The History of Interracial Marriage in Mississippi

Kelly Therese Pollock  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app, so you never miss an episode, and please tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers, to listen too.

In Mississippi, prior to the end of the Civil War, enslaved people had no right to consent or contract to legal marriage. Many of them did, of course, form long term unions and think of themselves as married, but they had no legal protections, and their enslavers could, and frequently did, separate couples and families. In antebellum Mississippi, even the few free Black people in the state had no legal right to marriage. If Black people could not be married at all, then, by extension, there could be no interracial marriage. In 1865, the Mississippi State Constitution was amended to abolish slavery. The clause, "All free men, when they form a social compact, are equal in rights," implied at least that freed people now had the right to marry. Although it was not immediately clear whether interracial marriages would be permitted, when the state legislature met a few months later, they established what would become known as the Black Codes, which, among other things, did explicitly outlaw interracial marriage, punishable by life in prison. The Civil Rights Act of 1866, which the United States Congress passed over President Andrew Johnson's veto, gave all citizens the right, "to make and enforce contracts, to sue the parties and give evidence, to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold and convey real and personal property and to full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and property, as is enjoyed by white citizens." Some white Mississippians worried that this law gave Black people the right to marry white people, but marriage licenses were granted locally, not federally, and many local officials simply continued to refuse to grant licenses for interracial marriages. However, in 1868, Mississippi lawmakers, led by Republicans, including 16 Black delegates, drafted a new racially progressive state constitution, which gave Black men over 21 the vote and established a public school system. It also declared that, "All persons who have not been married but are now living together, co habiting as husband and wife, shall be taken and held for all purposes in law as married," and they really meant all persons, regardless of the race of either party. In 1870, the state legislature repealed the Black Codes, including the law prohibiting interracial marriage. As with most progressive legislation in reconstruction, Mississippi's laws allowing interracial marriage would not last. In 1880, the Mississippi State Legislature, which had swung back to democratic control, passed a new code of laws, once again, outlawing interracial marriage, defined as marriage between a white person and a person with at least one Black grandparent. In 1890, Mississippi delegates again met to write a new state constitution, this one erasing all of the racial progress from the previous one. The 1890 constitution reaffirmed the illegality of interracial marriage, even more strictly defining such marriage between a white person and a person with at least one great-grandparent who was Black. And for the first time, due to the growing population of Chinese residents in Mississippi, it was now illegal for white people and Chinese people to marry. In 1892, Mississippi outlawed common law marriage, meaning that couples could no longer get around the prohibitions by just living together and claiming to be married, but rather they had to be issued a marriage license. But that move proved to be so unpopular that in 1906, common law marriages were reinstated and allowed all the way until 1956. Of course, whatever legislators intended, they couldn't regulate love. And couples who watched their relationships go from being illegal to legal, back to illegal, stayed together, making homes and raising families, despite the changing legal landscape. These families had various strategies for avoiding legal scrutiny. In some cases, the Black partner might pass as white. The stricter law defining someone as Black if they had just one Black great grandparent, meant that some people who were legally defined as Black could be very light skinned and outside a court of law, or sometimes even inside one, it might be very hard for anyone to prove their race. Another strategy some couples used when passing as white was not an option, was to act as if they had a different kind of relationship. The wife might be for census purposes, the live-in housekeeper, for instance, or the husband might be the wife's border. Or officially, the couple might live in residences next door to each other. In many cases, especially when the relationship was between a white man and a Black woman, the community and even law enforcement were willing to ignore relationships regardless of what the law said. When couples were prosecuted, it often wasn't for interracial marriage with its steeper punishment, but rather for unlawful cohabitation, which generally incurred just a fine or a short jail sentence, not enough to dissuade couples who truly loved each other. Mississippi actually still has a law on the books against cohabitation, punishable by fines of up to $500 or jail time of up to six months. Presumably, it still is not enough to dissuade most people. By 1967, Mississippi still had laws on the books against interracial marriage. They'd been updated and refined several times since the 1890s. On June 12, 1967, the United States Supreme Court handed down a unanimous decision in Loving v Virginia. In the opinion, Chief Justice Earl Warren, writing for the court, argued, "Marriage is one of the basic civil rights of man, fundamental to our very existence and survival. 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 14th Amendment, is surely to deprive all of the state's citizens of liberty without due process of law." 20 years after Loving made it unenforceable, in 1987 the Mississippi electorate finally repealed the section of its 1890 state constitution outlawing interracial marriage, by a vote of 52% to 48%. Joining me in this episode is Dr. Kathryn Schumaker, Senior Lecturer in American Studies at the United States Studies Center at the University of Sydney, and author of, "Tangled Fortunes: The Hidden History of Interracial Marriage in the Segregated South."

