Ronald McNair Program
Tiffany Griffin	SCHOOL: Tougaloo College    MAJOR:  Dr. Ethel Young-Minor    MENTOR: Dr.     GRADUATION DATE: May 1999    ORGANIZATIONS Delta Sigma Theta National Dean's List Mu Alpha Theta Alpha Chi Honor Society Alpha Lamda Delta Honor Society

To be considered African-American in the United States not even half of one’s ancestry must be African Black.  The nation’s answer to the question ‘Who is black?’ has long been that an African American is any person with any known African ancestry.  This definition reflects the slaves’s and their descendants long experience with slavery and later Jim Crow segregation.  In the South, this definition came to be known as the one-drop rule.  Essentially, a single drop of Black blood results in an individual being Black.  This definition emerged from the American South to become the nation’s definition, generally accepted by whites and Blacks alike.  The one-drop rule appeared in the early 1800's and eventually became the dominant rule for defining the racial category of those of white and black African ancestry.  Therefore, attention must be given to the different patterns of white control and the associated beliefs; surrounding the different circumstances of miscegenation, mixing of the races, to the issues surrounding the survival of mulattoes in society and their status as freed persons after Reconstruction.

The works of William Wells Brown and Francis E.W. Harper provide two of the best literary examples in African American literature of the predicament of the mulatto in the nineteenth century.  William Wells Brown was born a mulatto slave and later escaped slavery later becoming an active abolitionist.  In his literary work, Clotel, Brown uses his personal experiences to express the injustices suffered by the slave and in particular the mulatto.  Although, Francis E. W. Harper was not born into slavery, her parents were mulatto slaves.  Therefore, the experiences of slavery and the experiences of African-Americans and mulattoes during Reconstruction she fictionalizes in her novel, Iola Leroy,  were related and experienced by her first hand.

Problems of personal identity , especially for very light mulattoes, are apparent in both novels.  These personal dilemmas are the internalized counterparts of the ambiguities and strains involved in occupying a marginal status in the pattern of race relations in the United States.  The conflicting perceptions and conflicting role expectations of the mulatto are traced through slavery and the Reconstruction in African- American literature to illustrate the paradox of ‘Who is Black?’ in the white community as well as in the black community.  The novels of William Wells Brown and Francis E. W. Harper illustrate the injustices suffered by all in the slave community, dark black and mulatto.  In doing so, they provide a means of unifying all who possess African blood to the African- American community , even if some possess only ‘one-drop’.