Mixed Race Studies

Bill to recognize Nansemonds passes committee

Suffolk News-Herald
Suffolk, Virginia
2014-04-02

A bill that would extend federal recognition to the Nansemond Indian Tribe and five others in Virginia passed the Senate Indian Affairs Committee on Wednesday.

The tribes, which also include the Chickahominy, Eastern Chickahominy, Upper Mattaponi, Rappahannock and Monacan, are officially recognized by the state but not by the federal government.

“I just hope we can finally get there,” Nansemond Indian Tribal Association Chief Barry Bass said on Thursday. “It’s been a long, hard road.”

The bill has passed the Senate Indian Affairs Committee before, but a vote in the full Senate has been blocked by senators who believe the tribes should have to go through the Bureau of Indian Affairs as other tribes have done.

But recognition through the bureau’s administrative process requires documentation that current tribal members have a continuous line of descent from the historical tribes. That has been difficult, if not impossible, for Virginia Indians to prove, in part because of Walter Plecker, who was the registrar of Virginia’s Bureau of Vital Statistics from 1912 to 1946. He replaced “Indian” with “black” for the race on many birth and death certificates that passed through his office, ensuring that no official documentation exists for many tribal members to prove their relationship to ancestors…

Read the entire article here.

Race, Marriage, and the Law of Freedom: Alabama and Virginia 1860s-1960s

Chicago-Kent Law Review
Volume 70, Issue 2: Symposium on the Law of Freedom, Part I: Freedom: Personal Liberty and Private Law (1994)
pages 371-437

Peter Wallenstein, Professor of History
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

INTRODUCTION

In 1966, one hundred years after Congress passed the Fourteenth Amendment and sent it to the states for ratification,’ Richard and Mildred Loving took a case to the U.S. Supreme Court to challenge their convictions for having violated Virginia’s laws against interracial marriage. In the months ahead, the nation’s high court would face squarely, for the first time, the question of whether laws like Virginia’s violated the Fourteenth Amendment. In June 1967, in a unanimous decision, the Court struck down all laws that made the racial identity of an American citizen a criterion for indictment and conviction for the crime of contracting a marriage.

The most private of relationships proved tightly entwined with public policy in the years after the end of American slavery. Sexual relations across racial lines-whether within marriage or outside itproved a topic of judicial interest into the 1960s for two reasons. First, many American states enacted and long retained statutes restricting such interracial relations, and second, some people sought to establish and maintain such relations whatever the law. Generalizing about the racial attitudes and behavior of white southerners, Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal noted in the early 1940s that “the closer the association of a type of interracial behavior is to sexual and social intercourse on an equalitarian basis, the higher it ranks among the forbidden things.”

This Essay focuses on the most forbidden thing of all: marriage between African Americans and European Americans. The Essay details the origins and application of laws against such marriages, and tracks the history of challenges in the courts to those laws. Two states, Virginia in the Upper South and Alabama in the Deep South, together illustrate how the law related to sex, marriage, and interracial couples. Though the variations on a general theme are intriguing, the two states differed little in the outlines of their legislative or judicial histories on questions of miscegenation. Both states criminalized sexual and marital relations of an interracial nature. In both states, any number of cases developed at the local level, as the courts dealt with indictments for violating the antimiscegenation laws. At the appellate level some defendants brought appeals on constitutional or other grounds. The legal environment in each state was shaped by a decision from the other state.

Four cases, two from Alabama and two from Virginia, went to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1883, Pace v. Alabama supplied a major precedent in favor of the constitutionality of antimiscegenation statutes. Virginia relied on Pace into the 1960s to justify its own antimiscegenation  laws. In two cases in the 1950s, Jackson v. Alabama and Naim v. Virginia, the Court skirted the issue and left Pace intact. In 1967, in Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court finally reversed Pace and established a new law of race and marriage throughout the nation. Only in the 1960s, a full century after Emancipation, did the Supreme Court declare statutes against interracial marriage unconstitutional. Only then did the law of slavery and racism defer at last to the law of freedom and racial equality.

