Meghan Misunderstood - Sean Smith

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– less than eighteen months earlier – the most memorable elements for me were her mother Doria’s quiet grace, the exquisite playing of cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason, the Kingdom Choir singing ‘Stand By Me’ acapella and the long, passionate sermon by the Most Rev Michael Curry on the power of love. As he spoke, the reactions from the Royal Family that we were allowed to see were priceless: Prince Charles read and re-read the order of service as if it was the latest fascinating issue of Country Life magazine; his wife Camilla and Kate Middleton were desperately trying not to make eye contact with each other; Prince Andrew looked as pompous as ever. Prince William adopted a superior smile, Princess Beatrice seemed to be on the verge of laughing out loud, while, best of all, Zara Tindall appeared gobsmacked. The Queen had the familiar look of grim determination that was never going to waver. Harry, meanwhile, held Meghan’s hand.

      Meghan, it seemed, had been determined to recognise her heritage as a woman of colour on the most important day of her life so far. So, was the Royal Family itself fundamentally racist or just bogged down with stuffy traditions and protocol? And as a society, are we, the UK, really as tolerant as we like to proclaim?

      There seemed so many questions for me to answer on my Meghan adventure. In particular, I wanted to find out more about her quest for female empowerment. Was feminism of fundamental importance to her or something she had adopted as a fashionable cause? And what about racism? How badly has she been affected by prejudice in her life? Watching Tom’s documentary a second time, I was struck by the words of a biracial woman in Cape Town: ‘It is quite a struggle when you grow up as a mixed-race child – either you are not white enough or you are not black enough, so you are in the middle; and you have to find your identity based on the middle – and with Meghan creating awareness about this, it makes people feel that it’s ok to be me.’

      For me, that begged the question: did Meghan have that same struggle with identity growing up in Los Angeles? I wanted to follow her journey from Hollywood to the balcony of Buckingham Palace and back again and answer the questions, is she misunderstood? And if she is, why?

PART ONE

       Moments of History

      The eyes of the entire world were on Meghan Markle as she walked serenely and gracefully down the aisle of St George’s Chapel in Windsor. They have remained on her ever since.

      Her wedding to Prince Harry was an occasion of great joy, representing happiness at last for the Queen’s grandson, who had captured the hearts of the nation when he disconsolately but bravely followed his mother Diana’s coffin on that eternally sad day twenty years earlier. Now he was marrying a breathtakingly beautiful woman in a story that the screenwriters of Hollywood, where Meghan had made her name, could scarcely have imagined.

      At least her mother Doria was there, the only member of her family to take a place at the ceremony. She had sat beside her daughter in the Rolls-Royce as she set out on the nine-mile drive that would take her from the luxurious Cliveden House Hotel to the steps of the chapel. They were two strong women strangely unsupported in a foreign land on this grandest of May days. As always, they had each other, sharing an unshakeable bond.

      Instead of drawing attention to herself, though, Doria sat quietly in a pew across from the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. Her eyes glistened with pride and excitement but she stayed composed, watching a woman of colour, her ‘Flower’ as she still called her, hammer loudly on the door of stuffy tradition and protocol.

      There is nothing traditionally royal about Doria Loyce Ragland, memorably described by her daughter as a free spirit with dreadlocks and a nose ring. Her yoga class back in Los Angeles would scarcely have recognised the demure, stylish lady in a pale green Oscar de la Renta dress and coat. Her long hair was styled and partly hidden beneath a matching hat.

      What a journey it has been for a family that historians and genealogists have eagerly traced back to the shameful days of slavery in America’s Deep South, where the persecution of the black population did not stop with the Emancipation Proclamation of 1865 that officially freed all slaves. Meghan herself has admitted that trying to unravel her family tree is a bewildering task but she is intensely proud of her biracial heritage, describing herself as a ‘strong, confident, mixed-race woman’.

      Her maternal ancestors continued to face poverty and persecution for generation after generation, battling against the oppression of the Jim Crow laws, the legislation that enforced racial segregation in the southern states until 1965, two years after Dr Martin Luther King Jr’s iconic ‘I Have a Dream’ speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. Then, he implored, ‘My four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.’

      While that was a win to be celebrated, the ceremony itself was, in retrospect, an appalling indictment of racism and segregation at the time. Hattie would not normally have been let into the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles where the ceremony was held, in its Coconut 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.

      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

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