Couples who have been living happily for years and with grown children in good positions are liable to find their entire lives upset. Believing themselves white they have sometimes discovered, or some enemy has discovered it for them, that unknown to them, a law had been passed changing the racial status of one of them. Once legally white, they are now legally colored. Others not dreaming they had a Negro strain have contracted marriages in good faith only to discover that they were really outside the pale, with sometimes great tragedy resulting. Research into ancestry is frequently resorted to in order to win divorce, or for personal vengeance and blackmail.
In short, the situation as to the marriage of citizens in twenty-six and a half states of the union is so tangled as to make the famous Gordian knot a veritable poem of simplicity by comparison. The constitution of no less than six of these states rules that a Negro is one thing while the state laws declare him to be something else. Thus if such laws are strictly interpreted there are citizens who can marry neither colored nor white. If they remain in those states their only hope of getting a partner is to import an Eskimo, or some other racial group not named in the law.
Woolley tells of the chaos that the Louisiana miscegenation law of 1908 created as soon as it was passed. The district attorney, he says, was “stumped” when he found in the town of Lee “that among the truck gardeners, fishermen and other classes of people that the color line had been ignored for years. The accused white men swore they were Negroes and their neighbors backed them up. There were no birth records to disprove the stories—only the absence of the slightest kink in the hair and the absence of blonds.”13 He relates further how “the very first arrest” for miscegenation “took the state by the ears and gave Dame Gossip the center of the stage. At select gatherings family skeletons were trotted out wholesale.” Among the number was the brother of a United States senator who had married an octoroon in the days when such marriages were permissible, and who, as a consequence was now thrown into the social discard. One man, seeking revenge on a neighbor, went to dig in the parish records, hoping to prove him of Negro ancestry, when he discovered that he, himself, had a Negro grandfather, on which he sold his property and left the state. One leading New Orleans banker was similarly discovered to be colored, and his name and that of his family were struck off “the calling lists” of the best people. He left for New York and became “a big figure in Wall Street.” Still another case, that of two brothers and sister, “bearer of one of the foremost names” were discovered from the parish records to be colored. One brother became “a raving maniac” and was sent to an asylum; the other brother remained on his estate but was cut off from “the very people who have known him longest and esteem him most”; while the sister went to Europe.14
WHO IS A NEGRO? EUROPEAN TYPES—RUSSIAN
VI. Marie Alexandrovna Bykova (nee Pushkin), daughter of Pushkin’s oldest son, and direct descendant of the great poet (Chatwood Hall photo). In Virginia, Mme. Bykova would be a Negro. Her Negro ancestry “is ascertainable.”
In other states with similar laws, a mixed couple legally married in one state, say in Pennsylvania, if they cross the line into Virginia or Maryland even for a day and remain together are criminals, liablbe to imprisonment and fine. Be it noted, too, that to these fantastic laws the like of which an Adolf Hitler in his craziest moments had never been able to concoct, the United States Supreme Court has repeatedly given its approval. In 1883 it held in the case of State versus Jackson that the privileges and immunities of the Fourteenth Amendment do not include the right to marry outside of one’s own “race”!15
Worst of all, these anti-marriage laws leave the door wide open to concubinage and interracial fornication. There are, of course, laws against these but they are observed nowhere, except in the case of white women and Negro men. Louisiana, whose law against illicit intercourse of white and black is one of the most stringent, is one of the worst offenders. In short, the laws of the twenty-nine and a half states above-mentioned are a direct inducement to sexual promiscuity—an inducement that mankind has never needed.
With the fall of Hitler, his Nuremberg law met the fate of similar freak laws of the Middle Ages, like that of Avignon, against the Jews.
Anti-marriage laws are a reflection of the greed of their makers and the crooked social vision of their approvers. But one ought to expect nothing better, at least he will not, if he remembers that it is usually the slickster and the opportunist—men whose mission it is to prove that “fair is foul and foul is fair” who dominate in law-making of this kind.
In 444 B.C., Rome, a pagan nation, passed a law abolishing the statute prohibiting marriage between certain of her citizens because of caste. Christian America, more than two thousand years later, has not yet caught up with her in this respect, has not yet seen fit to legalize the union of citizens who have been mixing illegally for more than three centuries.
ADDITIONAL BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hoernlé, R. F. A., South African Native Policy, pp. 39, 42, 55. 1939.
Negro Year Book, 1921-22, pp. 178-181.
Legal Status of Negro-White Amalgamation, Amer. Jour. of Sociol., Vol. 9, pp. 666-78. 1915-16.
Stephenson, G. T., Race Distinctions in American Law. 1910.
Styles, F. L., Negroes and the Law. 1937.
Woodson, C. G., Fifty Years of Negro Citizenship as Viewed by the U. S. Supreme Court. 1921.
Gilligan, F. J., Morality of the Color Line. 1928.
Turner, H. M., The Black Man’s Doom (Decision of the U. S. Supreme Court on the Civil Rights’ Act for Negroes. 1896).
1 Campbell, J. L., Lives of the Chief Justices of England, Vol. 2, p. 406. 1874. The American slaveholders, however, succeeded in setting the decision aside by Yorke, the attorney-general and Talbot, the solicitor-general in 1729. Twenty years later Yorke, as Chief Justice, again declared slavery in England legal. In 1772, Chief Justice Lord Mansfield again declared it illegal in the Somerset case, but contrary to general belief that did not end it as Negro slaves continued to be advertised for sale. (Stuart, C., Memoirs of Granvills Sharp, p. 20, 1836.) Negroes were probably not freed in England until 1834, when slavery was abolished throughout the empire. But incredible as it sounds white people in the British Isles were still held in actual slavery after the blacks were freed. These were the Scotch colliers. See Eden, F. M., History of Laboring Classes in England, pp. 7-11. 1797. Miller, H., My School and Schoolmasters, pp. 303-305. 1857.) These colliers had been freed in 1775, but the masters ignored the law. They were not freed until 1842. And, of course, we recall that the Russians were freed from slavery only in 1861.
2 Haldane, J. B. S., Heredity and Politics, p. 140. 1938.
3a Race Relations News. No. 15, Sept. 1939. Most of the mixed marriages in South Africa between Negroes and whites from 1927-36 were between whites and mulattoes—698 white men to mulatto women; and 137 white women to mulatto men. (Ibid. Jan. 1939). See also: Sex and Race, Vol. 1, pp. 131-141,
3b Statutes of S. Africa, Vol. 1, p. 14. 1927.
3c Ziervogel, C., Brown South Africa, p. 19. 1938.
4 New York Post, Aug. 10, 1938, as reported by the Reich Food Laws.
5 Quoted in Schuman, F., The Nazi Dictatorship, p. 383. 1939.
6 The South’s Fight for Race Purity. Pearson’s Maga. January, 1910.
7 Ruvigny, Titled Nobility of Europe, pp.