The law that the Lovings challenged in the 1960s had its origins in the seventeenth century. In Virginia, slavery and antimiscegenation legislation developed together. In Alabama, by contrast, laws restricting interracial marriage originated only in the 1850s. In both states, such laws reached their fullest development in the years between 1865 and 1883, that is, in the generation after the Civil War and Emancipation. Moreover, in both states the legal definitions of white and non- white shifted in the early twentieth century, such that residents with any discernible African ancestry were classified as nonwhite (something not the case in the nineteenth century).

When the Lovings married each other in 1958, no constitutional challenge to antimiscegenation laws had succeeded in any federal court. The American system of marital Apartheid no longer held sway in many states outside the former Confederacy, but in the South it showed no promise of relinquishing its control. That system had its origins, at least in Virginia, as far back as the 1690s. It had grown more powerful as slavery had. It had continued to grow more powerful into the 1920s and 1930s. As late as the 1950s, efforts to challenge the system in state and federal courts alike in both Alabama and Virginia had come to naught. Yet, the Lovings prevailed in their challenge. This Essay tells the history of the system they challenged and outlines the story of that challenge and its aftermath…

Read the entire article here.

Ties to Thomas Jefferson Unravel Family Mystery

The Root
2014-01-26

Gayle Jessup White

A woman seeks answers to decades-old questions about whether her family is related to the descendants of Thomas Jefferson.

ore than 40 years ago, I learned of my family’s ancestral ties to Thomas Jefferson. It was a blood connection impossible to prove, and one seldom discussed, as my father was ashamed of his mother’s out-of-wedlock birth. Still, he acknowledged that he’d heard from an older generation that Jefferson was his lineal ancestor. The tie was a mystery because the only black descendants we knew of were from Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings, and we couldn’t find the link.

Dad also painfully confessed that his mother’s life was a mystery—she and his five older sisters died of tuberculosis in 1920 when he was 5 years old, leaving him and his older brother to be raised by a taciturn father and a cold stepmother. He remembered little about his mother, and seemed to know even less. He did offer these tidbits: She was born in Charlottesville, Va., home of Jefferson’s Monticello, and she sometimes called herself Eva Robinson, other times Eva Taylor. No one knew why.

Like most African Americans, oral history is my primary source for deep family roots. There are no birth certificates, marriage licenses or census records. Our great-great grandmothers, great-great grandfathers, aunts, uncles and cousins were items on manifests, bills of sale and plantation ledgers. Sometimes, our forefathers or their families owned our foremothers. This was apparently the case in my family. But I wasn’t to learn that for decades.

No, 40 years ago, I was accepting of what scant evidence I had, and for me, there was little doubt of my father’s Jefferson family bona fides. Dad was tall—6 feet 2 inches—freckle-faced and, in his youth, redheaded. He even had, I would learn years later, the Jefferson family nose, one that sloped gently. It was evident that there were whites in the woodpile, as folks used to say.

So when after years of collecting what little tangible proof was available, including a Bible engraved with the initials D.T. and the date 1821, which belonged to my grandmother and which I inherited from my uncle, and a baptismal certificate signed Eva Taylor Jessup, I was thrilled to find more circumstantial evidence. With the help of Thomas Jefferson scholar Lucia (Cinder) Stanton, I saw a 1900 census record listing my grandmother. She was a domestic servant living in the home of Jefferson’s great-granddaughter. I almost wept when I read Cinder’s words: “Could this Eva Robinson be your grandmother?” Cinder, who had built a highly regarded career studying Jefferson and his Monticello slaves and is the author of “Those Who Labor for My Happiness: Slavery at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello,” seemed very confident.

It wasn’t long before she found my great-grandmother, one Rachael Robinson, in the 1870 census records, unmarried and with two children described as “mulattos.” Living as a bachelor and just one household away was Moncure Robinson Taylor, my probable great-grandfather and Jefferson’s great-great grandson, and the man who most likely fathered her children. Additionally, in 1901, my grandmother, Eva Robinson Taylor, left Charlottesville for Washington, D.C., where she was married. Around the same time, Moncure Robinson Taylor, then 40 years old, married for the first time. An interesting coincidence, or had Rachael, my great-grandmother, died, leaving Eva free to move to the city and Moncure free to marry? There’s no written evidence of that, no death certificate, but it’s possible. Cinder said the discoveries made her tingle. To say I felt the same would be an understatement.

