Kathryn A. Schumaker, Ph.D., associate professor and the Edith Kinney Gaylord Presidential Professor in the Department of History, Dodge Family College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oklahoma, has received a highly competitive award from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The one-year $60,000 NEH Public Scholars Award will support the writing and revision of a book providing new history and insight on the color line in Mississippi told through the stories of interracial families. The term color line refers to the racial segregation, enforced by state and local laws known as Jim Crow laws, which were particularly common in the Southern United States following the abolition of slavery.
Schumaker’s project, “Interracial Families in Jim Crow Mississippi,” will explore how interracial families experienced the rise of Jim Crow and how they responded.
“The book centers on the remarkable case of the Burnsides, who crossed the color line and ‘passed’ as white while remaining in their tight-knit community,” Schumaker said. “Although segregationist politicians claimed to support the strict separation of the races, the continued existence of mixed-race families in Mississippi into the twentieth century reveals the contradictions and complexity of how segregation law was understood and enforced at the local level. Ultimately, white supremacists sought to erase the existence of such familial ties across the color line to perpetuate the myth of segregationists’ historic commitment to ‘racial purity.’”
NEH Public Scholars Award funding was distributed to approximately eight percent of the 314 proposals received nationally. Schumaker’s project begins January 2023.
Director of the OU Arts and Humanities Forum Kimberly J. Marshall, Ph.D. said of the announcement, “we are very lucky to have excellent publicly engaged humanities faculty like Dr. Schumaker here at OU.”
