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akindheart explain one drop. Meaning one drop blood?
One-drop rule"The one-drop rule was a legal principle of racial classification that was prominent in the 20th-century United States. It asserted that any person with even one ancestor of black ancestry ("one drop" of "black blood")[1][2] is considered black (Negro or colored in historical terms). It is an example of hypodescent, the automatic assignment of children of a mixed union between different socioeconomic or ethnic groups to the group with the lower status, regardless of proportion of ancestry in different groups.[3]
This concept became codified into the law of some U.S. states in the early 20th century.[4] It was associated with the principle of "invisible blackness"[5] that developed after the long history of racial interaction in the South, which had included the hardening of slavery as a racial caste system and later segregation. Before the rule was outlawed by the Supreme Court in the Loving v. Virginia decision of 1967, it was used to prevent interracial marriages and in general to deny rights and equal opportunities and uphold white supremacy."
"Before the American Civil War, free individuals of mixed race (free people of color) were considered legally white if they had less than either one-eighth or one-quarter African ancestry (only in Virginia).[6] Many mixed-race people were absorbed into the majority culture based simply on appearance, associations and carrying out community responsibilities. These and community acceptance were the more important factors if a person's racial status were questioned, not their documented ancestry. Because of the social mobility of antebellum society in frontier areas, many people did not have documentation about their ancestors anyway.[citation needed]
Based on late 20th-century DNA analysis and a preponderance of historical evidence, US president Thomas Jefferson is widely believed to have fathered the six mixed-race children with his slave Sally Hemings, who was herself three-quarters white and a paternal half-sister of his wife Martha Wayles Jefferson.[quote 1] Four of them survived to adulthood.[7] Under Virginia law of the time, while their seven-eighths European ancestry would have made them legally white if they’d been free, being born to an enslaved mother made them automatically enslaved from birth. Jefferson allowed the two oldest to escape in 1822 (freeing them legally was a public action he elected to avoid because he would have had to gain permission from the state legislature); the two youngest he freed in his 1826 will. Three of the four entered white society as adults. Subsequently, their descendants identified as white."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-drop_rule
The one drop rule in practice in 1914 North Carolina =
https://www.flickr.com/photos/vieilles_annonces/4714692797/in/album-72157624036175005/
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