So I‘ve learned my family is probably descended from the Taylor line, explaining why my grandmother sometimes used that surname. I started attending lectures about Jefferson, taking my friends to Monticello, Googling Thomas Jefferson and African-American descendants. It was the Googling that delivered. I read about Tess Taylor, a poet and a white Jefferson descendant. She’d written a book of poems, The Forage House, about her conflicting feelings of being descended from the country’s most enigmatic slave-holder. I sensed a connection, I reached out and she reached back. I would learn later that Tess’ great-great-grandfather was Moncure’s brother, and my great uncle. That would make Tess my third cousin, once removed…

Read the entire article here.

Cousins, Across the Color Line

The New York Times
2014-01-22

Tess Taylor

EL CERRITO, Calif. — I learned about her through the comments section of an article in Publisher’s Weekly. I had recently published a book of poems crafted out of family stories, and it had been written up, along with a brief interview. In the interview, I reckon with the complicated history of my family — I am a white descendant of Thomas Jefferson — and the fact that some of my ancestors were slave owners from 1670 until the Civil War.

In the comments section, the woman, Gayle Jessup White, had written: “I am an African-American Jefferson descendant. My grandmother was a Taylor (although her mother didn’t exactly marry into the family!), a direct descendant from J.C. Randolph Taylor and Martha Jefferson Randolph” — Thomas Jefferson’s daughter. “Tess Taylor — I wonder if we share great-great-grandparents? The plot thickens.”

The story of Sally Hemings, a slave in the Jefferson household — and the children she most likely bore the third president — is by now widely accepted. That story has offered a chance for people descended from slave owners and those descended from enslaved people to begin to recognize their connections. But the situation, at least in my family, remains delicate. Some white Jefferson descendants have welcomed Hemings descendants. Others have not. Hemings descendants are not allowed to be buried in the family graveyard at Monticello, Jefferson’s home, because despite increased evidence, there is, technically, room for scientific doubt. The doubt in turn points to great historical violence: Because it was not the custom of slave owners to name who fathered the mulatto children on their plantations, we have little documentary evidence that would constitute legal “proof” of our interrelationship.

Yet the fact is that many so-called white and so-called black people in our country are actually deeply interrelated. It is highly likely that I have distant cousins I’ll never know, people who’ll never come to any family reunion. Historians have obsessed over Jefferson’s possible liaisons, but slavery lasted many generations. Among his sons, grandsons, great-grandsons and great-great-grandsons, there were bound to be other liaisons and therefore other direct lineal descendants of Jefferson and enslaved people or domestic servants.

I wrote to Gayle immediately. Frankly, I was delighted to get her note. I looked her up. I sent her an email. “Hey. It’s Tess,” I wrote. “Let’s talk.”…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Free African Americans of North Carolina, Virginia, and South Carolina from the Colonial Period to About 1820 (Fifth Edition)

Genealogical Publishing Company
2005
2 volumes; 1355 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9780806352800

Paul Heinegg

The third edition of Paul Heinegg’s Free African Americans of North Carolina and Virginia was awarded the American Society of Genealogists’ prestigious Donald Lines Jacobus Award for the best work of genealogical scholarship published between 1991 and 1994. This fifth edition is Heinegg’s most ambitious effort yet to reconstruct the history of the free African-American communities of Virginia and the Carolinas by looking at the history of their families.

Published in two volumes, and 300 pages longer than the fourth edition, Free African Americans of North Carolina, Virginia, and South Carolina from the Colonial Period to About 1820 consists of detailed genealogies of 600 free black families that originated in Virginia and migrated to North and/or South Carolina from the colonial period to about 1820. The families under investigation represent nearly all African Americans who were free during the colonial period in Virginia and North Carolina. Like its immediate predecessor, the fifth edition traces the branches of a number of African-American families living in South Carolina, where original source materials for this period are much scarcer than in the two states to its north. Researchers will find the names of the more than 10,000 African Americans encompassed by Mr. Heinegg’s genealogies conveniently located in the full-name index at the back of the second volume.

