Mixed Race Studies

That the Blood Stay Pure: African Americans, Native Americans, and the Predicament of Race and Identity in Virginia [Smithers Review]

Journal of American History
Volume 103, Issue 3, December 2016
pages 742-743
DOI: 10.1093/jahist/jaw364

That the Blood Stay Pure: African Americans, Native Americans, and the Predicament of Race and Identity in Virginia By Arica L. Coleman. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013. xxiv, 300 pp. $45.00.)

Gregory D. Smithers, Associate Professor of History
Virginia Commonwealth University

Few Virginians have negatively affected the Old Dominion more than Walter Ashby Plecker. In his role as registrar of Virginia’s Bureau of Vital Statistics, a position he held from 1912 to 1946, Plecker oversaw a campaign to preserve the racial “purity” of Virginia’s white population and divide African Americans, Native Americans, and Caucasians along a black-white binary. To that end, Plecker was not only evangelical in his calls for the separation of the races but was also one of the founding members of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America and, with John Powell and Earnest Sevier Cox, played a pivotal role…

Read or purchase the review here.

Why the Nazis studied American race laws for inspiration

Aeon
2016-12-13

James Q. Whitman, Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law
Yale Law School

Edited by Marina Benjamin

‘At the bus station in Durham, North Carolina.’ May 1940. Photo by Jack Delano/FSA/Library of Congress.

James Q Whitman is the Ford Foundation professor of comparative and foreign law at Yale Law School. His subjects are comparative law, criminal law, and legal history. His latest book is Hitler’s American Model (2017).

On 5 June 1934, about a year and half after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of the Reich, the leading lawyers of Nazi Germany gathered at a meeting to plan what would become the Nuremberg Laws, the centrepiece anti-Jewish legislation of the Nazi race regime. The meeting was an important one, and a stenographer was present to take down a verbatim transcript, to be preserved by the ever-diligent Nazi bureaucracy as a record of a crucial moment in the creation of the new race regime.

That transcript reveals a startling fact: the meeting involved lengthy discussions of the law of the United States of America. At its very opening, the Minister of Justice presented a memorandum on US race law and, as the meeting progressed, the participants turned to the US example repeatedly. They debated whether they should bring Jim Crow segregation to the Third Reich. They engaged in detailed discussion of the statutes from the 30 US states that criminalised racially mixed marriages. They reviewed how the various US states determined who counted as a ‘Negro’ or a ‘Mongol’, and weighed whether they should adopt US techniques in their own approach to determining who counted as a Jew. Throughout the meeting the most ardent supporters of the US model were the most radical Nazis in the room…

Read the entire article here.

Black or white?

The Globe and Mail
2016-12-12

Stephanie Nolen, Latin America Bureau Chief
Rio De Janiero, Brazil

Jacqueline Suellen Chaves poses for a photo on Belm Docs. She’s a black woman rejected as too white for a job as a social worker by a panel. Daniel Ramalho/For The Globe and Mail

It was a policy was born of good intentions but has stirred up perplexing, often painful, questions: What makes a person black, or white? Is it facial features? Hair? Family? Or an experience of racism? And who gets to decide?

Jacqueline Chaves checked the Internet every day, waiting to see test results posted – a pass would be the last step in her long road to a job as a social worker.

Ms. Chaves, 23, had worked hard to get through a degree program at the competitive federal university in Belem do Para, a port city on the Amazon forest’s Atlantic coast. There were many tough tests along the way but she wasn’t a bit worried about this final one. It was an exam to assess whether she qualified for a position being reserved for an affirmative-action candidate. Ms. Chaves knew she would sail through, because she is black.

Or thought she was…

…Commissions are vital to ensure that limited affirmative-action spaces are not used by cheating white students, said Iuri Nascimento, an activist with a racial-equality advocacy organization called Negrex. Any argument that it’s impossible to tell who is eligible in a country with a lot of mixed-raced people is simply aimed at undermining the system, he added.

There is no “purely objective scale” of blackness, he said, but it’s also not that hard to tell who is black and who isn’t: Police officers identify who is black just fine, argued Mr. Nascimento. (Black Brazilian men are killed by police three times more often than white.)…

…Yet there are many Brazilians – including other black activists – who think that the tribunals are a terrible idea. Petronio Domingues, a historian with the Federal University of Sergipe who studies the fight for racial equality in Brazil, said it’s absurd to think that there are characteristics that can be evaluated objectively to determine race.

“They’re looking only at a person’s appearance, and that doesn’t define race,” he said. “Any definition of what it is to be black cannot be external to the individual. … Race is a social construction, without scientific basis.” Nor is there any evidence that proves that black people with very dark skin suffer more prejudice than those who are called pardo, or brown, he added, so it makes no sense to give more “points” to someone whose skin is darker or hair curlier…

Read the entire article here.

