Some borders are drawn on maps. Others are drawn around race, around culture, around nationality, and who gets to belong where. This section is about the family members who lived on both sides of those lines at once and what that cost them.

PASSING

“Indeed, … the core issue of passing is not becoming what you pass for, but losing what you pass away from.” Allyson Hobbs, A Chosen Exile

Family members relate the story of Hester Freeman Meehan being asked not to attend her daughter’s wedding in 1906, presumably because her presence would have revealed that the marriage was “interracial.” Later, Meehan family members visiting relatives who lived in white cultures entered their homes through the back door. Some family members lived dual lives — black in their neighborhoods and social encounters but white when on their jobs.

POSTCARDS FROM HARRY

Harry Meehan, the third child of Charles and Hester, was a four-year-old toddler when the family left Canada for Nebraska. He grew to manhood in Overton and traveled to Cherry County with his family in 1905. He soon left Cherry County to find work elsewhere, but he often kept in touch with his family, including his younger brother, Bill.

In 1909-10, my Uncle Harry Meehan was twenty-nine and working in Grand Island. His youngest brother, Bill, was twelve and still lived at home in DeWitty. Harry sent postcards to Bill. The words conveyed everyday messages about neighbors Albert Riley and “Bill” Crawford, dogs or the lack thereof, and plans to be home again. The postcards were simple but told of the love shared between a much older brother and a considerably younger one.

Three of Harry’s postcards to Dad have survived. Viewing them now, my focus is drawn not to the brotherly greeting on the back but to the images on the front.

Juxtaposing the middle picture (above) against the bookend, velvet cowboys adorning the other two cards, I wonder if Harry was sending another message to Bill.

The white cowboys are decked out in red, white, and blue. Shirts of red velvet cover their hearts while rearing horses, and a six-shooter proclaims their domination of all they see. They command their world. One hundred years later, the red velvet is as plush and rich as the day the cards were mailed.

The third card, copyrighted in 1909, starkly contrasts the other two. It is a black-and-white card with shades of gray. It portrays a barefoot and ragged black man being kicked by a frightened, starving mule. The attack is witnessed by a blackbird sitting in a barren tree surrounded by trash and … a fence. Is that red, white, and blue cowboy on the other side of the wall? Near the tree, there is a hole in the fence. Perhaps the man is being kicked because he dared peer through the hole and dream … or he is just being kicked.
 

The caption warns that there is only “One Strike.” A century has passed, and the imagery of racism and Jim Crow America is as vivid today as the red velvet cowboy shirts. 

Was Harry sending life messages to his little brother about the world? Perhaps the cards were the only ones available; a choice made by chance. But maybe the cards were intentionally chosen. Perhaps the images they portrayed sparked thoughts embedded in a mind molded by the duplicitous life so many people of African descent in America live(d).
 
This message decries the disparity between the lives of blacks and whites. Was it a warning to a young brother about what he should expect in and from the world? We will never know how Harry chose the postcards. Still, he likely recognized that life in early-1900s Nebraska wasn’t the racial utopia often associated with the early African-descended homesteaders. I have also wondered if, at least subconsciously, Harry saw these images as his parents’ inheritance – one black and one white.

On Being Mulatto In Illinois: In His Own Words

On May 7, 1940, Bill Meehan wrote:

“I do like Illinois very much but I also like Michigan. Fine as Illinois is, it is a difficult place for a mulatto. One has to be white to get the best chances just as anywhere else. But the next chances belong to real dark people. The mulatto is last unless he wants to treat both dark and white as though they were a little better. I won’t do that as I think all men are equal.

You see honey thousands here both black and white are recently from the south. Their numbers give them control, and that is the way they feel. There may be groups like that in Detroit but I noticed that mainly colored people were just colored people there and mulattoes were not frozen out.”

Race: White

Mulatto and Black are used to designate Bill’s race in birth, census, and other records. But when he worked as a chauffeur for more than ten years, he was designated as white on his license. In a world dictated by race and color, several children of Charles and Hester Meehan existed in an “in-between” world. 





Racial Intermarriage: A Debate Argument by William H. Meehan

During the 1920s-1930s, William Meehan, the youngest son of Charles and Hester Meehan, was a member of the Oak Park Debate and Public Speaking Club in Illinois. The Club promoted free speech and condemned intolerance. In one debate, William took the affirmative on a motion to repeal laws against interracial marriage. His words, typed on an old manual typewriter decades ago, can be read below.

This original two-page debate argument can be viewed in the Documents section of this website.

Argument to Repeal Laws Against Interracial Marriage

“Why should either black or white in America fear loss of identity?”