Hi Katie, thanks so much for joining me today.

Dr. Kathryn Schumaker  10:58  
 Hi Kelly, thanks for having me on the podcast.

Kelly Therese Pollock  11:00  
I'm excited to be speaking with you. I want to start by asking, this is your second book. So how did you become interested in this topic and decide to write a book about this? 

Dr. Kathryn Schumaker  11:12  
So in 2018, I was finishing my first book, and I was writing about a free speech case from Neshoba County, Mississippi, which is the same place that the civil rights workers were murdered in 1964. And as I was researching that case, I came across the story about an inheritance dispute, which involved some people who may or may not have been related to some of the students that I was writing about. And this inheritance dispute really caught my attention number one, because it was just after Brown versus Board of Education. It was a case of two different sets of cousins fighting over a fortune, which is not that unusual in any era. But in this case, you know, one set of cousins was Black and one set of cousins was white. And this case caught the attention of the Mississippi press and some of the Black press outside of the state. But otherwise, I couldn't find very much written about it. And the assertion at the heart of the case was that this fortune rightfully belonged to these Black cousins who were the closest descendants of this man who they said passed for white. And so I was trying to sort of make sense of this case. And the more I looked into it, just I was just curious, right? Like, you know, who are these people? Where is this coming from? This seems like a very dangerous story to tell in civil rights era Mississippi. And what I found was that it seemed like the story was true, and that, in fact, this man who had passed away was the child of a man who enslaved this man's mother, and that they had stayed together after the Civil War, and that they he and his siblings had inherited all of this land that had once been the plantation where they were enslaved. So when I came across I didn't quite know how to make sense of this story. And so I started looking more into it and thinking about maybe there was something there. And that took me into this whole history of common law marriage in Mississippi, and the era when interracial marriage was legal, and what happened to those families after it became illegal. And then the story just kind of grew and grew, and then it became a book that, yeah, I've just finished.

Kelly Therese Pollock  13:23  
So a lot of the stories that you're looking at, the families that you're talking about in this book are families who are breaking the law, at least at some points in this history, and so they're trying to, at least sometimes keep their status somewhat quiet. They may be trying to pass for different races, or at least sort of, you know, just sort of stay on the down low. So how are you able to pull out some of these stories? Which stories can you tell, and what may we be missing in the story? What else might there be that we just can't know, because there are people are trying to sort of stay in the shadows?

Dr. Kathryn Schumaker  14:08  
So a lot of the families that are featured in the book are families that I found through inheritance disputes. And one of the things that's really helpful about these kinds of cases is that they often include a lot of testimony, maybe depositions, like people who are part of the family telling their own stories, and descendants from these families talking about these histories and giving an accounting of the past that may or may not diverge from the kind of official historical record. So they used a lot of inheritance disputes, many of which ended up before the Mississippi Supreme Court, and the records that the Mississippi Department of Archives and History keeps of these cases are incredible. They're really rich resources, so I used a lot of those, but also once I figured out that couples who, you know, would maybe consider themselves married, so kind of marrying privately without getting a marriage license. These kinds of couples were sometimes prosecuted for what was called unlawful cohabitation. So once I knew that phrase and kind of what to look for, I could look at newspapers, which would sometimes talk about who was prosecuted for what, and that often took me to courthouses where I would look at the records, like the minute books of circuit courts, and that was how I found especially where there were a lot of these kinds of families, they tended to be prosecuted all at once. Maybe they'd been together for decades. Maybe they'd been together for five years, but then I could find a lot more stories that way, and sort of cross reference people with the census and with other records, property records, and then kind of go look for things that weren't disputed, which often, I found that white men would leave property to their Black common law wives in their wills, and these weren't always disputed. So then that helped me also to kind of trace together these connections and figure out, you know, this bigger story, which is really a story of that tension between public and private and what people do behind closed doors, which, as you mentioned, there's not, we can't know everything about these families. And there's so many times in this book where I wanted to know more, and I really wanted you know, that sort of inside story, but it's just not accessible, especially in cases where these histories were intentionally buried because people were anxious. They were anxious about prosecution. They were anxious also about some of the descendants of these families adopt white identities. So sometimes they're anxious about people knowing this history because they want the privileges of whiteness, right? They don't want to be racially identified as Black. And so there are all kinds of motivations that people had for keeping family secrets buried. And there's really only so much that I as a historian can trace the record, or even that descendants know, like when I talk to descendants. But I think you know, with a lot of these families, they left a lot of evidence that they considered themselves married and that they considered themselves to be family units. And I think that that's the story that I'm trying to tell in this book, is, again, you know, how did people create these connections and sustain these connections privately? And you know, where did they come into contact with the public system? Where did they come into contact with the courts? And how did they navigate that? And what did it mean for these families? 

