Table of contents: Introduction 3
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Introduction 3 Chapter I. During Slavery (1619-1865) 5
Chapter II. After Slavery (1865-1964) 16 2.1 Period between 1865-1920 16 2.1.1 Relationships between black men and white women after the war 16 2.1.2 Negro – White Intermarriage 17 2.1.3 Actions preventing interracial romance in the South 18 2.1.4 Anti-miscegenation laws 18 2.2 Jim Crow 19 2.2.1 Lynching of black men 20 2.2.2 Examples of Jim Crow Laws 21 2.3 The era between 1920 and 1960 21 2.3.1 Explanations of race and interracial relationships 21 2.3.2 Speaker for segregation-Gerald L. K. Smith 22 2.3.3 World War II 23 2.4 White efforts to overcome racial prejudice 23 2.5 Segregation 23 2.6 Loving v. Virginia 24 Chapter III. Present Day (1950s- 2000) 26 3.1 The civil Rights movement 26 3.2 Approval and disapproval of intermarriage 27 3.3 Minority reaction 29
3.4 Intermarriage in regions 31 3.5 Research of black and white marriage in the 1960s and 1970s 32 3.6 Multiracial family 33 3.6.1 Mixed children and their identity 33 3.7 Cross-race friendships 35 3.8 Interracial romantic relationships and marriage 35
What inspired me for choosing this topic for my thesis was my interest in racial matters and history of the United States of America. Romantic relationships including sex and marriage and laws barring sex and marriage between Blacks and Whites had the longest history and the widest application in the United States. The interracial relationships and marriage were just natural development of my thoughts about life in the USA. Interracial relationships and marriage gave birth to the unique society in this country. After four centuries we can see spectacular phenomena that developed of multicultural and multiracial society forging America. This paper describes social moods in the New World, matter of slavery, continues to the era after abolition of slavery till the present day and is divided into three main chapters: During the slavery (1619-1865), After Slavery (1865-1964) and Present Day (1960s up till now). The first chapter describes life in the “New World“, the rise of slavery. Mingling between slaves and slave holders resulting in children (Mulattoes). The second chapter retails the period after abolition of slavery, anti-miscegenation laws, successive segregation and people’s fight against them. The last chapter mentions changes in attitudes of black people towards Whites and therefore changes in society. According to recent studies, various kinds of intermarriage have become more common over the course of this century. The point of my thesis was not to describe interracial relationships between all races and members of various ethnic groups in the USA. I decided to deal with relationships and marriage between Blacks and Whites because these alliances do not seem fully approved by the society of the USA yet. The black and white color line is still linked to high degree of racial prejudice and it is the natural outcome of strong patterns of segregation and the heritage of a long history of racial inequality in the USA. This thesis also indicates that relationships between Blacks and Whites are troublesome in the social sphere. Intermarriage here means any marriage across ethnic or racial lines. Mixed marriage is used as a synonym of intermarriage. Outmarriage is much the same phenomenon, but viewed distinctly from the point of view one group. Amalgamation and miscegenation are two old and still pragmatic words for sexual mixing across racial lines (with or without marriage).White and Black are capitalized because I regard both as proper nouns in contemporary usage. For writing this thesis I used printed materials like books and journals; a video record and the internet and internet books. Although, the topic may seem banal and unimportant, the advances in interracial relationships and marriage will clarify and explain racial issue in the USA and give the reader a complex idea of society in the United States from the historical view till present day. Chapter I.DURING SLAVERY (1619-1865) When the life was a difficult struggle to survive in the New World, interracial marriages and illicit liaisons created a new race of multiracial children. Native Americans, Africans, Spanish, and Portuguese participated in interracial sex, producing multiracial children for over hundred years before English settlement (Yancey 71). In 1619, three important events occurred in Jamestown: (1) male colonists elected their first representatives to govern themselves; (2) the first boat of single English women arrived to improve morale and create families; (3) the first boat of Africans arrived. The occurrence of black men and white women in the midst of white men and Indian women creates the first generation of multicultural Virginians (Yancey 71). Various nations had different attitudes to intermingling. The Portuguese did not dread the intermingling of the races. These interracial relationships between the Portuguese and Africans easily extended to the New World. The Spaniards mixed less freely with the Negroes than did the Portuguese but mixed just the same. At first they seriously considered the inconveniences which might rise from the sexual relationships between races and generally refrained from intermingling. But men are but men and as Spanish women were too few in the New World at that time, they soon found African women attractive. Interracial sex was the most famous among the French. Not being disciplined to mingle with Negroes, the French early faced the problem of the half caste, which was given consideration in the most humane of all slave regulations. It means that free men who had children with their concubine should be punished by a fine (usually two thousand pounds of sugar). If the offender was the master himself, he paid not only the fine, but also the slave was taken from him, sold and never allowed to be freed. There was one more exception: if the man was not married to another person at that time of this act he was to marry the woman slave and the children who were born, as well as the slave woman, become free. Among the English the situation was absolutely