This study analyzes how post-Reconstruction and post-Civil Rights figures, such as President Barack Obama, Booker T. Washington, John Mercer Langston, and Frederick Douglass, who are direct descendants of one European, Jewish, black, or Italian American parent and one African parent describe themselves in their autobiographies despite the one-drop rule, which American society uses to characterize anyone with any amount of African ancestry as black.

Review

"Pace’s work not only adds research knowledge to the academic field but reminds the reader of our nation’s “pride and pain”, - our boast about our great diversity and our ongoing 300 – year struggle over the status and rights of African-Americans and what W.E.B. Du Bois called the “double consciousness” of its black citizens.

Examining racial identity of prominent African-Americans in two important and pivotal periods of the nation’s civil rights struggles adds a significant dimension to the autobiographical analysis and self-identity – even when they occurred a century apart. Its focus on first-generation African-American offspring of bi-racial marriages adds another dimension to the analytical nature of the work." 

Richard Arrington, Jr. , Ph.D.,

Miles College

"Race and Identity in Multiracial African American Autobiographies (May 2014) by Sheba N. Pace offers a wealth of information and a compelling and readable introduction to 20th century multiracial African American autobiography. We learn that the post-Reconstruction writers emphasized inclusion, while the post-Civil Rights authors, living in an environment in which legal segregation had been formally abandoned, tend to emphasize exclusion.

Dr. Pace, in vividly contrasting the post-Reconstruction image of the “Talented Tenth” with that of the “fictional tragic mulatto” of the Civil Rights autobiographies, makes a very valuable scholarly contribution to the study of multiracial African American literature of autobiography in the twentieth century, a study that should galvanize the interest of a diversity of groups."

The Red Mountain Post