NAACP cofounder lost US citizenship for marrying a Bengali man

by Rishi Tue Mar 05, 2013 10:55 pm

I have recently been thinking about the blurred race politics of early Twentieth Century activist Taraknath Das. Das was an anti-colonial Bengali organizer in British India, eventually fleeing arrest by British authorities by immigrating to America. After landing in New York in 1907, Das carried on the Indian Independence movement in exile and also married a white socialist named Mary Keatinge Morse, a co-founder of the NAACP. Morse’s marriage to Das had an unusual consequence: it revoked her citizenship. A law passed in 1922 voided citizenship for American women who married foreign men. As for Das himself, federal law had stated that only “white persons” and persons of African ancestry could be granted citizenship. Previously, attornies for Indian immigrants like Das had argued that Indians were of “Aryan descent” and therefore “whites” eligible for citizenship. But a 1923 Supreme Court decision (United States vs. Bhagat Singh Thind) voided all citizenships granted to Indian migrants by declaring them non-white. It was not until 1946 that US immigration law finally allowed Indian-born migrants to become citizens without having to resort to redefinitions of race.

http://aaww.org/the-skin-vivek-bald/

by Rishi Tue Mar 05, 2013 11:03 pm

And yet these Asian immigrants inhabited a nether zone and confused the forces of segregation, which did not know how to classify “in-between” people. Bengali migrant’s skin tones were classified by every shade: “Mulatto” and “White” in a 1900 census; “dark,” “copper,” and “ruddy” in a 1910 passport application processing; “Black,” “Oriental,” “Turkish” or “Malaysian” during the draft registration of the first World War. This shape-shifting sometimes went both ways. Some African Americans began to pretend to be “Hindoo” and cross the lines of segregation. Thus, a black man named Joseph Downing played a spiritualist named “Joveddah de Rajah” in the 1900s. Another African American man, the Reverend Jesse Routte, traveled in the deep south without being accosted, because he had taken to wearing a velveteen robe and a turban. Activist Mary Church Terrell tells a similar story, in her book A Colored Woman in a White World, of an African American who travels with an exposition through Charleston as a “Hindu Fakir.”

NAACP cofounder lost US citizenship for marrying a Bengali man

NAACP cofounder lost US citizenship for marrying a Bengali man

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