different. There was not so much need for the use of Negro women by Englishmen in the New World, but they had the same tendency to cohabit with them. The English had the natural tendency to denounce these unions and restrict the custom to the weaker types of both races. There was extensive miscegenation in the English colonies, however, before the white race as a majority could realize the apparent need for maintaining its integrity (Sollors 43, f). White slaves appeared in the New World too, mostly because of the development of industries. Yancey describes them like landless, unemployed, poor, single men and convicts from England. These men did not have any obligation in England, therefore were able to leave the country. In exchange for paid ship passage, food, clothing, shelter and their freedom, after serving from four to seven years, these dregs from England had an opportunity to become a landowner. In short, they become indentured servants. Their dream, however, turned into nightmares. English servants, away from the mother country, had no rights to protect them. Actually, they were the personal property of their owners, who auctioned them off (to the highest bidder) at the dockside. They became white slaves for a limited time. European male indentured servants arrived alone and outnumbered white females (about four to one). The other problem was that indentured women could not marry or have children until their term of service was finished. Many of these indentured servants did not see their freedom. They were whipped, worked extremely hard, or died of malaria. These living conditions contributed to interracial sex between white indentured slaves and black women, which in some cases resulted in unwed pregnancies (Yancey 75). Free blacks had the same standard of sexual conduct as whites until 1670s. According to Sollors, there might be a certain temptation to say that it was the slave status rather than race that caused the difference in the treatment in this early period. But as Sollors says, it would be misleading. Race, after all, determined who could be enslaved. A better and more accurate characterization might be to say that some free blacks could “rise above their race”. These blacks who “rose above their race” were prosperous, lived on the Eastern Shore and were not newly arrived Africans. They were highly acculturated men and women of African origin. Some of them were property owners and were able to make their living in the new colony. Many of them were married and probably were Christians. These free blacks were treated as “black Virginians” rather than as members of exotic and lower race (105). In the days before institutionalized slavery many Africans participated in the full life of the community with the same rights as Europeans. They attended church services, had legal access to sue and to be sued and could buy and sell goods. It is mentioned in Yancey´s book that sexual liaisons, including marriages between white women and black men were socially tolerated. Mulatto children born to these white women were considered as second-class citizens, but they experienced relative freedom compared to multiracial children born to black women (75). The mixture of the Blacks and the Writes is called Mulatto. According to Wikipedia a Mulatto is: a person of mixed ancestry with an African and a European parent (half black and half white), the offspring of two mulatto parents, or a person with a mixture of African/European ancestry In the past the term originally referred to the children of one European and one African parent, or the children of two mulatto parents. Then a myriad of other terms, both in Latin America and the United States, were in use to denote other individuals of African/European ancestry. <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mulatto&oldid=118102848>. Other notion similar in meaning to Mulatto is the term Half Caste: Half caste is a term used in the United Kingdom and other English-speaking parts of the world. An example is a child of black African and white European parentage. The term mulatto has also been used for this particular mixture. Both terms are considered impolite and potentially offensive by some, as the words have been used pejoratively in the past to ostracize and isolate the offspring of such unions. For example, "children of the plantation" (the children of African-American slaves and their European-American masters in the U.S. Southern states) were not accepted as heirs, and in most cases, the relationship was never acknowledged, and "half-caste" conveyed the deliberate exclusion. <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Half-caste&oldid=107245054>. In the United States the word mulatto is used very rarely. They use a term “Negro”. Every person with African ancestry is considered to be “Negro”, without reference to genetic logic. There are cases when “the white blood becomes socially advantageous only in the overwhelming proportion” (Jordan 84). To sum up, the mulatto offspring were counted as slaves. “By classifying the mulatto as a Negro he was in effect denying that intermixture had occurred at all” (Jordan 86). Other notions important for further reading: Quadroon, octoroon and, more rarely, quintroon were historically racial categories of hypodescent used in Latin America and parts of the 19th century Southern United States, particularly Louisiana. A quadroon (from the Spanish cuarterón "quarter") was someone of one quarter black ancestry: a person with three white grandparents and one black grandparent. Likewise, octoroon denoted a person of one eighth black ancestry, and quintroon (quint- here implying "fifth generation") or, less commonly, hexadecaroon described a person of one sixteenth black ancestry. The terms were also used in Australia to refer to people of mixed Aboriginal and European ancestry. <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Quadroon&oldid=119075602>. The question of what do about these children let to the rise of the first slavery laws written in America. The attempt of these laws was to control sex and marriage among Europeans, Africans, and Indian Americans. Some historians assert than interracial