Tuesday, Feb. 18, 2003: 3:00-5:00 p.m.
In 1957, a professional boxer in New Orleans named Ralph
Dupas was threatened with losing his eligibility to compete
in segregated bouts unless he could prove his whiteness to
the satisfaction of the State Board of Health and the State
Boxing Commission.
The state alleged that Dupas's parents were "colored,"
but had constructed an elaborate plot to pass as white that
involved changing names, moving to New Orleans, and inventing
a "foundling" story for the mother. The state fought
his attempts to gain documentation as white for three years,
all the way to the Louisiana Supreme Court. Although Dupas
finally prevailed, the case opens up a fascinating entree
into examining the legal, popular, and political definitions
of race in the era of Jim Crow.
Michelle Brattain is assistant professor of history at Georgia
State University. Her book, The Politics of Whiteness:
Race, Workers, and Culture in the Modern South presents
the first sustained analysis of white racial identity among
workers in what was the South's largest industry--the textile
industry--for much of the twentieth century. Grounding her
work in a study of Rome, Georgia, and surrounding Floyd County
from the Great Depression to the 1970s, Professor Brattain
paints a richly textured local portrait of how the varied
social benefits of whiteness shaped the experience of textile
millhands and, as a result, Southern politics. In doing so,
she challenges traditional views of Southern politics as dominated
by elites and marked by passivity among Southern workers.
Brattain uncovers considerable white working-class political
influence and activism for decades starting in the 1930s--which,
by re-creating and defending Southern institutions grounded
in the idea of racial difference, helped pave the way for
resistance to the civil rights movement.
A native of Charlotte, Professor Brattain earned a bachelor's
degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
in 1990. She continued her training at Rutgers University,
earning her doctorate in January 1997. She taught at the California
Institute of Technology and the University of Auckland, New
Zealand, before going to Georgia State University.
The MARIAL Center
Emory West, 4th Floor, Room 415E
Open to the public
Refreshments will be served
