The Soul of Blood and Borders: Brown Babies, Black Amerasians and the African American Response

FAIN: FT-278293-21

Sabrina Thomas
Texas Tech University (Crawfordsville, IN 47933-2484)

Research for a book on the African American response to biracial children born in the wake of World War II and the Vietnam War.  

The Soul of Blood and Borders: Brown Babies, Black Amerasians and the African American Response is a comparative analysis of the African American community’s disparate responses to the brown babies (the children of African American soldiers and German women born as a result of the Second World War) and the black Amerasians (the offspring of African American soldiers and Vietnamese women born during the Vietnam War). It examines how domestic and foreign factors shaped and reshaped the way African Americans understood race, identity, and progress at two critical points in U.S. history—the modern Civil Rights Movement and the aftermath of the American defeat in the Vietnam War. It contends that at each moment, the brown babies and black Amerasians forced African Americans to reconsider what it meant to be black in America as they fought for racial equality.