When I was in college my brother told me that Ludwig van Beethoven was partially black. He said that it was common knowledge when Beethoven was alive that he was of “Moorish” complexion and ancestry. What’s the scoop? Was he black, or–more to the point–was he pure white? –Chris Crutchfield, Saint Paul, Minnesota
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Beethoven black? Sure, why not? If we accept the “one-drop rule” that long prevailed in the U.S., namely that any black African ancestry whatsoever makes you black, and if we further buy the argument sometimes heard that everyone on earth is at least 50th cousin to everyone else–that is, has a common ancestor no more than 50 generations back–then everybody’s black, or more accurately, as Santana once put it, everybody’s everything. If on the other hand we’re looking for documented proof that Beethoven’s ancestry can be unambiguously traced to somewhere south of the Sahara, that could be tougher to come by, although as is commonly the case in these matters it can’t be entirely ruled out.
Beethoven is a case in point. Rogers’s evidence for the composer’s blackness, presented in the third volume of Sex and Race, is twofold: (1) Some of Beethoven’s ancestors lived in Belgium; Belgium had long been controlled by Spain; Spain employed some full-blooded Negro troops and in addition had been overrun by the Moors in medieval times; the Moors, according to Rogers, were a hybrid of white and black African stock; ergo, over the span of 1,000 years, black ancestry could conceivably have been transmitted from Africa to Beethoven. (2) Beethoven had a darker complexion than was typical of northern Europeans of his day, and some referred to him as “the black Spaniard.”
