Claudette Colvin made Civil Rights history

I want to be very clear.  If you are an African American with the Colvin surname, you are most warmly welcome here.  Please use this site to explore your roots and uncover your past, wherever that may lead you.  The resources and assistance of this website and the Colvin list are available for you to use.  If you would like to contribute to the website by moderating forum for African American Colvins, I would love to hear from you.

I have learned a lot about my Colvin "cousins" and myself since the Colvin mailing list was first launched in April of 1997.  I started the list thinking that it would be a good way to help a few of the people that I had begun  to correspond with as a neophyte genealogy hobbyist, people like Marilyn Solari and Jewell McDaniel.  I had no idea that the list would grow into a powerful tool for connecting Colvins from all over not only the United States, but from other parts of the world as well.  I had no idea that there were many Colvins whose skin color was much darker than my own and whose ancestors came from Africa instead of Europe.  I have since learned that my family's story is very likely intertwined with the family stories of some of them.

Many Colvin families living in the southern states were slaveholders during the time leading up to the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation.  In my own family tree, "Fanny" Frances Salisbury, who married James Colvin ca 1758, owned a slave woman whom she had inherited from her father, a North Carolina farmer of small means.  I do not know how long Fanny held onto the woman, but there is no indication that she was still part of the James Colvin household by the time the first census was taken in 1790 when they were living near Uniontown, Pennsylvania.  I'd like to think that Fanny was enlightened enough to have freed her, but I have no proof of that either, and it is probably more likely that she was sold to someone else.  

I'd like to think that those of us who know our families were slaveholders can openly embrace the idea of having blood-related cousins of African American descent.  Certainly few of us would admit to having any kind of racial bias whatsoever, but I also think the reality is somewhat more complicated.  Since becoming aware of my family's involvement in slavery, however small, I have consciously been working at overcoming any vestiges of racism in myself, including any notions of "white privilege", a kind of racism that goes largely unnoticed as a part of our culture.

If you are willing and interested in exploring this pretty uncomfortable subject, I recommend a film that was shown in 2008 on PBS called "Traces of the Trade", the story of the deWolf family of New England as they discover their own history as the largest slave-trading family in U.S. history.  Information about the film can be found at http://www.tracesofthetrade.org/.  If you are curious about what "white privilege" is and how it affects us and our culture, here is a 7-page PDF file that explains it pretty well:  http://www.case.edu/president/aaction/UnpackingTheKnapsack.pdf

Your comments are welcome.