The latest on Emma Dunham Kelley Hawkins: No, she wasn't black
Early in 2005, as you may recall, there was a ripple of press interest in nineteenth-century author Emma Dunham Kelley Hawkins.
For years, Hawkins had been considered an African American author, and her novels were spotlighted in the Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. But on February 20, 2005, Holly Jackson, a graduate student at Brandeis University, published an article in the Boston Globe revealing that Hawkins never identified herself as an African American, and was consistently identified as white in contemporary census records. Hawkins' inclusion in the black literary canon now seemed to hinge on a single piece of evidence: a photograph in the frontispiece of her first novel, Megda, in which she appeared to have a dark complexion. Pressured by Jackson's findings, Gates readily conceded that a mistake had apparently been made regarding Hawkins' identity....
Now Dr. Katherine Flynn has the goods to prove by census records that Hawkins wasn't black. Flynn has traced more than four generations of Hawkins' family through census, probate, and newspaper records, definitively establishing that there is no evidence to believe that Hawkins ever identified as an African American or had ancestors who did.
Read entire article at Caleb McDaniel at HNN blog Cliopatria
For years, Hawkins had been considered an African American author, and her novels were spotlighted in the Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. But on February 20, 2005, Holly Jackson, a graduate student at Brandeis University, published an article in the Boston Globe revealing that Hawkins never identified herself as an African American, and was consistently identified as white in contemporary census records. Hawkins' inclusion in the black literary canon now seemed to hinge on a single piece of evidence: a photograph in the frontispiece of her first novel, Megda, in which she appeared to have a dark complexion. Pressured by Jackson's findings, Gates readily conceded that a mistake had apparently been made regarding Hawkins' identity....
Now Dr. Katherine Flynn has the goods to prove by census records that Hawkins wasn't black. Flynn has traced more than four generations of Hawkins' family through census, probate, and newspaper records, definitively establishing that there is no evidence to believe that Hawkins ever identified as an African American or had ancestors who did.