Kelly Therese Pollock  17:29  
The vast majority of the cases that you're looking at are white men and Black women. There are a few scattered cases where it's the reverse, where it's Black men and white women. Could you talk some about that, the privileges that white men have, that they're able, in a lot of cases, to get away with breaking the law by either marrying or cohabiting with Black women, and the law is willing to just sort of look the other way or ignore what white men are doing in the privacy of their own homes? 

Dr. Kathryn Schumaker  18:10  
So an important piece of this history, and I think an important piece of Jim Crow that historians have been really attuned to, is the gendered nature of Jim Crow and how even the way that people thought about things like interracial sex and like what was so dangerous and so threatening about it, and, you know, especially the role of lynch mobs and vigilante justice. So much of this invoked these ideas of what they called miscegenation and the threat of amalgamation. Of course, when we look at like lynching data, what we find is that most people, Black men, Black women, Black children who are lynched in the South were not lynched for being accused of sexual crimes. It was often things like murder, theft, you know, in the case of Emmett Till obviously just, you know, whistling or making some kind of was considered an inappropriate communication to a white woman. So when we think about how Jim Crow worked, it had this legal aspect, and has this extra legal aspect. So there's what the law says, and then there's also kind of what communities enforce and how they enforce it. Sometimes that happens in the courts, sometimes it happens in the dark with a mob. And you know, these ideas about the kind of order of southern society were so gendered in the sense that, you know, white men really did sit at the top of this hierarchy. They're the ones who are making the law. There are no women in the Mississippi State Legislature. They're not serving on juries. There's no women on these juries who are trying these cases. This is a very white male space in terms of who's making and who's enforcing the laws. And of course, if we look at the judges, the justices, the Mississippi Supreme Court, they're all white men during the Jim Crow period as well. So when we're talking about the law, even the law itself is gendered and is racialized in this sense. And so what I found, and this did surprise me initially, but I think the more I think about it in a broader context, it does make sense, like we, even today, even in our current political context, understand that a lot of people draw a distinction between a politician's public face and their private life. And there are sometimes people try to, you know, talk about, like the party of family values and point out hypocrisy, you know, Republican men who have affairs, this kind of stuff. But I think that idea is very old, and it really goes back to this idea that these men had, that they sort of had this right to privacy, that they didn't accord to other people, they didn't necessarily accord to white women, they didn't necessarily accord certainly to Black people, but that they thought that they had the right to govern their home lives. This is something that even has a foundation in the British common law. So there's a legal precedent for this, for the law kind of remaining outside the home, and for these men to have that right to govern their home. So when we think about the idea that there's a kind of right to choose your partner, there's a right to choose your sexual partner, there's a right to choose your romantic partner, your domestic partner, it's not that far fetched to imagine that these men also understood this idea, "Well, if I want to, you know, treat a Black woman as my wife, I should have, you know, the leeway to do that, and it's really none of your business." And so what I found in these cases was oftentimes tension between the judges and even the grand juries, where judges would be lecturing grand juries because they're refusing to indict their neighbors. And the judge is saying, "Everyone knows this is true. Everyone knows this is happening. Everyone knows you're tolerating." They would use really disparaging terms to talk about Black women. They would talk about them as concubines, all kinds of even more offensive racial slurs. And these juries who are made up of people from the community who know these histories. Mississippi is a very rural state. These are very small communities. People do know each other's business, but they're often reluctant to get involved in this, what is considered to be kind of that private sphere and that personal sphere. And so, you know, this isn't true of everyone. Certainly, there are juries who are more than happy to convict some men, especially these men, were particularly egregious in terms of sort of embracing these Black women, especially if they treated them on a plane of equality. Of course, a lot of Southerners during the Jim Crow era did not have the idea that the two partners in the marriage were equal. So there's already this built in inequality to these relationships. And so, you know, having a Black woman who lives with a white man who has children with him, outsiders often wouldn't see her as a wife, which also helps justify this, that they didn't think of it as breaking anti miscegenation law, because it was like, "Well, that's for marriage. These aren't marriages, because they can't be those kinds of respectable relationships." So that's also where there's this tension between what's sort of happening, how these two people understand the relationship to one another, but also how outsiders see them, and that was often, again, racialized and gendered in ways that disparage the position of Black women and kind of disqualified them from being seen as a wife, which again, allows these families, ironically, to exist in public in ways where they're also sort of hidden.

