This is a subject that has gotten some academic attention, although the people involved are smallish in number.
In New Orleans for sure, mixed race "colored" people were the biggest losers. The city and its environs went from having a tri-racial hierarchy of blacks, whites, and mixed people, to a biracial one. Privileges that so-called 'black Creoles' had as a kind of middle-caste were lost.
One scholar, whose name I don't recall, suggested that many mixed race people simply started passing for white. I understand there is something of a small mixed-race diaspora from the New Orleans, and probably Charleston (and perhaps the Pensacola/Mobile region, among others), in which European-looking people with some African descent went North to live their lives as whites, gaining the privileges thereof, but severing ties to African Americans, including family members.
This is the one time head of the NAACP, the intriguingly named Walter White.
View attachment 300893
Describing himself, White said "I am a Negro. My skin is white, my eyes are blue, my hair is blond. The traits of my race are nowhere visible upon me." Both of his parents were slaves. The
oral history of his mother's family is that they were descended from William Henry Harrison, who would become a president of the United States.
The story goes that he survived
the Atlanta race riot of 1906, which included an attack on his family. He later used his ability to pass for white to be an investigator for the NAACP, which he would lead later in life.
- Alan