The Invisible Line

November 1, 2010

The story of the wealthy Gibsons of Colonial South Carolina, the farming Spencers of 19th-century Kentucky, and the middle-class Walls of post-Civil War Washington, DC, and each family's shifting self-identity from black to white.

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from February 15, 2011
Many persons of African American heritage but white appearance crossed the color line at times when racial classification had very real and harsh implications. Legal scholar Sharfstein chronicles the lives of three such families who made the transition from black to white during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Gibsons started as landowners in South Carolinas backcountry and became wealthy slaveholders and part of the southern elite, producing a senator and a major figure in American commerce. The Spencers owned farmland in eastern Kentucky and eventually Appalachia, scratching out a life as part of an isolated community, in which families were loathe to set hard racial definitions until coal mining and outsiders pressed the broader social mores of the U.S. The Walls gravitated to postCivil War Washington, DC, and became part of the black elite that challenged racial restrictions until they could no longer resist the temptation to take advantage of the escape their fair skin afforded them. Drawing on archival material, Sharfstein constructs an absorbing history, demonstrating the fluidity and arbitrariness of racial classification.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)