Kelly Therese Pollock  23:29  
And the decision on the part of law enforcement to go after these families at all really seems to be one of these kinds of crimes that it's just kind of like there's some other reason like that. They want to, you know, I don't know. They've got a quota of crimes they need to meet that week, or there's something else driving it. They're mad at somebody and want to, you know, have a reason to charge them with a crime. So could, could you unpack that a little bit? What? What is it that is actually happening here? Obviously, it is a criminal offense that is on the books that they can charge somebody with, but it is often not, as you mentioned, these are small rural towns where everybody knows everybody else. And so the decision at any given time to actually charge somebody with a crime when probably they've known for years that these two people were living together. You know, it's there's obviously something that's driving that.

Dr. Kathryn Schumaker  24:33  
So what I argue in the book is that many of the prosecutions, specifically for unlawful cohabitation. So, you know, when I find prosecutions of interracial couples in the court records in Mississippi, the vast majority of these cases are not being charged as violations of the law prohibiting interracial marriage, and that was a very punitive law. You could get up to 10 years of hard labor at Parchman Farm, which was a miserable place. They incarcerated both men, and then, you know, after the first decade of the 20th century, women  there as well. This was a really terrible place where people didn't want to be sent and that was, you know, obviously a very harsh punishment. The unlawful cohabitation law, on the other hand, was race neutral, and it was also a misdemeanor. So the harshest penalty a person could get is a $500 fine and six months in the county jail. And those are not nothing right? Those are serious consequences. But what I found is that people were often only fined, or they received pretty short jail sentences. And so when I'm looking at when people are prosecuted and why they're prosecuted, what I find is that there tend to be certain moments in Mississippi history where there is a greater enthusiasm among judges, among juries, among communities, for prosecuting these specific kinds of crimes. So one that really stands out where there are a lot of prosecutions, is in the early 20th century, during the progressive era. And this is also the time the rise of James K. Vardaman, who was pro-lynching, who had a very brazenly white supremacist platform, and a lot of Vardaman's supporters, and I think, you know, sort of tapping into this broader critique of what they saw as vice, and Mississippians' penchant for vice, and they really grouped cohabitation between white men and Black women as a form of vice. That's how they saw it. Again, they're not seeing these as marriages, which is why they're not prosecuting them as such. So they're seeing this as a form of vice, and they tend to be targeting, you know, distilling, so illegal bootlegging, they're also targeting gambling, and then they're targeting cohabitation. They put these three things together, and there's just a lot of political attention in this moment, in part by Vardaman and his associates. But I think, you know, in one sense, it is a bit opportunistic. I think also, though, that impulse is tapping into something which again, is this understanding that these things are tolerated. And not everyone thinks that they should be. There were certainly people who thought the state should be policing people's private lives. It should be policing their home lives, and so there's a kind of political will in that moment. What I saw in the record was a lot of prosecutions, basically from like 1906 or so to about 1913. So this is really the height of the progressive era. You know, progressive politicians often wanted state solutions to things like poverty and vice and so this is kind of how this gets captioned, this broad umbrella. And if you look at communities across the state, there were more prosecutions than there had been, say, even 10 years earlier. So that's one moment, another moment when there's a lot of prosecutions is, perhaps unsurprisingly, during the rise of the second Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, and of course, the Klan is very critical of things like interracial sex. The Klan is, you know, all about racial purity. They're tapping into identities about eugenics, which, of course, are obsessed with racial purity and kind of classifying the races and protecting, you know, American civilization from its downfall, which a lot of eugenicists saw as intermixing between white Americans and people of other racial classifications. So a lot of prosecutions around like 1924, that moment tends to again, bring these things to the surface. So I think it's true that, you know, this is something that a lot of communities are aware of these families, but it's only in these certain moments when the political will exists, because it's actually very hard to get a conviction. You have to get evidence, you have to get people to testify against one another. And of course, the people who know the most about these, the so called crime, are the people who are involved, and they're not motivated to testify against one another. So of course, you know you need neighbors to snitch on other neighbors, and people are not always willing to do that. And so what I found is that the courts will bring a bunch of these cases all at once, and then some of them get tried. They get brought to trial. As a result of those trials, people often would just plead guilty, maybe accept fines, and then the people who held out, those cases would often end up being dropped because it was just so much for the court to handle, and they'd have to move on to other more pressing issues, like murder, assault, of the other kinds of criminal cases that these courts are hearing. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  28:51  
So in some of these cases, the defense comes down to whether or not one of these people is actually Black, and how we define Black or African American, how we define race. And this is, of course, in the days before there is genetic testing or DNA. So what does that look like? What does that mean? How are they defining these things? And that changes, of course, over the time period that you're looking at. And that's different in Mississippi than it is in Virginia. But how are people making this argument that, in fact, so and so can't be guilty of this because they are, in fact, not Black?