sexual relations were more prevalent during the colonial era than during any latter time in American history. As the slavery becomes a social status and intermarriage was not legal, it was difficult to define legitimate family members. Who belonged to in white families, and who did not? This was on a sociologically constructed color line, not a biological bloodline. For example, a biological daughter cold be a mulatto slave, but a mulatto slave could not be acknowledged as a daughter in the house of her father, a white master. Under the racial purity laws, white women could give birth to a black child, but a black woman could not give birth to a white child. This paradox is the result of the one-drop rule: a fiction created by slave holders that branded interracial children as black slaves if they had “one drop” of African blood. Therefore, interracial marriages were outlawed in most colonies, slave marriages were not binding. The slave family could be split according to the slave holder’s will. According to law slave master could sell any of the slave family members (Yancey 77). The one-drop theory (or one-drop rule) is a historical colloquial term in the United States that holds that a person with any trace of sub-Saharan ancestry (however small or invisible) can not be considered white and so unless said person has an alternative non-white ancestry they can claim, such as Native American, Asian, Arab, Australian aboriginal, they must be considered black. <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=One-drop_theory&oldid=115729751>. Defining whites as free and blacks as slave was easily accomplished by outlawing interracial sex and marriage. The laws were different in each state. Generally in the South, whites could not marry a non white person and produce legal interracial heirs. This was the first step to keep the color line distinct. Interracial marriage became officially illegal (Yancey 76). Slavery law first came about by struggling to define the legal status of the child born with both European and African ancestry. A rapid increase of free mulattoes alarmed the ruling class, who projected a subtle self-serving economic plan by overturning English common law to declare that a child’s inheritance would follow that of the mother’s station in live, not the father’s. This change in law sorted the masters´ problem with breeding African slave children with partial English descent out. Criminalizing interracial marriage allowed patriarchal white masters to pressure white women into producing only white heirs they continued to have illicit interracial sex for pleasure and creation of slave children for their own economic gain. To sum up, white men could legally mingle with women of color whom they legally owned, but they could not marry them. In other words, they could form an interracial family in a nontraditional way, but they could not acknowledge them socially. The spectrum of sexual slavery included concubinage, brief illicit sexual encounters, rape, and voluntary cohabitation (Spickard 239). Although, natural results of miscegenation were children, the society did not really know how to accommodate them in the system. It was not absolutely clear whether they should be considered white or black, free or slave, acknowledged or denied. According to Jordan’s book, answering these questions was difficult because “the cultural matrix of purpose, accomplishment, self- conception, and social circumstances in the New World” (83) had to be considered. It is said in Owens´ book that the offspring of master-slave relationship received a higher status (privileges in later life). However, their mixed blood was more like a disadvantage for mulattoes. They experienced the scorn of both masters and slaves (211). Even though “many black mothers of mulatto children went on to have offspring by slave husbands, and usually treated them all their sons and daughters, light and dark, similarly” (Owens 212), this way of mixing blood and so intimate relationships between slave women and masters led to the development of bitterness between races. The master was killed sometimes by the slave husband who was not able to bear the situation. The most common form of interracial mating in antebellum period was forced sex between white men and slave women and concubinage. The white man’s lust for black women often destroyed any possibility that pretty black girls could remain chaste for long. Few parent slaves could protect their daughters from the sexual advances of white men. Often through “gifts”, but usually through force, white overseers and planters got sexual favors of black women. Many slave women were forced to be concubines. If they refused, they were flogged for their refusal or raped. Some black women chose the lot of concubine in order to avoid the harder labors of field slaves. Generally speaking, the women were expected to offer themselves“willingly”. Most of the white men sought more than one-night stands with black women. Frequently they purchased attractive black women for their concubines. In many cases the master loved his concubine and treated her as his wife (Blassingame 154, f). There are cases described that white men loved their black concubines more than their white wives. Subsequently, the white women sued for and insisted on divorce (Blassingame 156): Henry Watson asserted that the wife of a Natchez, Mississippi, slave trader divorced him because of his concubine. White women were frequently infuriated by their husband’s infidelities in the quarters and took revenge on the black women involved. When Moses Roper was born, for example, his mistress tried to kill him when she discovered that her husband was Roper’s father. To prevent this, the man sold Roper and his mother. (Blassingame 156)
Jordan 75 Certain southern cities, notably Charleston and New Orleans abounded in the more relaxed racial system. Slave women provided their masters with domestic companionship. These women were hired by as concubines by wealthy white planters and merchants. In the case of free women of color and her parents could be negotiated a contract (which lasted often several years) with the “White suitor” (Spickard 243).
