Well aktually, Johnny Cash issued a statement to the KKK telling them his first wife wasn’t black and appeared to have some racist attitudes in his youth, though he did come around later on and I wouldn’t say he was racist. Her heritage is described:
“In the image, Vivian, whose father was of Sicilian heritage and whose mother was said to be of German and Irish descent, appeared to be Black.”
Though in other images in the same article she doesn’t appear black at all, so I’m not sure. There seemed to be different attitudes about what was considered “black” in that time.
“The stress was almost unbearable. I wanted to die,” she [Vivian] wrote in her memoir. “And it didn’t help that Johnny issued a statement to the KKK informing them I wasn’t Black.” She did not think the campaign should have been dignified with a response.
So she may have been more upset that he responded at all, not necessarily being upset that he said she wasn’t black.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/05/16/johnny-cash-first-wife-vivian-black/
Sicilians were sometimes “black” in the jim crow south. I couldn’t find the citation, but at least one black dude avoided getting murdered after it was discovered the woman he was sleeping with was sicilian. I think the anecdote is from Isabelle Wilkerson’s Caste.
Irish and Italians were Catholic, which was enemy #3 to the KKK right behind black and jewsiwh people. Irish and Italians weren’t even considered white for the first half of the 20yh century
I thought that the irish were always considered white but faced discrimination due to their nationality itself, along with religion, and typically being poor, more like being viewed as a “lesser” category of whites
Interesting, the basis of that is so strange
Did you not read the end of the article you linked? His wife definitely had black roots, but it was a family secret.
Earlier this year, the mystery of whether Vivian was descended in part from Africans was finally resolved. In a February episode of the PBS show, “Finding Your Roots,” host and historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. presented Rosanne Cash with her DNA results and family genealogy. Vivian Cash’s maternal great-great grandmother was indeed an enslaved Black woman, Sarah Shields, whose White father in 1848 had granted her and her eight siblings their freedom and their passage into Whiteness, too.
Basically Vivian’s great-great-grandmother was a black enslaved woman, and her descendents hid this fact to save themselves from Jim Crow laws.
It’s possible she and Johnny knew but kept it quiet because they lived in the deep south in a time when it was scary to be in any way black. The ‘one-drop rule’ is still a thing for a lot of americans, after all. We know that Vivian wife was living in fear of the KKK whenever he went on tour. I would imagine he said whatever he had to say to keep her safe while he was away
Yes, but I was responding the original posts claim that Johnny Cash came out and said his wife was black, which was the exact opposite of what happened. His wife being 1/16 African helps the claim that she had maybe a darker complexion I guess, it’s hard to tell with most photos of her being in black & white or potentially colorized. I’m also 1/16 Native American and I really wouldn’t claim that I’m actually Native American based off of that (though maybe some scholarships exist that say otherwise).
Her being 1/2 Sicilian may have had a bigger impact on skin-tone, but maybe the African great-great-grandmother was a well-known secret in her family and they tried to hide it as much as possible, I don’t know. It’s probably more important to ask, “Did she consider herself to be black?” Everyone has their own definition of it, but I’ve not seen anything that says that she actually considered herself as black, but it’s also possible she tried to hide it early on given the racial climate at the time. Is the “One-Drop Rule” still valid here?
The one drop rule is absolutely central to this conversation. Whether or not she was dark-skinned was not why she had threats from the KKK, it’s the fact that her complexion and facial features suggest black ancestry that made her a target.
One sixteenth black was still legally black in many States, and Tennessee, where they lived, was the first place to codify this. You’re not wrong that her Sicilian heritage could have given her this complexion, but if her Black heritage was proven, as small as 1/16th might be, it would have made their marriage illegal under miscegenation laws. So he had a vested interest in keeping it quiet for both their sakes. He’s still progressive and brave for embarking on such a relationship, if indeed be did know of her heritage
A few years ago, I visited Jamaica and was surprised to find out how much everyone there loves Johnny Cash. I was anticipating Bob Marley to be the big name, but it was actually Cash. Didn’t even know there was a connection between him and the country
He had a house there, which I had the chance to visit. I’m quite certain he spent most of his time there. Given his immense popularity in Jamaica, it would be shocking if Johnny Cash had held any racist views.
They skipped the era of country music that was “I love my dog more than my wife, but don’t ask me to choose between my dog and my truck”
It’s not just today, even his contemporaries kinda sucked and mostly didn’t like him.
Yeah, just as an example -
Marty “Big Iron” Robbins released a song in 1966 called “Ain’t I Right” that said people who came down to southern towns last summer to show people a new way of life were actually a bunch of secret Communists who didn’t care about America and just wanted to sow discord.
Some context: in the summer of 1964, a bunch of civil rights activists went down to southern states to register people to vote for an event called “Freedom Summer,” which led to them being harassed by local police and eventually at least 3 of them being murdered by the KKK. This was a huge headline dominating story that made the American mainstream actually start paying attention to the civil rights movement and start looking at how bad racism in the south had gotten, so Robbins was totally reacting to and trying to push against that change in popular opinion when he released that song.
Well, shit. That’s going to put a little tarnish on my next FNV playthrough.
He’s the only person in both the Country and Rock & Roll Halls of Fame. He was a Rock musician, not just a country one.
And he shot a man in Reno
What is a sundown town?
Oh, you poor soul.
Here’s the wikipedia, if you wanna read.
And here’s a video about the history of slavery and its after-effects that is kind of relevant.
The tl;dr is that there were laws, like vagrancy (i.e. not having a job), that were vague and applied to “everybody” but realistically only applied to black people through legal jiu jitsu and selective blindness on the part of police. Sundown towns are known as such for that behavior. They were (are) very unwelcoming if you’re not white.
Black people who are passing through have to leave by sundown. There’s still some small towns in the US with this expectation, although it’s no longer written on signs.
