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Steve, Meghan’s great-grandfather, was born about 1908 and died in 1983. He married Lois Russell in 1929, and worked as a presser in a cleaning shop. The couple had a son called Alvin, Meghan’s grandfather, who died aged 81 in 2011 and who was married to Ava Burrow. She worked for Hamilton County Schools, and the couple moved to California, where Meghan’s mother, Doria, was born. The Jim Crow laws might have been repealed, but such entrenched racism could not disappear overnight.
Meghan’s parents met towards the end of the 1970s when her father Thomas, of Dutch-irish descent and originally from Pennsylviania, was working as a lighting director for a soap opera and her mother was temping on set. Thomas already had two children from a previous relationship, Samantha and Thomas Jr, who were to make headlines of their own when news of their younger half-sister’s relationship with Prince Harry came out.
Doria and Thomas married and moved to The Valley in Los Angeles, a leafy and comfortable area that was also predominantly white. Doria, “caramel in complexion”, according to her daughter, was often assumed to be Meghan’s nanny rather than her mother.
By her own account, Meghan’s parents worked as hard as they could to prevent her from becoming aware of any racial tensions.
At one point, they bought two collections of a boxed set of Barbie dolls, one portraying a white family and the other a black one. They mixed the two up to show a black mother, white father and one each of the children, and presented it as just the one set.
But with all the goodwill in the world, Doria and Thomas were never going to be able to shield their daughter for ever.
Meghan recalled her feelings of confusion at the age of seven when asked to tick a box confirming her ethnicity. There was nothing for mixed-race children and so, rather than having to choose one parent’s identity over the other, she left it blank, despite a teacher advising her to choose the white option as she had light skin.
When she told her father what had happened, he was unequivocal: “If that happens again, you draw your own box.”
As she began to make her way in the acting world, on more than one occasion Meghan found that ironically she would end up being either “not black enough” or “not white enough” for a particular role.
She told Ebony magazine: “I could get into twice as many rooms, but was turned down twice as often as many of my peers. It’s that dichotomy that we can go through, ‘What are you? Where do you fit in? I want to put you in this box and I want you to stay there’.
“I never want to complain. I get that so many people have it worse than I do. But it took me deep into my 20s to come to the realisation that I am ‘enough’ exactly as I am, and I don’t have to be more or less of anything for other people.”
■ Extracted from Harry & Meghan - The Love Story, by Emily Herbert, published by John Blake and out now.
ON STRUGGLE AS AN ACTRESS
I never want to complain... so many people have it worse MEGHAN MARKLE
when the wedding took place was positive, with much talk of Britain’s first black marchioness, photoshoots in Tatler magazine, and cheerful comment.
The country is clearly ready for a black princess as well as a black marchioness, or a mixed-race one, or whatever anyone wished to call her.