Blassingame 156 In many cases nobody found out about the sexual relations between black men and white women because the children resulting from such unions were light enough to be considered white. One Virginian testified that when his wife gave birth to a mulatto child, he did not doubt the child was his. One white woman in eighteenth-century Virginia who had a mulatto child convinced her husband that the child was dark because someone had cast a spell on her. He believed the story for eighteen years (Blassingame 156). Interracial unions were illegal. There are still some cases described in Jordan’s book that document interracial marriage did occur. Probably the majority of interracial marriages occurred in New England. White women and Negro men of the lower class affected the rise of the interracial marriage. According to Jordan “in the plantation colonies, although there were occasional instances of white women marrying black men, legitimization of this relationship was unusual” (Jordan 71). White men usually received only a mild public censure for crossing the color line. By contrast, a White woman with a Black lover was despised by the white public. This act of interracial relationships was considered a major offence against public opinion. The only exception occurred in rural areas where mixing between lover-class White women and free mulatto men was relatively accepted (Spickard 245). Before the Declaration of Independence, it was necessary to start sorting to problem with slavery out. One of the contributors to this burning question was Thomas Jefferson; the third President of the United States (1801–09), the principal author of the Declaration of Independence (1776). It is said on Wikipedia that Thomas Jefferson owned many slaves over his life. On the other hand, he fought for abolition of slavery. Jefferson found slavery immoral and supported the idea of emancipation of slaves. The explanation of Jefferson as a slave holder was that he was in debt; therefore he could not set them free until he paid all his debts (which never happened). One of his efforts for abolishing or at lest limiting slavery was his proposal to emancipate slaves in Virginia in the House of Burgesses and in his first draft of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson condemned the British crown for sponsoring the importation of slavery to the colonies. His endeavor was mostly unsuccessful. In 1778, the legislature passed a bill he proposed to ban importation of slaves into Virginia. Although this did not bring complete emancipation, in his words, it "stopped the increase of the evil by importation, leaving to future efforts its final eradication". In 1807, he signed a bill abolishing the slave trade. Jefferson attacked the institution of slavery in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1784). <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thomas_Jefferson&oldid=119394197>. Although Tomas Jefferson owned slaves he can be assessed as a kind master. He took part at forming a nontraditional family based on interracial relationships and mingling. It can be read in Yancey´s book Just don’t marry one what the history of Jefferson’s interracial family was like: In a newspaper interview in 1873, Madison Hemings described how his African great-mother became pregnant by Captain Hemings en route to Virginia, where John Wales purchased her. Captain Hemings attempted to buy his biracial child, Betty, and her mother, but Mr. Wales refused due to his curious fascination with the outcome of his amalgamated child. Mr. Wales must have been very intrigued with Betty, because she became is concubine after his wife’s death. She bore him seven slave children, one of whom was Sally Hemings. When John Wales died in 1774, his daughter Martha, and her husband, Thomas Jefferson, inherited Sally, her mother, and her grandmother. Jefferson had two surviving daughters at the time of his wife’s death. Following in his father-in-law’s footsteps, Jefferson took Sally, his wife’s sister as his concubine at Monticello, where she reportedly bore him six children … After his [Jefferson’s] death in 1826, most of Jefferson’s two hundred slaves were sold, except for the Hemings slaves, who were freed according to his will. But not Sally. Jefferson’s daughter, Martha, made special provision for Sally by unofficially freeing her so that she would not have to leave Virginia within one year in accordance with state law. Yancey 79 A 1998 DNA study concluded that there was a DNA link between some of Hemings descendants and the Jefferson family, but did not conclusively prove that Jefferson himself was their ancestor (Yancey 79). In contrast, Jefferson considered blacks inferior to whites, childlike and untrustworthy. The only things he found right was to set all the blacks free. Except for this, he felt Whites and Blacks could not live together within one country and government. He saw only one solution which was to set all the Blacks free and deport them back to Africa. <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thomas_Jefferson&oldid=119394197>. The life in the New Worlds was consisted of many things that Europeans took with them and practiced them in the colonies. One of them was inescapably religion. In the eighteenth century, English Christians felt a certain obligation to convert Indians and Negroes. According to the Christian tradition the souls of men should be given spiritual care while they are still on earth. This tradition was related not only to some souls but all (including slaves). Many of the Englishmen who settled in America were not very willing to meet this obligation. One of the reasons of their unwillingness was their practical way of thinking, connected with the plantation management. Another reason could be that if