stories of individuals who have been most affected by the taboo on interracial marriage…These are the people directly affected by the color line…and their struggles illustrate the shifting nature of that line.” – Renee Romano, Professor of History, Oberlin College
This project builds upon BHS’s oral history collections, begun in 1973, which contain interviews with more than 500 narrators around themes such as the Black and Jewish Communities in the Neighborhood of Crown Heights, Brooklyn’s Puerto Rican Community, Brooklyn Navy Yard Workers, and Brooklyn’s West Indian Community.
“While studies of individual communities in Brooklyn abound, scholars have largely examined individual neighborhoods and ethnic enclaves as homogenous and bounded spaces. Although these case-studies have been insightful and important, they have tended to downplay the historically fluid borders, cultural hybridity, and overlapping identities of Brooklyn’s communities. BHS will examine Brooklyn as an interstitial space in which cultures and communities messily overlap.” – Suleiman Osman, Assistant Professor of American Studies at George Washington University
Project Background
Forty-three years ago, interracially married couples faced prosecution and jail time, or violence, if they happened to cross into one of 16 states that prohibited and punished marriages on the basis of racial classifications. Fifty-eight years ago, anti-miscegenation laws were on the books in 30 states. Eighty years ago, in 1930, the Hays Code forbade portrayals of interracial romance, curtailing the careers of actors of color like Anna May Wong who could no longer play the romantic leads. In Germany in 1935, The Nuremberg Laws were introduced that prohibited marriage between Jewish Germans and other Germans. The only other nation to legislate against intermarriage was Apartheid South Africa in 1949. While interfaith marriages were not legally proscribed in the U.S., interfaith and interclass marriages often met with opposition from family and community.
And yet, in less than two generations since the last anti-miscegenation laws were removed, a study recently released by the Pew Research Center reports that a record one out of seven new marriages in the United States were between spouses of a different race or ethnicity from one another.
From Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? (Stanley Kramer, 1967) to Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever (1991), stories about mixed-heritage romance abound in theater, film, literature, cultural criticism, news media, political cartoons, pop culture, humor, and folklore. These stories powerfully address issues about gender, sexuality, class, power, community, nationality, and identity. Despite popular culture’s fascination with this topic, scholars agree that all too rarely do we hear the real stories of mixed-heritage families’ personal experiences, which can add perspective and complexity to historical moments and movements.
Scholarly Advisors
Mary Marshall Clark, Oral History, Columbia University is Director of the Oral History Research Office and a past president of the Oral History Association. The Co-Director of Oral History Master’s program at Columbia, she directs the Columbia University Summer Institute on Oral History.
Martha Hodes, History, New York University is the author of White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South (Yale University Press, 1997), which won the Allan Nevins Prize for Literary Distinction in the Writing of History. Her book The Sea Captain's Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century (W.W. Norton, 2006) was a finalist for the Lincoln Prize and was named a Best Book of 2006 by Library Journal.
Keren R. McGinity, History, University of Michigan is a gender historian who specializes in American Jews and intermarriage. Her first book, Still Jewish: A History of Women and Intermarriage in America (NYU Press, 2009), was selected as a finalist for the 2009 National Jewish Book Award.
Suleiman Osman, American Studies, George Washington University specializes in U.S. urban history, the built environment, U.S. cultural and social history, and the study of race and ethnicity, with a particular focus on the way urban space both shapes and is produced by culture and politics.
He is author of Inventing Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification, Race and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York (Oxford University Press, 2011).
Renee Romano, History, Oberlin College is an historian of the 20th-century United States who specializes in contemporary American race relations and African American history. Her book, Race Mixing: Black-White Marriage in Postwar America (Harvard University Press, 2003) brings together political, social and cultural history sources in a narrative history that examines the politics of interracial marriage and the social experience of interracial couples from the 1940s through today.
Michael J. Rosenfeld, Sociology, Stanford University is a social demographer studying race, ethnicity, immigration, and family structure, especially family structure changes over time. He is author of The Age of Independence: Interracial Unions, Same-Sex Unions, and the Changing American Family (Harvard University Press, 2007).
Elizabeth M. Smith-Pryor, History, Kent State University practiced law for six years in New York City before returning to academia. She is author of Property Rites: The Rhinelander Trial, Passing, and the Protection of Whiteness (University of North Carolina Press, 2009).
Karen Woods Weierman, Literary History, Worcestor State College is author of One Nation, One Blood: Interracial Marriage in American Fiction, Scandal, and Law, 1820-1870 (University of Massachusetts Press, 2005).
Project Funders
Institute of Museum and Library Services
National Endowment for the Humanities
New York Council for the Humanities
Two Trees Management
Brooklyn Brewery
Sweet ’N Low Division of Cumberland Packing
FHL Bank San Francisco
Project Staff
Director of Oral History, Sady Sullivan
Project Contact
Director of Oral History, Sady Sullivan
ssullivan@brooklynhistory.org
Public Programs
Thursday, January 26
Watch & Discuss the film Something New with sociologist Erica Chito-Childs
7:00 p.m.
Wednesday, February 1
Watch & Discuss Vin Diesel’s short film Multi-Facial
7:00 p.m.
Sunday, March 11
Watch & Discuss the groundbreaking 1967 film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?
2:00 p.m.
Wednesday, April 4
Bridging the Gap: Poetry Showcase with Tara Betts, Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai, Adrienne Lyric (A. Lyric), and Nichole Acosta
7:00 p.m.
Saturday, April 14
Identity and Oral History Workshop
2:00 p.m.
Saturday, May 5
Film Screening: The Loving Story with filmmaker Nancy Buirski
3:00 p.m.
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