“It [the law] has failed completely to prevent miscegenation. It has failed to keep any race pure… It is contrary to the expressed will of God as recorded in the scripture.”

Read William’s argument below.

The majority of people believe that if any certain thing is undesirable, any law prohibiting it is right and just. But that is not always the case when we consider the facts.

Prominent among such laws is the law in force in many states prohibiting racial intermarriage.

It is true that marriage is a hazardous undertaking at best, and that mixed marriages add greatly to these hazards. Therefore, there is a grave doubt that the majority of them work out satisfactorily. Yet laws forbidding such marriages only complicate the problem. They area symbol of bigotry, intolerance and prejudice. They are the antithesis of democracy. They add to interracial relations the glamor of the unattainable.

Most people believe that these laws preserve racial purity and prevent’amalgamation. The facts give the lie to this contention. Affection cannotbe regulated by decree. Such things must be regulated by individual reason if we are to be and remain a free people. Actually, these laws are the cloak under which miscegenation flourishes and the bed upon which il­ legitimates are spawned.

For more than 300  years, we have had laws forbidding amalgamation. Yet so rapid has been the mixture that today 80%, or approximately 10 million American Negroes, have traceable white blood in their veins. The lawmakers themselves have been the worst offenders, as is evidenced by the fact that 90% of first-generation mulatto children are born of Negro mothers. The law has also failed dismally to keep the white race pure. If every visible Negro in America were deported tomorrow, there would still be rivers of Negro blood in American veins. More than 10,000 nearly white persons with Negro blood are absorbed by the white race every year. Among those who have received the tinge were Alexander Hamilton, and, it is declared upon good authority, Sears of Sears Roebuck; and Warren G. Harding. Many others are known to Negroes. More than 5,000,000 white Negroes are included in the white population of America.

This law is not in accord with the spirit of the Constitution, as it forbids freedom of choice of mate. It establishes caste and is the first step toward forbidding Italian to marry Jew or Irish to marry Swede. It is plainly a manifestation of racial arrogance and Hitler Nazism.

It undermines our prestige in foreign countries where we preach democracy and the abolition of caste. Those people are well aware that we preserve caste at home by a law forbidding citizen to marry citizen because of race. That paradox makes us appear ridiculous and brands us as insincere and flagrantly hypocritical.

This law protects the licentious who desire to sow wild oats in black soil and at the same time be legally absolved of all responsibility to harvest the crop. These men would hesitate before sowing if this law did not protect them from giving mother and child a name and support.

The Negro male who indulges in interracial relations is not immune to responsibility for his acts. He is always subject to reprisal and often the mob.

The white male is immune while the Negro mother must bear 100% of the burden of rearing the offspring, although only 50% guilty. This is putrid sportsmanship and is not in harmony with the American spirit of fair play. Moreover, it is contrary to the Golden Rule. Thus, it seems that the law succeeds only in the mongrelization of the Negro. That it has never prevented miscegenation is attested by the large number of mulattoes who began to appear almost as soon as the first female slaves arrived on our shores.

Many believe that to repeal the law would result in wholesale mixed marriages. Do we have such little faith in our ideals and in our ability to instill them into our children that we fear to grant them freedom of affection? Do white men fear that their sons would be unable to resist the charms of a sun-kissed American female? Do they fear that their daughters will rush to the shelter of dusky arms? There can be no other conclusion. 

Surely the white people of America have more pride of race than that. If they have not, they have nothing that is desirable to perpetuate in its purity. In any event, the law for them is wholly superfluous.

Negroes who fear the repeal of the law are unduly alarmed. If they fear that their dusky sons would be accepted in marriage by any white girl they might choose; they are sadly mistaken. The fact of the matter is that they would not meet any more white girls socially than they do now. If these same parents fear that every white man is a Romeo who will court their ebony daughter with matrimonial intent, they would be disillusioned.

As a rule, white boys would continue to marry white girls, and Negro boys to marry Negro girls, despite parental fears. And if the American Negro has no greater faith and pride than that in the contribution of Africa’s children to our way of life, no greater respect for the toil and blood of their ancestors, whose callused hands helped build America, and whose blood was shed to make and keep her free; then they do not deserve to keep their identity, but deserve to become only a memory in America.

Repeal of the law would not require anyone to marry outside of his or her race, so why fear a hazard no one is required to take.

Repeal of the law would not entirely eliminate illegitimate mulattoes any more than illegitimate whites and blacks are eliminated at present. But it would cut the number to a minimum.