Mr. Heinegg’s findings are the outgrowth of 20 years of research in some 1,000 manuscript volumes, including colonial and early national period tax records, colonial parish registers, 1790-1810 census records, wills, deeds, Free Negro Registers, marriage bonds, Revolutionary pension files, newspapers, and more. The author furnishes copious documentation for his findings and an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources.

A work of extraordinary breadth and detail, Free African Americans is of great importance to social historians as well as genealogists. The fifth edition traces many families who were covered in previous editions back to their 17th- and 18th-century roots (families like those of humanitarian Ralph Bunch, former NAACP president Benjamin Chavis, and tennis stars Arthur Ashe and Althea Gibson, that would go on to fame or fortune). Providing copious documentation for his findings and an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources, Mr. Heinegg shows that most of these families were the descendants of white servant women who had had children by slaves or free African Americans, not the descendants of slave owners. He dispels a number of other myths about the origins and status of free African Americans, such as the “mysterious” origins of the Lumbees, Melungeons, and other such marginal groups, and demonstrates conclusively that many free African-American families in colonial North Carolina and Virginia were landowners.

The two volumes include the following family surnames: Abel, Acre, Adams, Africa, Ailstock, Alford, Allen, Alman, Alvis, Ampey, Ancel, Anderson, Andrews, Angus, Archer, Armfield, Armstrong, Arnold, Artis, Ashberry, Ashby, Ashe, Ashton, Ashworth, Atkins, Aulden, Avery, Bailey, Baine, Baker, Balkham, Ball, Baltrip, Banks, Bannister, Barber, Bartly/Bartlett, Bass, Bates, Battles, Bazden, Bazmore, Beckett, Bee, Bell, Bennett, Berry, Beverly, Bibbens, Bibby, Biddie, Bing, Bingham, Binns, Bizzell, Black, Blake, Blango, Blanks, Blizzard, Blue, Bolton, Bond, Boon, Booth, Bosman, Bow, Bowden, Bowers, Bowles, Bowman, Bowmer, Bowser, Boyd, Brady, Branch, Brandican, Brandon/Branham, Braveboy, Braxton, Britt, Brogdon, Brooks, Brown, Bruce, Brumejum, Bryan, Bryant, Bugg, Bullard, Bunch, Bunday, Burden, Burke, Burkett, Burnett, Burrell, Busby, Busy, Butler, Byrd, Cane, Cannady, Carter, Cary, Case, Cassidy, Causey, Cauther, Chambers, Chandler, Chapman, Charity, Chavis, Church, Churchwell, Churton, Clark, Cobb, Cockran, Cole, Coleman, Collins, Combess, Combs, Conner, Cook, Cooley, Cooper, Copeland, Copes, Corn, Cornet, Cornish, Cotanch, Cousins, Cox, Coy, Craig, Crane, Cuff, Cuffee, Cumbo, Cunningham, Curle, Curtis, Custalow, Cuttillo, Cypress, Dales, Davenport, Davis, Day, Dean, Deas, Debrix, Demery, Dempsey, Dennis, Dennum, Derosario, Dixon, Dobbins, Dolby, Donathan, Douglass, Dove, Drake, Drew, Driggers, Dring, Driver, Drury, Duncan, Dungee, Dungill, Dunlop, Dunn, Dunstan, Durham, Dutchfield, Eady, Easter, Edgar, Edge, Edwards, Elliott, Ellis, Elmore, Epperson, Epps, Evans, Fagan, Faggott, Farrar, Farthing, Ferrell, Fielding, Fields, Findley, Finnie, Fletcher, Flood