Would-Be Bridegroom Takes Oath He Is Negro

The San Francisco Call
Volume 104, Number 70 (1908-08-09)
Page 31, Column 4
(Source: California Digital Newspaper Collection)

Cannot Get License to Wed Mulatto Until He Proves His Race

ST. LOUIS, Aug. 8.— “You can’t get a marriage license here,” said Leon G. Smith of East St. Louis yesterday when William Hawkins and a mulatto woman named Fanny F. Austin of East St. Louis came into the marriage license clerk’s office and asked for a license.

Hawkins inquired what the reason was for refusing him a license, and was told that licenses would not be issued for mixed marriages, whites and negroes. Then he laughed and told Smith that while he generally passed for a white man and very few people ever imagined he had negro blood, that he really was a negro. To prove this Hawkins opened his shirt collar and showed that below his throat he was somewhat darker than his face appeared. He also showed his finger nails to prove his negro blood, and finally made an affidavit that he was a negro. Then the license was issued. Hawkins told Smith that he has three sisters married to white men who do not suspect their wives of having negro blood.

Evolution of interracial marriage

WSLS-TV 10
Roanoke, Virginia
2016-11-22

Brie Jackson, Anchor/Reporter

ROANOKE (WSLS 10) – The story of one Virginia couple whose love for one another changed history is being shown on the big screen nationwide including the Grandin Theatre.

“Loving” tells the story of Mildred and Richard Loving. He was white, she was black and Native American. Decades ago, their marriage was against the law in Virginia and several other states. Their love story broke barriers for interracial couples.

In 1958, the couple married in Washington, D.C. where it was legal, but returned home to Virginia and were arrested. A judge sentenced the couple to prison unless they left the commonwealth for 25 years. They did, but returned to the state five years later and were jailed again. Eventually their case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court where the court ruled the ban on interracial marriage unconstitutional.

That 1967 decision paved the way for others to marry who they love regardless of race.

“The bottom-line, if you love someone it does not matter the color of your skin,” said Pamela Casey.

Pamela and Corwin Casey’s love story begins in 1980 when Corwin was an activities director at a children’s home in North Carolina. Pamela said they met on her first day. She arrived as a volunteer from her church in Ohio…

Read the entire article here.

Multiracialism and Civil Rights

Fordham Law News
Fordham University, The Jesuit University of New York
2016-11-21

Shane Danaher

Tanya K. Hernández

Fordham Law Professor Tanya Hernandez shared excerpts from her upcoming book on multiracialism and civil rights in talk sponsored by the Center on Race, Law & Justice’s Colloquium on Race and Ethnicity on November 17, not quite seven months shy of the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Loving v. Virginia, which invalidated laws prohibiting interracial marriage and the legal stigma against mixed-race children.

Hernandez outlined the argument presented in her work-in-progress study of multiracial identity in discrimination lawsuits, tentatively titled Multiracials and Civil Rights. In the book, Hernandez challenges conventional wisdom about multiracial discrimination.

“The growing view that discrimination against multiracial (racially-mixed) people poses a distinctive challenge to racial equality law is incorrect,” she said. “This misperception is based on the false presumption that multiracials experience racial discrimination in a unique manner that makes it necessary to reconsider civil rights law.”…

Read the entire article here.

An Unsung Hero in the Story of Interracial Marriage

The New Yorker
2016-11-17

David Muto, Copy Editor/Senior Web Producer

Bill and Carol Muto on their wedding day, eight years after the U.S. Supreme Court, in Loving v. Virginia, struck down interracial-marriage bans. COURTESY BILL AND CAROL MUTO

At my parents’ wedding, in Blacksburg, Virginia, my mom wore a floppy, wide-brimmed hat atop her feathered hair. My dad wore lightly flared pants and had sideburns that almost reached his jaw. Peter, Paul and Mary music played at their ceremony, and at the reception afterward they drank sherbet punch alongside friends and family members dressed in plaid and platform shoes. It was a fairly ordinary American wedding in 1975, save for one distinction: the bride was white, and the groom was Asian.

My dad, a third-generation Japanese-American from Los Angeles, and my mom, from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, had met in Michigan, in 1970, while he was in the Air Force and she was in college studying nursing. They eventually settled in Texas, where they raised my three siblings and me. As a gay man, I’ve often thought about how my parents’ timing was fortuitous. Just a few years earlier, their marriage may not have been legal in the state where they wed, Virginia. The new film “Loving,” directed by Jeff Nichols, tells the story of the couple who changed that: Mildred and Richard Loving, a black woman and a white man who were arrested in Virginia in 1958 and sentenced to prison there after marrying in Washington, D.C. The couple, played by Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton, toiled silently for years, unable to live openly together in their home state, until their case reached the Supreme Court—which, in a unanimous decision in 1967, struck down all interracial-marriage bans throughout the U.S.