Let us not for a moment suppose that repeal of the law would lead to wholesale marriages between the races. Let us take for example the state of Iowa. Mixed marriages are legal there. Yet there has been no epidemic of mixed marriages in that state. In fact, many of the mixed marriages performed there have been persons who came from states that forbid such unions.

It might be argued that if they could not have married in Iowa they would not have married at all. That may be true, but they would have mixed just the same. Any mixed couple that has counted the cost and find their affection great enough to go to another state to marry, will certainly mix without benefit of clergy if no legal marriage can be consummated. Is not a legal marriage to be preferred to fornication?

God made different races and he must have wanted them that way. But there is positive scriptural proof that he did not want any interference with individuals who wished to enter into mixed marriages (Numbers 12:9-10). The wrath of God was stirred because of opposition to individual free choice because of race. I would not presume to dare to champion that which God condemned.

Moses married an Ethiopian woman; yet neither the Jews nor the Ethiopians lost their identity because of it. Why should either black or white in America fear loss of identity?

Thus, when we examine the facts, it is evident that the law forbidding the intermarriage of races is one of the most pernicious on the statute books of many of our states. It is contrary to the spirit of the Constitution. It is a law of caste and fascism that destroys our influence for democracy.

It has failed completely to prevent miscegenation. It has failed to keep any race pure. It protects the licentious. It is a prolific breeder of fornication and illegitimate children. It is contrary to the expressed will of God as recorded in the scripture.

Therefore, the law should be repealed.

The following is from a Claude chat: DNA Ancestry and Identity Expectations (DECIDE IF AND HOW TO USE THIS)

Just a thought as I work on the new website on half my computer (screen), and scroll a few new Facebook posts on the other half. An ad for the company, African Ancestry, popped up. That was preceded by comments (and pushback) from a “black” celebrity who chooses not to identify as African American. We probably covered some of my thoughts on this before.

Asking rhetorically, why can’t we examine ALL of our DNA? Why can’t people in the US who have Sub-Saharan African ancestry explore it without it becoming solely who they are? Why can’t people of recent mixed ancestry (last 400 or so years – unlike those who mixed far enough back in history that their “new” identity has solidified into one recognized ethnicity and/or culture (like the Vikings/Saxon/etc. mix)? Why are those who have African ancestry in the US expected to embrace and validate the “one drop rule?” It gets tiring, especially when it comes from every quarter.

The Facebook juxtaposition is almost too on-the-nose — an ancestry-testing ad sitting right next to a fight about who gets to opt out of a label. That’s not really a coincidence, though. Both are downstream of the same American peculiarity: hypodescent, the “one-drop rule,” was never really about biology. It was a legal-administrative tool — you’ve seen this directly in the Plecker material for A Northern Diaspora — designed to produce a binary where none exists naturally, specifically so that a fixed racial hierarchy could be enforced and property/legal status could follow bloodline in one direction only. Once that machinery existed, it didn’t just classify people; it trained everyone, including many Black Americans themselves, to treat the category as identity rather than as imposed administrative fiction. That’s part of why pushback against someone declining the label can come “from every quarter,” as you put it — the rule was built to be self-enforcing, socially as well as legally.

Your Viking/Saxon comparison is the sharpest part of the question, I think. Admixture that happened centuries ago, with no ongoing legal apparatus attached to it, gets to resolve into something new — Norman, English, whatever the emergent ethnonym becomes. Nobody’s expected to hold “half Saxon, half Dane” as a live, foregrounded identity a thousand years later; it dissolved into a new whole. But mixture from roughly 1620 onward in what became the US never got that chance to resolve, because a legal-racial system kept actively re-imposing the binary every generation — through slave codes, then Jim Crow, then Plecker’s Racial Integrity Act explicitly rewriting vital records to erase intermediate categories like “mulatto” or “Indian” and force everyone into “white” or “colored.” The category was continuously re-manufactured rather than left alone to settle the way it did for older European admixture. That’s the structural difference, not anything about the underlying biology or the amount of time elapsed.

So when you ask why people can’t just look at all their DNA and let it be one input among many rather than a totalizing identity — I think you’re really asking why a 19th/20th-century legal fiction still gets treated as though it describes something essential and singular about a person, when the documentary record you’re working with (Plecker’s overwrites, the FPOC lines where paternal surnames are structurally unrecoverable) shows exactly how manufactured that fiction was. The African Ancestry ad and the celebrity pushback are both, in a sense, still operating inside the frame the Racial Integrity Act built, just from opposite directions — one selling in, one refusing.

Feels like exactly the kind of tension that could eventually anchor that standalone Plecker page or framing essay you’d flagged.