, Flora, Flowers, Fortune, Fox, Francis, Francisco, Franklin, Frazier, Freeman, Frost, Fry, Fullam, Fuller, Fuzmore, Gallimore, Gamby, Garden, Gardner, Garner, Garnes, George, Gibson, Gilbert, Gillett, Godett, Goff, Goldman, Gordon, Gowen, Grace, Graham, Grant, Grantum, Graves, Gray, Grayson, Gregory, Grice, Griffin, Grimes, Groom, Groves, Guy, Gwinn, Hackett, Hagins, Hailey, Haithcock, Hall, Hamilton, Hamlin, Hammond, Hanson, Harden, Harmon, Harris, Harrison, Hartless, Harvey, Hatcher, Hatfield/Hatter, Hawkins, Hawley, Haws, Haynes, Hays, Hearn, Heath, Hedgepeth, Hewlett, Hewson, Hickman, Hicks, Hill, Hilliard, Hitchens, Hiter, Hobson, Hodges, Hogg, Hollinger, Holman, Holmes, Holt, Honesty, Hood, Hoomes, Horn, Howard, Howell, Hubbard, Huelin, Hughes, Humbles, Hunt, Hunter, Hurley, Hurst, Ivey, Jackson, Jacobs, James, Jameson, Jarvis, Jasper, Jeffery, Jeffries, Jenkins, Johns, Johnson, Joiner, Jones, Jordan, Jumper, Keemer, Kelly, Kendall, Kent, Kersey, Key/ Kee, Keyton, King, Kinney, Knight, Lamb, Landum, Lang, Lansford, Lantern, Lawrence, Laws, Lawson, Lee, Lephew, Lester, Lett, Leviner, Lewis, Lighty, Ligon, Lively, Liverpool, Locklear, Lockson, Locus/Lucas, Logan, Longo, Lowry, Lugrove, Lynch, Lyons, Lytle, McCarty, McCoy, McDaniel, McIntosh, Maclin, Madden, Mahorney, Manly, Mann, Manning, Manuel, Marshall, Martin, Mason, Matthews, Mayo, Mays, Meade, Mealy, Meekins, Meggs, Melvin, Miles, Miller, Mills, Milton, Mitchell, Mitchum, Mongom, Monoggin, Month, Moore, Mordick, Morgan, Morris, Mosby, Moses, Moss, Mozingo, Muckelroy, Mumford, Munday, Muns, Murray, Murrow, Nash, Neal, Newsom, Newton, Nicholas, Nickens, Norman, Norris, Norton, Norwood, Nutts, Oats, Okey, Oliver, Otter, Overton, Owen, Oxendine, Page, Pagee, Palmer, Parker, Parr, Parrot, Patrick, Patterson, Payne, Peavy, Peacock, Pendarvis, Pendergrass, Perkins, Peters, Pettiford, Phillips, Pickett, Pierce, Pinn, Pittman, Pitts, Plumly, Poe, Pompey, Portions, Portiss, Powell, Powers, Poythress, Press, Price, Prichard, Proctor, Pryor, Pugh, Pursley, Rains, Ralls, Randall, Ranger, Rann, Raper, Ratcliff, Rawlinson, Redcross, Redman, Reed, Reeves, Revell, Reynolds, Rich, Richardson, Rickman, Ridley, Roberts, Robins, Robinson, Rogers, Rollins, Rosario, Ross, Rouse, Rowe, Rowland, Ruff, Ruffin, Russell, Sample, Sampson, Sanderlin, Santee, Saunders, Savoy, Sawyer, Scott, Seldon, Sexton, Shaw, Shepherd, Shoecraft, Shoemaker, Silver, Simmons, Simms, Simon, Simpson, Sisco, Skipper, Slaxton, Smith, Smothers, Sneed, Snelling, Soleleather, Sorrell, Sparrow, Spelman, Spiller, Spriddle, Spruce, Spurlock, Stafford, Stephens, Stewart, Stringer, Sunket, Swan, Sweat, Sweetin, Symons, Taborn, Talbot, Tann, Tate, Taylor, Teague, Teamer, Thomas, Thompson, Timber, Toney, Tootle, Toulson, Toyer, Travis, Turner, Tyler, Tyner, Tyre, Underwood, Valentine, Vaughan, Vena/Venie, Verty, Vickory, Viers, Walden, Walker, Wallace, Warburton, Warrick, Waters, Watkins, Weaver, Webb, Webster,Weeks, Welch, Wells, West, Wharton, Whistler, White, Whitehurst, Wiggins, Wilkins, Wilkinson, Williams, Willis, Wilson, Winborn, Winn, Winters, Wise, Womble, Wood, Wooten, Worrell, Wright, and Young.

