{"id":10274,"date":"2010-11-27T02:08:09","date_gmt":"2010-11-27T02:08:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=10274"},"modified":"2016-11-19T23:51:44","modified_gmt":"2016-11-19T23:51:44","slug":"%e2%80%9cwhite-negroes%e2%80%9d-in-segregated-mississippi-miscegenation-racial-identity-and-the-law","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=10274","title":{"rendered":"\u201cWhite Negroes\u201d in Segregated Mississippi: Miscegenation, Racial Identity, and the Law"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.jstor.org\/stable\/2587946\" target=\"_blank\">\u201cWhite Negroes\u201d in Segregated Mississippi: Miscegenation, Racial Identity, and the Law<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.jstor.org\/action\/showPublication?journalCode=jsouthernhistory\" target=\"_blank\">The Journal of Southern History<\/a><br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.jstor.org\/stable\/10.2307\/i324142\" target=\"_blank\">Volume 64, Number 2<\/a> (May, 1998)<br \/>\npages 247-276<\/p>\n<p><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.txstate.edu\/history\/people\/faculty\/bynum.html\" target=\"_blank\">Victoria E. Bynum<\/a><\/strong>,\u00a0Emeritus Professor of History<br \/>\n<em>Texas State University, San Marcos<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Not until David L. Cohn returned to his native <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Mississippi\" target=\"_blank\">Mississippi<\/a> after an absence of two decades did he understand the complexities of the racial system in which he, a white man, had been reared during the first decades of the twentieth century. \u201cI began to discover that this apparently simple society was highly complex,\u201d he wrote in the 1948 foreword to his memoir of <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Mississippi_Delta\" target=\"_blank\">Delta<\/a>\u00a0life. \u201cIt was marked by strange paradoxes and hopelessly irreconcilable contradictions. It possessed elaborate behavior codes written, unwritten, and unwritable.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In the same year that Cohn\u2019s words were published, Davis Knight, a twenty-three-year-old Mississippi man, collided with this system of paradoxes, contradictions, and codes. On June 21, 1948, the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Jones_County,_Mississippi\" target=\"_blank\">Jones County<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Circuit_court\" target=\"_blank\">Circuit Court<\/a> in <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Ellisville,_Mississippi\" target=\"_blank\">Ellisville<\/a> indicted Knight, who claimed to be\u2014and certainly looked\u2014white, for the crime of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=450\" target=\"_blank\">miscegenation<\/a>. Two years earlier, on April 18, 1946, he had married Junie Lee Spradley, a white woman. The state claimed that, even though Knight appeared to be white, he was in fact black&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cWhite Negroes\u201d in Segregated Mississippi: Miscegenation, Racial Identity, and the Law The Journal of Southern History Volume 64, Number 2 (May, 1998) pages 247-276 Victoria E. Bynum,\u00a0Emeritus Professor of History Texas State University, San Marcos Not until David L. Cohn returned to his native Mississippi after an absence of two decades did he understand the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,459,8,1459,20],"tags":[4518,780,4519,20762,3884,6956,1453,1454],"class_list":["post-10274","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-history","category-media-archive","category-mississippi","category-usa","tag-davis-knight","tag-journal-of-southern-history","tag-junie-lee-spradley","tag-mississippi","tag-piney-woods","tag-the-journal-of-southern-history","tag-victoria-bynum","tag-victoria-e-bynum"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10274","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10274"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10274\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50066,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10274\/revisions\/50066"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10274"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10274"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10274"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}