Grove nightclub; it had a whites-only policy. The film’s famous producer, David O. Selznick, called in a favour to ensure that they let the great actress in, but, even then, she had to sit at a small segregated table at the back and well out of sight.
The role of Mammy represented a dreadful white stereotype of black servants, but Hattie’s emotional acceptance speech would have inspired both Doria and Meghan. Herself the daughter of two black slaves, she said, ‘I shall always hold it as a beacon for anything that I may be able to do in the future. I sincerely hope I shall always be a credit to my race and to the motion picture industry.’
The sad reality was that by the time she died, in 1952, she had played a maid seventy-four times. Big roles did not come her way after her Oscar win: ‘It was as if I had done something wrong.’ Her dying wish was to be buried in the Hollywood Cemetery alongside the great stars of the golden age, but that was also denied by a ‘no-blacks’ policy. It would be a further seven years before racial discrimination was outlawed in California. The controversy over recognition for black actors continued into Meghan’s lifetime.
Discrimination was rife in Tennessee when Doria’s ancestors moved further north and settled in Chattanooga, a deeply racist town little deserving its place in musical history as the title of the jaunty Glenn Miller classic, ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo’. As recently as 1980, five black women were murdered there by members of the Ku Klux Klan in a drive-by shooting.
Meghan’s ancestors did not face such life-ending hatred but they still had to battle for a better life for themselves and their families. Meghan’s great-aunt Dora, for instance, was the first Ragland to go to college and became a teacher. Dora’s elder sister Lillie ran a successful real-estate business in Los Angeles and was listed in the African–American Who’s Who. She was married to Happy Evans, a famous black baseball player in the 1930s, a time when that sport was still segregated and there were separate ‘negro’ leagues.
Doria’s grandmother, Netty Arnold, worked as a lift operator at the upmarket apartment block called the Hotel St Regis in Cleveland, Ohio, where she met and subsequently married James Arnold, a bellhop. They were both black, working in a place where only whites were allowed to live.
In Cleveland, one of their daughters, Jeanette, married twice. First to a local man, Joseph Johnson, a professional roller-skater, then, following her divorce, to Alvin Ragland, who would become Meghan’s much-loved grandfather. The surname Ragland is actually one that his family took from their slave owner following emancipation.
Growing up, Meghan Markle was constantly fascinated by her family history, trying in vain to untangle its web and confessing that she was in ‘awe of her past’. Her principle problem in trying to cast light on the ‘blurred lines’, as she called them, was that black slaves were not properly documented until they officially registered. In 1870, a sharecropper called Stephen Ragland, Alvin’s great-grandfather, had become the first black Ragland.
Meghan gave a different account of that important landmark in her family history when she spoke to Elle magazine in 2015 – before she met Prince Harry: ‘Perhaps the closest thing connecting me to my ever-complex family tree, my longing to know where I came from, and the commonality that links me to my bloodline, is the choice that my great-great-great-grandfather made to start anew. He chose the last name Wisdom.’ He may well have done so informally but genealogists poring over Meghan’s ancestry have failed to find a thread linking the last name Wisdom to her family tree. Often family histories become confused by the telling and the retelling.
The Ragland family’s life changed forever when they made the 2,300-mile trek from Cleveland to Los Angeles soon after Doria was born in September 1956. There were five of them in a borrowed car: Alvin, Jeanette, her two children from her first marriage – Joseph Jr and Saundra – and baby Doria. While it wasn’t exactly an epic story matching the trip west of the Joad family in Steinbeck’s magnificent novel of the Great Depression, The Grapes of Wrath, the trip did become the subject of countless stories told to Meghan as a little girl.
Uncle Joseph, who was some seven years older than Doria, was chief storyteller. One of the most vivid of his tales was when they pulled into yet another small redneck town in the middle of nowhere. There was a blizzard of biblical proportions and, rather aptly, they were searching for a room for the night. They had no luck, sent packing back to the highway by the locals who would not welcome any blacks on their white-only streets or, heaven forbid, in their white-only beds.
And then there were the countless times when they stopped for food at a diner and had to use the back door for ‘coloureds’. This was practically a daily occurrence as they shuffled in, trying not to draw attention to themselves.
Eventually they made it to Los Angeles, which, while not exactly the Promised Land, gave everyone a chance of a better life. Jeanette found work as a nurse, while Alvin, who had a strong entrepreneurial streak, started off working for his Aunt Lillie before finding his niche buying and selling bric-a-brac and curios in flea markets. Eventually, he opened his own antique shop called Twas New. By all accounts, he loved the objects for sale more than the money he might make from them. His pride and joy was his collection of vintage American cars.
Alvin was also a charismatic man whose company women enjoyed. His marriage to Jeanette did not last long in the California sunshine. They divorced and she became a single mum to the three children while he moved in with Lillie in the prosperous LA neighbourhood of View Park–Windsor Hills. The family remained close, however.
Meghan’s maternal line is full of strong women, and Doria was no exception. She grew up with a committed sense of social justice, perhaps an understandable reaction to the hardships her family had faced down the generations. She went to Fairfax High School in Hollywood, which during her teenage years was still a hotbed of racial tension.
At that age, Doria, known as Dodi at school, was a member of the Apex Club, a class for exceptionally smart pupils. She was a purposeful teenager, a trait she would pass on to her daughter. She was also part of a group of black students who would protest rigorously about the continued injustice and inequality faced by their communities. One of her friends from those days, Jennifer Caldwell, recalled, ‘She was a beautiful girl both inside and out. She had this beautiful afro hairstyle she was very proud of and she was always into fashion. She was whip smart, always smiling and sociable.’
Her parents may not have made a fortune but they were certainly comfortable. Doria lived a typical teenage life. She was the designated class driver when she passed her test and could borrow her mum’s car. They would all head off, with Marvin Gaye songs blaring out, to their favourite hangout place, called Tico’s, where they joined the queue for one of the restaurant’s famous tacos.
Doria was a free spirit and didn’t rush to engage in a career after school, preferring a relaxed, bohemian lifestyle in northern California for a while before she returned to LA. She found work as a temporary secretary, then as a trainee makeup artist at the Sunset Gower Studios in Hollywood, where they filmed the long-running soap General Hospital.
There she met a lighting director called Thomas Markle.
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Doria couldn’t miss Tom Markle. He was six foot three, well-built with a shock of red hair. She, on the other hand, was slim and striking. Meghan would later comment, ‘I like to think he was drawn to her sweet eyes and her afro, plus their shared love of antiques.’
He had also come from a relentlessly white background in his home state of Pennsylvania. Meghan described it as a ‘homogenised’ community where the ‘concept of marrying an African–American woman was not on the