Free African Americans ranks as the greatest achievement in black genealogy of this generation! No collection of African-American genealogy or social history is complete without this two-volume work.

“Free Negroes” and “Mulattoes” of Gloucester County and the Tidewater Area of Virginia Prior to 1800

Renegade South: histories of unconventional southerners
2013-08-01

The following guest essay by Wayne K. Driver expands upon my own research on the Morris Family of Gloucester County, Virginia.

Vikki Bynum, Moderator

By Wayne K. Driver

Throughout my years of researching my family from Gloucester County and the Tidewater Area of Virginia, I have noted that several families, including my own, were listed as “free Negroes” or “mulattoes” prior to 1800. This discovery ignited my interest; I wanted to know more about these families and how they fit into a society in which most people of African descent were slaves and where those of European descent dominated. I wondered if these free people of color had any rights, if they owned property or had the freedom to move about without being harassed.  Since my focus was on the years prior to 1800, I also wondered how they felt about the Revolutionary War.  Which side did they support? Which side promised a better future for them?

Families with the names ALLMOND/ALLMAN, BLUFORD, DRIVER, FREEMAN, GOWEN/ GOING, HEARN, KING, LEMON, MEGGS, MONOGGIN, and MORRIS are identified in various documents as living free from slavery.  “Free” did not necessarily mean, however, that they were as free as those of full European ancestry.  These “free” people did not have slave masters, but they did have limitations place upon them and hardships that would not be understood by my generation.

The above families of color, as well as others not cited in this essay, contributed to America by serving in wars, participating in religious movements, and working in many trades. At the same time, they strove for greater freedom of access to education, property ownership, and social equality.  Too often, these pioneers are forgotten in the history books; rarely are they recognized for their work in shaping the counties in which they lived.  When I drive through Gloucester, to my knowledge there is no physical memorial that bears witness to their service in the Revolutionary War, or their contributions to their communities.  I can find all types of negative propaganda concerning “free Negroes,” such as recommendations for their forced removal from the county, or punishment for not paying taxes. My hope is that someday the leaders of these communities will recognize free families of color and teach generations to come about their positive contributions…

Read the entire article here.

Loving v. Virginia (No. 395): 206 Va. 924, 147 S.E.2d 78, reversed.

Waren, C.J., Opinion of the Court, SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
388 U.S. 1, Loving v. Virginia
Appeal from the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia
No. 395
Argued: April 10, 1967
Decided: June 12, 1967
Source: Legal Information Institute, Cornell University Law School

MR. CHIEF JUSTICE WARREN delivered the opinion of the Court.

This case presents a constitutional question never addressed by this Court: whether a statutory scheme adopted by the State of Virginia to prevent marriages between persons solely on the basis of racial classifications violates the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. [n1] For reasons which seem to us to reflect the central meaning of those constitutional commands, we conclude that these statutes cannot stand consistently with the Fourteenth Amendment.

In June, 1958, two residents of Virginia, Mildred Jeter, a Negro woman, and Richard Loving, a white man, were married in the District of Columbia pursuant to its laws. Shortly after their marriage, the Lovings returned to Virginia and established their marital abode in Caroline County. At the October Term, 1958, of the Circuit Court [p3] of Caroline County, a grand jury issued an indictment charging the Lovings with violating Virginia’s ban on interracial marriages. On January 6, 1959, the Lovings pleaded guilty to the charge, and were sentenced to one year in jail; however, the trial judge suspended the sentence for a period of 25 years on the condition that the Lovings leave the State and not return to Virginia together for 25 years. He stated in an opinion that:

Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And, but for the interference with his arrangement, there would be no cause for such marriage. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.

