In what CNN described as a ‘landmark bipartisan vote” the Senate passed a bill Tuesday protecting same-sex marriage. Hooray for a preemptive strike! The bill also protects interracial marriage, something we thought was already entirely safe given the Supreme Court’s 1967 Loving vs. Virginia decision. But now we have an anything-goes Supreme Court. Who knows what will “go” next?
When I crossed the color line in 1968, among the many things I knew nothing about were laws against interracial marriage that had only been invalidated the year before. I got the facts when I did research for my soon-to-be-published memoir, White Wife/Blue Baby.
First let me say: if you like absurdity, race-mixing is your topic.
If you were going to regulate interracial marriage, first you had to know exactly who was white and who wasn’t. Before slavery became America’s get-rich-quick scheme, intermarriage went unnoticed legally. Some colonists married American Indians. Some indentured servants married slaves. There was a considerable population of mixed-race children. Which side of the color line were they on?
Over the next 250 years, the answer was different state by state and decade by decade. In some states, you were white if you were ¼ black; in others, 1/8 black or 1/16 black. At certain points, you could cross state lines and change races. Finally, Virginia got out ahead of the problem with its 1924 Act to Preserve Racial Integrity, redefining “white” to exclude anyone of any traceable African, American Indian or other “non-white” ancestry — the “one-drop” rule.
But wait! In response, a group of prominent whites who maintained that they were descendants of the 1614 union between Pocahontas and John Rolfe petitioned to be exceptions. Naturally, their wish was granted, and they were able to remain white. In Chicago, we call that “clout.”
The Racial Integrity Act further required all citizens to register with the state according to race. Eleven years before Hitler was elected, Virginians who wanted to marry were required to hand in authenticated racial genealogies. http://www.salon.com/2001/03/08/sollors/.
Will Florida school children feel uncomfortable if they find this out? Don’t worry–Ron DeSantis has taken care of that.
Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash.
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