Family Ties

Marcia Herman-Giddens says her fascination with her mother’s family tree started back in grade school in Birmingham after she came across a genealogy book her Aunt Beth made.

Herman-Giddens says she studied the book whenever she could and admired the image of the McAlpin clan’s coat of arms.

“I was intrigued with the name because it just seemed so much more interesting and exotic and exciting than the rest of my family names to me as a little child. So, it stuck with me,” she says.

Decades later as an adult, she got serious about learning more about the family lines, including the McAlpins. She even had her DNA analyzed and uploaded onto a website that compares DNA data files.

When the results came in, one of the matches was a man named Christopher MacAlpine-Belton, whose mother was PJ MacAlpine. Then, Herman-Giddens, who is white, made a surprising discovery.

Christopher and PJ were Black.

She later learned that the Black MacAlpines could trace their roots back to Forkland, Alabama.

“It just seems ironic that all the time when I was growing up in Birmingham and my mother was living there, she had no idea—absolutely none—because the history wasn’t known and it wasn’t in the genealogy book that there were McAlpines related to us all over Alabama, Black and white,” she says.

In her memoir, Unloose My Heart, published this year, Herman-Giddens recalls a difficult childhood growing up in the 1940s and ’50s in Birmingham, as well as her years as a young married working mother and civil rights activist and Unitarian. In addition, through her own genealogical research, she comes to terms with her own ancestors’ pre-Civil War enslavement of Black men, women, and children.

Finding Her Roots

The earliest McAlpin ancestor traced by Herman-Giddens is her fifth great grandfather, Alexander McAlpin, who left Scotland in the late 1740s and settled in the Carolinas. As it turns out, one of Alexander McAlpin’s grandchildren was Jefferson Carruthers McAlpin, an enslaver, who, in addition to fathering 11 children with two wives, had children with an enslaved woman named Jane. One of Jane’s children was Francis Percy MacAlpine, PJ’s grandfather.

Herman-Giddens does not mince words about Jefferson McAlpin and the circumstances that resulted in her having Black cousins. She says her slaver forebearers raped the enslaved women they owned.

“That’s basically how I process it. It’s not easy. I certainly don’t deny it,” she says. “I don’t care whether violence was involved or not—it was rape. No matter the circumstance, no matter how cooperative the woman might have appeared to be, she was trying to make her life tolerable and stay alive and do what she had to do. As an enslaved woman, she had no rights over her own body.”

Eventually, Herman-Giddens met PJ MacAlpine, her fourth cousin, her son, Christopher, and other Black cousins living in New York City.

“On my end of it—and I think PJ feels this way—to have met PJ and other cousins from the same circumstances, was very healing. There are almost no words for it, especially when I, as a white descendant, am not rejected, and amazingly, warmly received,” she says.

Racial Divide

Herman-Giddens is the only child of Lucy Marshall Price Herman and Edwin Parker Herman.

The family moved to Birmingham when she was five years old in 1946. Her mother was a homemaker and former clerk for the federal government; her father held an administrative position in the Social Security Administration. Their marriage was made difficult by their disparate personalities.

Her mother was a strict disciplinarian whose prickly personality caused her and her daughter to clash often. She was a woman whose own mother, Louise, whom everyone in the family called “M’Wese,” did not seem to care for her as much as her other children.

Lucy Herman was a proud descendant of slave holders, and, like M’Wese, held bigoted views. Frequently, in the privacy of the Herman home, she used the N-word.

“She was very racist. She was like her family. That’s the way she had been brought up. They were very proud of their slaveholding history, and she was only two generations from it,” she says.

Her mother’s family line includes great-grandfather William Marshall Richardson, the man Marcia was named for, who fought in the Civil War for the Confederacy, and her other great-grandfather, Henry C. Price, who ran a blockade and was captured by the Union Army. He later escaped to avoid signing a pledge of loyalty to the United States.

Following Henry Price’s death, his son, Carleton Hickson Price, spent years seeking repayment for the cotton he claimed Union forces stole from the family during the war.

In contrast, Herman-Giddens’s father, who grew up on a farm in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, was more easygoing and never in her memory expressed racist rhetoric or prejudice to her in public or at home, she says.

“I never detected anything racist in my father at all, in anything he said or his behavior,” she says. “He was from Pennsylvania, and he was by nature a very kind man anyway; how he put up with that in my mother, I don’t know.”