the slaves converted to Christianity, the inner sameness of all men would be recognized, which would not correspond with slave-master theory. The interest in accomplished conversion of Negro people was highly required mainly by members of clergy. Many slave holders thought that conversion will make the Negroes worse slaves. Planters believed that Christianizing the slaves made them: “more perverse and intractable, less amenable to discipline, more discontented with their lot” (Jordan 89) – which may have been true. What is more, the slave holders and all the Whites did not want Negroes growing too proud on seeing themselves on the same level as their masters in religious matters. The colonists could not accept the idea that Negroes might come to resemble them. And if the Negro was like them, how could they enslave him? The question of conversion started an issue concerning the Negro from the retrospect point of view. Colonist started thinking of their history and did not pay much attention what were they like at that time. Because of their African ancestry, they assessed them as: “ignorant, stupid, unteachable, barbarous, stubborn and deficient in understanding” (Jordan 90). The real reason why the slave holders did not want their slaves to convert to Christianity was that slaveholders´ fear that conversion might weaken their domination over his slaves. The clergymen interested in the cause of Negro conversion propagated the Gospel as an attractive device for slave control. This process was long and complicated. The first step forward were the religious revivals known as the Great Awakening and the Second Great Awakening in the North and South from the 1740s to 1780s. Although the revivalists generally did not challenge slavery, they preached to everyone, without consideration for race. The Methodists and the particularly Baptists welcomed converts from the black and white working population. Slave holders feared the Christian message of spiritual equality and resisted evangelicals preaching to their bondsmen. It was no accident that the first antislavery statements came from members of a religious group which operated at a time of social upheaval. As the revival movement spread, some slave holders considered preaching as their duty to teach their slaves about the Bible. Africans did not want to abandon the religion of their forefathers, but after so many years living in the New World and the birth of the new generation, many of them decided to accept Christianity and therefore accept America as their home. Over the years, large number of slaves associated with the idea of spiritual equality (Negroes are not equal on the earth but and are subordinated to their masters, but they all are equal before God) and found comfort in the biblical theme of deliverance (Jordan 88 - 93) <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part2/2narr2.html>. The native Africans enslaved in America found it relatively easy to understand similar features in Christianity because they believed the “life after death”. Like the Christians, the few Islamic slaves brought to the South were people of the book. They could read and white Arabic. When trying to convert Islamic slaves, whites sometimes read them English translation of Koran until they had mastered the language and replaced the Koran for the Bible. The Islamic slaves adopted Christian believes without difficulties because many of them were almost identical to the teaching of Mohamed (Blassingame 72f). After 1740, a great number of Negroes began entering the churches. In many areas certain blacks gained considerable reputation as preachers to their own people and in several cases to whites as well. To sum up, the Great Awakening re-emphasized the spiritual equality of Negroes with the white men (Jordan 98). The traditional African attitude differed greatly from those current in Europe and an antebellum America. Premarital sex among Africans was institutionalized soon after the start of the puberty and was accepted as a normal part of the courtship process. Africans highly valued children and that therefore were not able to understand the European concept of celibacy and regard sexual intercourse as dirty, evil and sinful. As they were gradually transforming into Afro-Americans, the Southern slaves lost their African religious significance of sex and procreation. The slaves adopted the Christian monogamy (instead of the traditional African polygamy). In numerous sermons and catechisms prepared especially for slaves, there were prohibitions against the premarital sex, adultery, fornication, and the separation of mates. Christian slaves often taught their children that “shame” and premarital sex were the same. The slave children did not learn about the sex as such, but they knew about the Christian injunctions against it before marriage. Sexual conquest became highly respected in slave families. The slave had to prove his abilities and his braveness to the slave girl and try to win her affections. If he managed to win her affection, he had to get her parents´ permission for the marriage. In some cases the slaves were engaged for one year before their relationship was consummated. From the other point of view, love meant one of the major crises in slave’s life. They did not want to see their wife to be beaten, insulted, overworked and of course raped. The knowledge they would not be able to anything to protect her was more than frightful for them. In short, according to the Christian beliefs and forms, the premarital sex was prohibited for black slaves; on the other hand, the rape and sexual intercourse between black slave women and white masters was common and real (Blassingame 162ff). Download 198.18 Kb. Share with your friends:
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