Invisible Blackness: A Louisiana Family in the Age of Racial Passing (Hardcover)

Description Invisible Blackness explores the complex lives of Creoles of mixed race born in Louisiana to enslaved women and the white men who enslaved them. Individuals such as Alice Thomasson Grice forged their own identities--and often reinvented themselves--within the increasingly strict racial order of antebellum and postbellum Louisiana. Alice Thomasson Grice occupied an unusual position among mixed-race Creoles of her era, as her white father recognized her formerly enslaved mother as his wife and raised Alice and her siblings as free people. After Alice married a white steamboat captain, Charles Grice, she and her children chose to identify as white. Invisible Blackness explores why Alice, her children, and friends in similar positions elected to cross the color line during the so-called "great age of passing" that spanned from 1880 to 1925.While it's impossible to quantify the number of people who crossed the color line at any given time, evidence suggests that the rate of