The varying shades of skin color found among African-Americans has been, and still is, a sensitive topic, and it was addressed in 1922 with some wit by an African-American journalist.
The attached article is good deal of fun to read and speaks of a social structure that, we prefer to think, is gone with the wind. Words appear in this article that seem queer to us in the digital age; there is much talk of "yellow gals"
"golden-skinned slave girls"
"tawny-skinned maids"
"midnight"
"stove-pipe" -all originating from African-American verses and songs. The author of this digest summed up the topic just so:
"Like all indications of caste, they require some tradition and enough of a leisure class or a class having genteel employment to entertain itself. A little more race pride is the remedy."
Posted below are the sociological observations of Donald Young as they appeared in his study (available at Amazon), American Minority Peoples (1932):
Click here to read about black women who pass for white.
- from Amazon - Style & Status: Selling Beauty to African American Women, 1920-1975
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(1932):
