New Republic (October 18, 1943): “The bugaboo of intermarriage, which lurks in even the most civilized white minds, could as well be forgotten. People are going to mate with whom they please as they have in the past and laws to prevent it are futile … There have been many mixed couples legally married in the Northern states, whose lives would put to shame the clandestine carnality of the white men who have created the generations of mixed blood Negro—to whom they have repudiated all obligations of parenthood …
“It is ironic that those who cry loudest against social equality by which they mean “intermarriage,” hail from the states, counties and townships where white blood, regardless of the law, flowed in the heaviest volume in Negro veins. These protestants should know, if anyone should, that people mate with whom they please; it is a very personal and private decision.”
Walter A. Maier, “Lutheran Hour, Bringing Christ to the Nations” (letter to Baltimore Afro-American, Nov. 20, 1943) : “In hesitating to advocate the intermarriage of colored and white people I follow the same principle in speaking against mixed marriages for Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, and Lutherans and Reformed.
“I feel that young people who enter upon married life without being able to worship at the same altar are under a definite handicap.
“Answering the question, “Isn’t marriage better than the race mixing we have now without benefit of clergy? If two people like each other haven’t they the right and obligation to marry rather than engage in the kind of illicit intercourse which has changed the color of the colored race in America from black to brown?
“This certainly is not in any sense the exclusive alternative. The fact I do not advocate mixed marriages does not mean that I espouse the cause of illicit intercourse.”
1 Quoted from D. G. Croly, Miscegenation, p. 66. 1864. On p. 67 is an equally strong endorsement by Theodore Tilton, another abolition leader.
2 Editorial, March 4, 1924.
3 Reprinted from the Los Angeles Times in Pittsburgh Courier, March 8, 1930.
4 Letter in author’s possession.
5 The Devil’s Inkwell, p. 33, Houston, Tex. 1923.
6 Catholic Worker, Jan. 1935.
7 Christianity and the Race Problem, p. 60. 1924.
8 conflict of Color, p. 231. 1910.
9 White Capital and Coloured Labour, p. 37. In the 1928 edition this passage is omitted.
10 Collier’s Weekly, Jan. 29, 1926, p. 410.
11 Race Problem in South Africa, p. 103. 1926.
12 The Black Man’s Place in South Africa, p. 127-8. 1922.
13 National Sermons, pp. 356, 626, 624. 1869. Bishop Haven was one of the greatest spokesmen for the oneness of mankind in American history. Like Wendell Phillips, he indulged in none of the hedging so common among American leaders today. He once refused pastorship of a church in the South because Negroes would not be admitted to it on equality with white people.
14a New Threshold Magazine, August, 1943.
14b N. Y. World-Telegram, July 29, 1943. (“My Day.”)
15a Interracial Justice, pp. 143-6. 1937.
15b The Race Question and the Negro, p. 198. 1943.
Chapter Six
MIXED MARRIAGES AS SEEN BY NEGROES
“Prejudice, like the spider, makes everywhere its home, and lives where there seems nothing to live on.” Thomas Paine.
BOOKER T. WASHINGTON, founder of Tuskegee Institute: “I have never looked upon amalgamation as offering a solution to the so-called race problem and I know very few Negroes who favor it or even think of it for that matter.
“What those whom I have heard discuss the matter do object to are laws which enable the father to escape his responsibility or prevent him from accepting, or exercising it when he had children by colored women …
“Those who are fighting race distinction are doing so not because they want to intermingle socially with white people but because they have been led to believe that where race discrimination exist they pave the way for discriminations which are needlessly humiliating and injurious to the weaker race.
“Let me add that I do not wholly share this view myself. While there may be some serious disadvantage in racial distinctions, there are certainly real advantages to my race at least.”1
Bishop A. Walters: “These laws forbidding intermarriage of the races and the injustices resulting therefrom are crimes which are calling aloud to Almighty God for vengeance and we are compelled to suffer as a nation until such ways are righted.
“None but Almighty God and the women of the Negro race know the baneful effects which colored women have to suffer by such prohibitory laws. Speaking with a colored woman not long ago, she said there is nothing so grinding, so crushing as to look in the face of a white woman and have her say by a sarcastic and withering look, ‘You’re nothing but a thing to be used by our men.’ I say again that prohibitory marriage laws such as I have mentioned above are a sad blot on the escutcheon of our land.”2
About 1928, the Baltimore Afro-American carried a serial “Brown Love,” in which mixed marriages were approved, and asked its readers to express their opinion. The following are excerpts from some of the letters it received:
“I can stand all the interracial love stories you are able to publish.
“I live down South where I haven’t a chance to learn what is going on.”
“There is no disgrace about a colored man marrying a white woman and vice-versa. We need to bury the hatchet and shake hands.”
“I really enjoyed reading the story. I don’t see any harm in printing those stories. I am engaged to a very refined, cultured, white girl, who is a college graduate and also a graduate nurse of a refined family, and I am made welcome in her family. I do not have to sneak or hide to see her. We love each other and will be married in December.
“I think Mr. and Mrs. Saunders of Columbus, Ohio, are wrong in their statement when they say that this is contrary to the holy command of God that races should ever be together, when God made of one blood all mankind.
“No race can consider itself above another. May you continue to print such stories, regardless of the narrow-minded ones.”
“There are interracial loves, interracial marriages, interracial dances, interracial penthouses, half-white and half-colored children, men and women, so why can’t we have interracial love stories?
“Here in the city of Camden, the above is quite true. Since it is, there must be interracial love stories, so please let us have them.”
“I love to read interracial love stories, but down here where I live, no colored man makes love to a white woman; and probably won’t for a long time.”
“If we discuss interracial love affairs from now until a hen learns to chant the Greek alphabet backward, will someone please tell me in what way it is going to help get jobs for our scores of boys and girls graduating in a few weeks?”
“Interracial