The Lovings are the couple whose names we rightfully remember from the case, and they’re indeed the stars of the film. But, buried in the footnotes of the Lovings’ story, a little-known name caught my attention—that of a Japanese-American lawyer who gave Asian-Americans, and families like mine, a voice at a pivotal moment in constitutional history…

Read the entire article here.

In ‘Loving,’ an American story about a marriage worth fighting for

PBS NewsHour
2016-11-15

A new movie, “Loving,” tells the real-life story of Richard and Mildred Loving, a Virginia couple who were arrested because interracial marriage was illegal in their home state. They appealed their case and won a landmark civil rights ruling at the Supreme Court. Jeffrey Brown speaks with director Jeff Nichols and others about how they brought the love story to the screen.

HARI SREENIVASAN: The film “Loving” opened nationwide over the weekend. It tells the true story of Richard and Loving, rural Virginians of different races who married in Washington, D.C.

On return to their home in Virginia, they were arrested for violating laws against interracial marriage. Their case eventually made it to the Supreme Court.

Jeffrey Brown has our story.

JOEL EDGERTON, Actor, “Richard Loving”: I’m going to build you a house right here, our house.

JEFFREY BROWN: “Loving” tells the real-life love story of Richard and Mildred Loving, a Virginia couple who married in 1958 in Washington, D.C., because interracial marriage was illegal in their home state…

Read the entire story here.

“We Were Married on the Second Day of June, and the Police Came After Us the 14th of July.”

The Washingtonian
2016-11-02

Hillary Kelly, Design & Style Editor

Richard and Mildred Loving. Photograph by Grey Villet.

An oral history, nearly 50 years later, of the landmark Virginia case that legalized interracial marriage—and is the subject of a talked-about movie out this month.

In June 1958, Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving drove from their home in Central Point, Virginia, to Washington, DC, to be married. Twenty-four states, including Virginia, still outlawed interracial marriage at the time. Mildred was part Native American and part African-American; Richard was white. Their union would eventually result in their banishment from the state and a nine-year legal battle.

On November 4, almost 50 years after the Supreme Court’s 1967 decision that the Lovings’ marriage was valid—and that marriage is a universal right—Hollywood is set to release Loving, already on Oscar lists. As director Jeff Nichols explained when asked why he took on the project, “We have very painful wounds in this country, and they need to be brought out into the light. And it’s gonna be an awkward, uncomfortable, painful conversation that’s going to continue for a while.”

The movie focuses on Mildred and Richard’s romance. We looked behind the scenes of the struggle itself, talking to insiders including the couple’s attorneys—then just out of law school—to revisit the case. One remarkable aspect: Unlike other civil-rights champions of their era, the Lovings never set out to change the course of history. “What happened, we real­ly didn’t intend for it to happen,” Mildred said in 1992. “What we wanted, we wanted to come home.”

This is the story of how a quiet couple from rural Virginia brought about marriage equality for themselves, and for all…

Read the entire article here.

Opinion/Commentary: The facts behind loving, law, and ‘Loving’

The Daily Progress
Charlottesville, Virginia
2016-11-13

Jeff E. Schapiro, Politics columnist
Richmond Times-Dispatch, Richmond, Virginia

Focus Features via AP Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga protray an interracial couple from Virginia whose romance and marraiage made history. The story or Richard and Mildred Loving is told, Hollywood-style in the movie “Loving.”

In 1963, Bernie Cohen, a lawyer in Alexandria, was representing Richard and Mildred Loving, a mixed-race couple from Virginia facing a predicament considered unthinkable today: They’d been banished from the state for 25 years for violating its prohibition on interracial marriage.

Living in Washington, D.C., where interracial marriage was legal and where they were wed in 1958, the Lovings wanted to return home, to rural Caroline County. To get there would require a long journey through the courts.

Having lost the initial challenge in state court, Cohen consulted with his constitutional law professor at Georgetown University, Chester Antieau. He introduced Cohen to another former student, Phil Hirschkop.

Cohen and Hirschkop were alike: Both were Jewish boys from Brooklyn who had settled in segregationist Harry Byrd’s Virginia. They also were liberals, committed to racial equality and social justice at a time when both could be scarce, especially in the American South.

It was Cohen’s and Hirschkop’s different legal backgrounds — the former was a trial lawyer; the latter, a civil rights lawyer — that would bring them together for the successful battle that concluded with a 1967 ruling by a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court voiding Virginia’s anti-miscegenation statute and those of 15 other states.

The decision allowed the Lovings — he was white; she was black — to openly live out their days in Caroline County.

Ahead of the 50th anniversary of a ruling on marriage equality that would presage the Supreme Court order legalizing same-sex marriage in 2015, a new film by Jeff Nichols, the writer-director, recounts the couple’s ordeal…

Read the entire article here.