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Woman of Color, Daughter of Privilege Amanda America Dickson, 1849—1893 By Kent Anderson Leslie University of Georgia Press, 1995 225 pp. Cloth, $29.95 Reviewed by Janette Thomas Greenwood, who teaches American social history at Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts. She is the author of Bittersweet legacy: The Black and White "Better Classes" in Charlotte, iSjo—1910. Kent Anderson Leslie's recent monograph, Woman of Color, Daughter ofPrivilege, contributes to a small but growing body of literature that addresses the experiences of racially mixed people in both the Old and New South. A group that seldom fit neatly into the South's carefully delineated, bifurcated racial order, mixed-race individuals, as Leslie shows, at times successfully challenged and attempted to redefine racial categorization. Focusing on the fascinating story of Amanda America Dickson, the daughter of a wealthy white Georgia planter and a slave mother, Leslie addresses "the interlocking issues ofrace, class, and gender in the nineteenth-century South." The author contends that Dickson managed to create a personal identity "bounded by a sense of class solidarity with her father" as well as by "her gender role as a lady and her racial definition as a person to whom racial categories did not apply." Leslie demonstrates convincingly that soudiern society—before and after the Civil War—at times tolerated significant exceptions to fundamental racial rules. But she is less convincing in her claims that Dickson managed to construct a "raceless" self-identity, living her life "outside the categories of race, in a world defined by class." Amanda America Dickson's tale challenges many widely held notions of class and race in both the Old and New South. Dickson was born in Hancock County, Georgia, in 1 849, the result of her white planter father's rape ofher slave mother. Her father, David Dickson, did not employ any of the socially accepted ruses of many other white planters with "outside" children—for example, keeping a secret , "second family." Instead, he lived openly with Dickson and her mother, entertaining prominent citizens at his house, even candidly displaying affection for his black "wife" in front ofguests, and Dickson grew up a privileged child in this household. As Leslie notes, David Dickson, as one of the wealthiest whites in Reviews ? ? 1 Hancock County, had "created a web of interlocking social and economic relationships , accumulating enough power to transgress a fundamental social taboo." David Dickson socialized his daughter to take her place as a southern lady in die world of the white elite and did all that was possible to secure her future. In 1865 Amanda Dickson appears to have married her white first cousin, Civil War veteran Charles Eubanks, possibly in Boston to avoid Georgia's ban on interracial marriages. After bearing two sons—whom her father later had "declared white" in New Orleans — Dickson left her husband and returned to her father's household witii her children in 1 870. Despite a brief marriage to a white woman, David Dickson continued to shower his affections on his daughter and her children . When he died in 1885, Dickson left the bulk of his $500,000 estate to her and her children, making Amanda Dickson the wealthiest black woman in Georgia —perhaps the wealthiest black woman in the South. Not surprisingly, Dickson's white relatives challenged the will, arguing that he had made it under "undue influence." A long and well-publicized court batde ensued . The Georgia Supreme Court finally upheld the will and Amanda Dickson's massive inheritance, citing the Fourteenth Amendment as the basis of her right to inherit her father's fortune. Amanda America Dickson subsequendy setded in Augusta, Georgia, in a fashionable section of the city. There she appears to have been accepted by her prominent white neighbors as "an exotic," the notorious, wealthy mixed-race daughter of David Dickson. Having made the choice to leave Hancock County and move to Augusta, Dickson, according to Leslie, had two choices in constructing a new life for herself: she could be "an active member ofthe black community and use her wealth for racial uplift," or she could "use her wealth and manners to endeavor to shield herself from the consequences ofbeing identified as black...

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