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By David Greenberg
Posted
Monday, June 14, 1999 MSN Slate
Last week, the Alabama Senate voted to
repeal the state's constitutional prohibition against interracial
marriage, 32 years after the Supreme Court struck down Virginia's
similar ban. Hadn't these archaic laws gone out with Bull Connor?
I asked myself as I read the news account. And haven't we been hearing
that America has rediscovered the melting pot, that in another generation
or two we'll all be "cablinasian," like Tiger Woods?
I talked to the measure's main sponsor,
state Rep. Alvin Holmes, a 24-year statehouse veteran who has been
trying to overturn the ban for decades. "The last time I tried was
about three years ago," said Holmes. "It didn't get out of committee."
Holmes credits his success to the last election, in which a bevy
of Democrats were swept into office.
Holmes wasn't just tidying up the
legal code. In parts of rural Alabama, he said, probate judges still
refuse to issue marriage licenses to interracial couples. Holmes
explained that some of his Alabama colleagues opposed his measure
because they willfully refused to accept that the federal government
had the power to override state law--an ideology of states' rights
that goes way beyond Newt Gingrich to John Calhoun.
When you think about it, it makes
sense that some Alabamians found it hard to jettison overnight a
300-year-old custom. Laws against interracial marriage--and the
taboos against black-white sex that they codify--have been the central
weapon in the oppression of African-Americans since the dawn of
slavery. President Abraham Lincoln's detractors charged him in the
1864 presidential campaign with promoting the mongrelization of
the races (that's where the coinage "miscegenation," which now sounds
racist, comes from). Enemies of the 20th-century civil rights movement
predicted that the repeal of Jim Crow laws would, as one Alabama
state senator put it, "open the bedroom doors of our white women
to black men." Fears of black sexuality have been responsible for
some of the most notorious incidents of anti-black violence and
persecution, from the Scottsboro Boys to Emmett Till.
Intermarriage bans arose in the late
1600s, when tobacco planters in Virginia needed to shore up their
new institution of slavery. In previous decades, before slavery
took hold, interracial sex was more prevalent than at any other
time in American history. White and black laborers lived and worked
side by side and naturally became intimate. Even interracial marriage,
though uncommon, was allowed. But as race slavery replaced servitude
as the South's labor force, interracial sex threatened to blur the
distinctions between white and black--and thus between free and
slave. Virginia began categorizing a child as free or slave according
to the mother's status (which was easier to determine than the father's),
and so in 1691 the assembly passed a law to make sure that women
didn't bear mixed-race children. The law banned "negroes, mulatto's
and Indians intermarrying with English, or other white women, [and]
their unlawfull accompanying with one another." Since the society
was heavily male, the prohibition on unions between white women
and nonwhite men also lessened the white men's competition for mates.
(In contrast, sex between male slave owners and their female slaves--which
often meant rape--was common. It typically met with light punishment,
if any at all.)
If fears of interracial sex underlay
bans on interracial marriage, it was marriage that became the greater
threat. Men might rape black women or keep them as concubines, but
to marry them would confer legal equality. Thus, over the course
of the 18th century all Southern states--and many Northern ones--outlawed
all marriages between blacks and whites. Up through the Civil War,
only two states, Pennsylvania in 1780 and Massachusetts in 1843--hotbeds
of abolitionist activity--repealed their bans.
The end of slavery should have made
things better. It didn't. In the South, the federal government initially
forced the removal of the bans in several states. But when federal
troops pulled out, the bans returned, along with a whole complex
of new discriminatory laws known as Jim Crow. In the West, 13 states
passed new laws against interracial marriage, many of them targeting
white-Asian unions along with white-black ones. Only in the North
did laws against intermarriage draw real fire, coming off the books
in Maine, Michigan, Ohio, and Rhode Island.
Still, even in the most enlightened
areas, mixed-race couples faced enormous social stigma. Clerks refused
to issue marriage licenses to mixed couples, and ministers often
wouldn't marry them. Couples that did marry faced harassment from
employers and neighbors. In 1944, Gunnar Myrdal, in An American
Dilemma, noted that "even a liberal-minded Northerner of cosmopolitan
culture will, in nine cases out of ten, express a definite feeling
against" interracial marriage. It was, he said, a "consecrated taboo"
that "fixed" the boundary between the races.
That changed slowly with the civil
right movement, which reshaped the nation's consciousness. In 1967,
an interracial married couple named Richard and Mildred Loving brought
to the Supreme Court a suit against Virginia, claiming the right
to live there. The court sided with them unanimously, decreeing
the ban unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment. The fortuitously
named Loving decision took its place in law books, but not necessarily
in practice. Where no one had the wherewithal to stand up for it--say,
in rural Alabama--Loving was flouted.
Precisely as white racists feared,
desegregation encouraged interracial unions. Blacks and whites began
to meet and date, especially on college campuses, which started
admitting African-Americans in larger numbers in the '60s and '70s.
The next generation saw a surge in intermarriage. In 1963, 0.7 percent
of blacks married someone of another race. By 1994, the figure had
reached 12.1 percent. The 1960 census recorded 51,000 black-white
marriages. Today there are more than 300,000. Attitudes changed
too. In 1958, 4 percent of white Americans approved of interracial
marriages. In 1994, it was 45 percent. And younger generations are
vastly more tolerant than their elders, suggesting these numbers
will climb.
Of course, it's hard not to also
see the glass as half--or, more precisely, 55 percent--empty. All
these numbers may be climbing, but they remain low. What's more,
the white-black marriage rate lags significantly behind rates of
white intermarriage with other, nonblack races. Among 25- to 34-year-olds,
52 percent of Native Americans and 40 percent of Asians married
outside their race, while only 6 percent of blacks did so. The racism
that kept Alabama's constitution unchanged has hardly been eradicated.
Whether these habits will change on their own, with the maturation
of a more tolerant generation, or whether full social acceptance
of black Americans will require a concerted governmental effort,
is unknowable. In the meantime, we can take only meager pride in
achieving a society in which interracial marriage is safe, legal
and, alas, rare.
© Copyright 1999
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