A few days ago, the post “Life and Death of Davis Knight,” received a visit and comment from Deborah Jiang Stein. Noting that she has her own blog, I decided to check it […]
The Life and Death of Davis Knight after State vs. Knight (1948)
By Vikki Bynum Davis Knight, the great-grandson of the infamous “Free State of Jones” guerrilla, Newt Knight, became the centerpiece of his own drama some 25 years after the death of his […]
Race and the “One Drop Rule” in the Post-Reconstruction South
Many people, perhaps most, think of “race” as an objective reality. Historically, however, racial categorization has been unstable, contradictory, and arbitrary. Consider the term “passing.” Most of us immediately picture a light-skinned […]
The Multiracial Knight Women During the 20th Century
By Vikki Bynum Newt Knight’s political career was short-circuited by his open embrace of his mixed-race descendants. The essay, “Negotiating Boundaries of Race and Gender in Jim Crow Mississippi,” which appears as […]
Rachel Knight: Does a Photo of Her Exist?
With help from descendants of Rachel Knight such as Dianne Walkup and Florence Blaylock, I have revisited the two photographs (see above) that I identified as being Rachel in my book, The Free State of Jones. […]
An American Family: The Multiracial Knight Community
By Vikki Bynum After posting my blog about Serena Knight, I returned to my research and photo files. There, I located this photograph of the Jeffrey and Ella Knight family, which is particularly revealing about […]
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