After their convictions, the Lovings took up residence in the District of Columbia. On November 6, 1963, they filed a motion in the state trial court to vacate the judgment and set aside the sentence on the ground that the statutes which they had violated were repugnant to the Fourteenth Amendment. The motion not having been decided by October 28, 1964, the Lovings instituted a class action in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia requesting that a three-judge court be convened to declare the Virginia anti-miscegenation statutes unconstitutional and to enjoin state officials from enforcing their convictions. On January 22, 1965, the state trial judge denied the motion to vacate the sentences, and the Lovings perfected an appeal to the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia. On February 11, 1965, the three-judge District Court continued the case to allow the Lovings to present their constitutional claims to the highest state court…

…Marriage is one of the “basic civil rights of man,” fundamental to our very existence and survival. Skinner v. Oklahoma, 316 U.S. 535, 541 (1942). See also Maynard v. Hill, 125 U.S. 190 (1888). To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual, and cannot be infringed by the State.

These convictions must be reversed.

It is so ordered.

Read the entire opinion here.

Virginia Ban on Interracial Marriages Goes to Federal Court This Week

The New York Times
1965-01-24
page 43

RICHMOND, Jan. 23—A constitutional test of Virginia laws that make it a crime for a white person to marry a Negro will begin here next week. The case is regarded as certain to go to the United States Supreme Court and may become a landmark. Eighteen other states have similar laws that would be affected by a Supreme Court decision in the Virginia case.

In a unanimous opinion last month, the Court struck down a Florida statute punishing extramarital cohabitation by whites and Negroes. It avoided a ruling on state laws against interracial marriage, but the decision raised new doubts about the continuing validity of such laws.

Knew About Law

On Wednesday, lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union will argue before a three-judge Federal court here that the state’s enforcement of Virginia’s antimiscegenation laws has grossly violated the constitutional rights of Mr. and Mrs. Richard P. Loving, both life-long residents of Virginia.

Mr. Loving, 31 years old, is a big, silent construction worker. He is white. His wife, Mildred, 25, is colored—part Indian and part Negro. Both had spent their lives in Caroline County, just south of Fredericksburg, until January, 1959, when they were banished from the state by County Circuit Judge Leon M. Bazile. They moved to Washington with their three children. Aware of the Virginia law, they had been married in Washington on June 2, 1958.

The charge brought against them five weeks after their marriage was violation of Title 20, Sections 53 and 59 of the Virginia Code:

“If any white person and colored person shall go out of this state for the purpose of being married and with the intention of returning … they shall be punished — by confinement in the penitentiary for not less than one nor more than five years.”

Other sections of the code provide for the annulment of interracial marriages “without any decree of divorce” and for a fine of $200 for performing an interracial marriage ceremony, “of which the informer shall have one-half.”…

Read or purchase the article here.

Southern Race Question

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle
Tuesday, 1893-07-25
page 2, column 5
Source: Brooklyn Public Library’s Brooklyn Collection
Transcribed by Steven F. Riley

The Views Expressed in a Richmond Religious Newspaper

How the Negro Is Taking Advantage of the Opportunities for Advancement—Some Singular Ideas as to the Future Outcome of Present Developments — Another Talker Suggests a Colored State.

Richmond, Va., July 25—A startling editorial appeared in the last issue of the Richmond Christian Advocate, the leading Methodist organ In the South, on the negro question, Written by Dr. J. J. Lafferty. Among other things it said:

“A Southern Methodist advocate has this incident: In a village of the cotton belt a big, burly blackr ode up to a store and said to the owner: ‘Let this man (pointing to a poor white laborer) have two dollars’ worth of goods and charge it to me.’ This transaction may fret the reader, but it has a wide significance.”

“The Northern people, during the war, were drawn to the plantation peasantry of the South. The lot of fat and fun loving negro, the happiest working class on earth, was, for years, pictured as a bitter bondage, the slave was represented as longing for freedom, and during the war praying through the nights for the coming of the national troops. Those moving though mistaken fancies and much more of the same sort, stirred the philanthropic heart of the cotton thread millionaires, and the rich army contractors turned virtuous. A great sum was sent South for the education of the negro. It expenditure. In the main, helped the negro. It was wisely directed that these donations should have a practical turn. What was the outcome? We find in nearly every Southern state the negro boys of the brighter sort in training schools.”

