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Jackson White Research Paper

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On April 22, 1921, Mrs. William A. Servin and her daughter-in-law, both members of the Nyack Women’s Club, went for a hike along Pearl River; a hamlet located roughly twenty miles from Manhattan and just north of the New Jersey border. After traveling along a grown-over path the two women happened upon four children they later described as, “so wretchedly clad and so encrusted with dirt as to seem scarcely human.” Disturbed by the children’s unkempt appearance and fearful for their overall well-being, Mrs. Servin contacted the county truant officer and local law enforcement to investigate.
Investigators returning to the scene discovered an entire family—father, mother, and four children—occupying an abandoned shack that might have housed …show more content…

Although there were the occasional reports of moonshining or a drunken feud “their most serious offenses [were] against the laws of hygiene.” Although the Thompson’s way of life closely resembled the Jackson Whites’ their benefactors were adamant they were different. Instead, Pearl River authorities “claimed for the Thompsons that identity of a “pure-white people, in this respect different from the clan inhabiting the Ramapos.” Despite the efforts of their benefactors to distance the Thompsons from the racially mixed people of the Ramapos, news

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