The Secret Migration

The illustrative history of O.S.B. Wall, his descendants, and their impact on history.

A few excerpts from Slate...

While Wall's life tracks some of the central themes of black history, his children's lives reveal one of its great hidden stories. From the colonial era onward, African-Americans were continually crossing the color line and establishing themselves as white people. It was a mass migration aided by American traditions of mobility, a national acceptance of self-fashioning, and the flux of life on the frontier. It is easy to forget how significant this mass migration was, because it was purposely kept a secret. But it touched millions of lives, simultaneously undermining and reinforcing the meaning of black and white.

...Most have treated passing as a tragic masquerade: Becoming white means abandoning family, moving far from home, changing names and identities, and living in constant fear that the secret will be betrayed...When histories of race mention people assimilating into white communities, such accounts hardly ever follow them past the point of becoming white. These individuals fade out of existence.

Ultimately, the Walls' experience and the experience of people who made the same journey force us to rethink the categories of black and white...In a country where large numbers of white people have black blood, what does race mean?

If O.S.B. Wall's children did not live the rest of their lives as African-Americans, their experience still says something profound about race in the United States. The historical migration from black to white affected African-American history at its most basic level: by making heroes disappear. Today, even as we recover his story, it is crucial that we also remember why he was forgotten.