“In the meanwhile, the negro reported in the census is growing rapidly as a citizen, with a home and decent income, a thrifty member of society. Moreover, the Southern commonwealth began after the war to tax the white property holders heavily to educate the sons of the non tax paying negro.”

“The negro laborer received as much money for coarse work as the ex-soldier of Lee. The white man consumed more of his earnings in house rent, clothing and food, hence he could not spare his son at the school. He needed the boy at the plow to aid in bringing up the family. The negro boy first loomed in the free school to read and write, then he learned in these technical schools how to make fine shoes, buggies, saddles, etc.”

“The newspapers recently reported that the private secretary to Mr. Blount of Georgia, representing the United States in the Hawaiian Islands, would shortly marry the daughter of a rich Chinaman of Honolulu. This educated young gentleman and of social standing seeks an alliance with an ex-coolie—a pig eyed pagan. Who will dare say that the olive colored octoroons and quadroons, the bright mulattoes, the heiresses of wealthy-men of mixed blood, will not be sought in the next century by impecunious, thriftless and idle young men of the white race? The negro maidens are seen at certain colleges for women of high degree in the North. Whereunto will this grow?”

“Consider the future of the friendless and fatherless boy of the white race in the South. Can he pay $500 to attend the Stevens Institute in New York. Can he command money for board and raiment while a student at any state school with a small annex of tools and a shop? He hasn’t money enough to buy oven a railroad ticket to such a college.”

“The grandchildren of warlike men with historic names, who made the Southern army a synonym of dauntless courage, are drifting toward the helot class, and in the century dawning there will come to pass social conditions that would stir the corpses in the jackets of grey.

“No man has soon the harvest from the sowing after Appomattox. The statesmen among us robbed the ex-soldier of Lee to educate black competitors of his children. Then Northern millionaires, in hatred of the paroled citizens, have endowed colleges of tools and machines to equip the ex-slave to surpass and subjugate the sons of the confederate in the struggle for the best pay and position in the skilled trades. It is a condition and not a theory that confronts us. Thoughtful men do not contest the fact.”

Madison, Wis., July 25—At the Monona lake assembly yesterday, John Temple Graves of Georgia advanced some radical ideas regarding the negro race problem in his lecture entitled, “Uncle Tom’s’ New Cabin.” He said:

“The remedy Is to be found in a negro state planted in the heart of our own great republic, under the shadow of the flag, under the benediction of the government. Here let him, unmolested, work out his final destiny. In the region of Colorado, Now Mexico and Arizona is to be found on area of 150,000,000 acres upon which our whole negro population could find subsistence and yet not be so densely populated as I found Germany or Belgium. The government should lend them every aid in developing the country. Negroes alone should hold the offices and rule the country. Nor are they opposed to such action. Actual investigation has shown that numbers are ready to go even to Africa where they can have a state of their own.”

Notorious in the Neighborhood with Joshua Rothman, Ph.D.

Research at the National Archives and Beyond
BlogTalk Radio
Thursday, 2013-08-22, 21:00 EDT, (Friday, 2013-08-23, 01:00Z)

Bernice Bennett, Host

Joshua D. Rothman, Professor of History and African American Studies
University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa

Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families Across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787-1861

Laws and cultural norms militated against interracial sex in  Virginia before the Civil War,. Nonetheless, it was ubiquitous in urban, town, and plantation communities throughout the state. In Notorious in the Neighborhood, Joshua Rothman examines the full spectrum of interracial sexual relationships under slavery-from Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and the intertwined interracial families of Monticello and Charlottesville to commercial sex in Richmond, the routinized sexual exploitation of enslaved women, and adultery across the color line.

White Virginians allowed for an astonishing degree of flexibility and fluidity within a seemingly rigid system of race and interracial relations, Rothman argues, and the relationship between law and custom regarding racial intermixture was always shifting. As a consequence, even as whites never questioned their own racial supremacy, the meaning and significance of racial boundaries, racial hierarchy, and ultimately of race itself always stood on unstable ground—a reality that whites understood and about which they demonstrated increasing anxiety as the sectional crisis intensified.

Joshua Rothman is Professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Alabama, where he is also Director of the Frances S. Summersell Center for the Study of the South.

For more information, click here.