A Realization

Herman-Giddens says her own views on race and support for civil rights sprang from rebellion against her mother’s racism.

“Part of it was that my mother was so extreme—and it wasn’t just my mother, but also my aunts and uncles and my grandmother. I was getting this from all of them, the classic lines that Black people weren’t quite human. They were inferior. They weren’t smart, and on and on,” she says.

Furthermore, early on as a first grader, she recognized inequality between the sexes in the pages of the Dick and Jane books she read at school, she says.

“They set me off, and I think I was born kind of a rebel and someone to whom justice and being fair was very important,” says Herman-Giddens. “With Dick and Jane, I was too young to know anything except it didn’t seem fair, and I was really mad that girls were relegated to the background.”

Then, Herman-Giddens writes of another pivotal moment in her childhood in the early 1950s. It occurred when her family’s maid, a Black woman named Jessie Robinson, inexplicably stopped coming to the Herman home to work.

Herman-Giddens remembers her parents’ growing concern when Robinson remained missing for several weeks. So, one day, Edwin Herman set out to find Robinson, and took his young daughter along.

The pair went door to door in Robinson’s neighborhood, a place whites commonly referred to as a “colored” section of Birmingham.

When a few wary Black residents opened their front doors to speak to her father, Herman-Giddens says it was the first time she witnessed the dilapidated living quarters in a community held down under the unrelenting weight of poverty, racism, and laws enforcing Jim Crow segregation.

“I was 10 years old and growing up in a section of Birmingham that wasn’t anywhere near the neighborhoods where African American people lived. Birmingham was the most segregated city in the country. It really was. Jessie Robinson was the only contact I had had with a Black person, and I had no idea about their lives.”

Herman-Giddens says she saw for the first time how the homes in Robinson’s community differed from the three-story house her family owned in the white neighborhood on Birmingham’s Southside on Milner Crescent. The street, ironically, was named after John T. Milner, a former enslaver who masterminded a way to use Black convicts for free labor, a forerunner to what later became the post-Civil War convict labor system.

The author also recalls her fifth-grade year when she tested well enough to enroll in the upscale Brooke Hill School for Girls. Many of the students were the daughters of the “Big Mules,” a nickname for the wealthy industrialists who carried great political power in Birmingham.

At Brooke Hill, Herman-Giddens was introduced to the city’s white social elite with invitations to country club luncheons and pool parties. Unlike her, most of her classmates were destined to become debutantes and were groomed for a life in Birmingham society. They were the girls, she says, who already knew, at age 13, how to wave a hand to summon a tuxedoed African American waiter to their tables for service while lunching at The Club country club.

Civil Rights Activist

Herman-Giddens also recalls the years when, as a young married mother, she and her then-husband Scott Herman-Giddens became active in the Unitarian Universalist Church of Birmingham, whose members took on active roles in the civil rights movement in support of racial equality.

Before long, she became an activist herself, participating in sit-ins at restaurants to protest Jim Crow laws that prohibited Blacks from eating inside restaurants with whites, and gathering with Black and white women for meetings, in violation of the law. She even taught Black children in a Johnson-era War on Poverty program in 1964 called Project CAUSE (Counselor Advisor University Summer Education) program in Tuskegee, Alabama.

Moreover, Herman-Giddens joined the march organized by the Concerned White Citizens of Alabama on March 6, 1965, in Selma, to protest the lack of voting rights for Blacks.

She says she sees parallels between that past fight for voting rights and voter suppression efforts by state legislatures around the country today.

“Today what’s going on makes me so sad because we did this once before. We worked so hard, especially Black people, to get voting rights, and now here we are struggling again. It’s just so depressing and so discouraging,” she says.

Herman-Giddens says she hopes that her memoir will prompt more discussions about race and slavery.

“Mostly I want readers to know my truth as a descendant of enslavers and what I now know, and to know what goes on, at least, in my own sphere,” she says.

“I’ve gotten so many comments from white people who’ve read the book, and people who’ve come up to me at readings and said, ‘Thank you for writing about this. Now I feel like I can talk about it,’ and ‘I’m going to start researching it. Now I know that I can talk to other people about it,’” she says.

“That has been a great gift because that, to me, has made it all worth it.”