Dr. Kathryn Schumaker  30:11  
So I didn't anticipate that so much of the book would be preoccupied with trying to pinpoint where the color line was and who decides, right? And other historians have written about this, about how important community conceptions of a person's race were, and that often mattered more than a person's ancestry did, so it's really the community that's deciding, and this is something that happens, you know, depending on where you go to school, that helps ascribe you to a certain racial classification. But also this, you know, these things do come into the courts. And the courts, you know, they are put in this position where there is this very strong cultural idea of race, that the one drop rule, right, that having any African ancestry makes a person racially Black. Like this is something that's very predominant in culture, and we still, you know, certainly live with us today, with the kind of complications of the post Civil Rights Era. And in these communities, of course, they don't have DNA testing, so they have this idea of the one drop  rule, but they don't actually have tools to prove anyone's ancestry, and I think that that's where it starts to get interesting, right? Because people did make accusations, and it's so and so you know that their grandmother was Black, that she was enslaved, but actually proving that, if it gets tested, if people can test that, that's the thing that becomes really difficult and becomes a problem for some of these prosecutions, because, in fact, in some of these cases where these couples are brought before the courts, one of the parties will argue, "I'm not Black." They will have their lawyer get up and say, like, you have to prove this person's racial classification, which, of course, is incredibly difficult to do. And in Mississippi, they draw the line, initially, in 1880 they draw it at one quarter blood quantum of African ancestry, which means one Black grandparent. And there are a lot of people in Mississippi who have one Black grandparent, and some of them identify as some of them identify as Black. But when they draw the color line more stringently, when they draw it at 1/8 blood quantum, which means that a person has one Black great grandparent, that actually makes enforcement much more difficult, because those people are dead, and those people are not living in the memory of the people who are still in the community, who are being called to testify about a person's racial classification. So in some of these cases involving these questions of, you know, interracial marriage, of whether or not the children of a particular couple are Black or white, they have to try to accumulate all this evidence, often from people who are like in their 90s. So these are very old people trying to remember their own childhoods, trying to say, "You know, I understood that this person was Black because they lived in this shack on the property, or they weren't allowed to eat dinner with the rest of the family. Or for women, you know, they wore a handkerchief on their head." That was considered a sign of a woman's blackness. And all of these things get brought into court, where juries and judges are tasked with evaluating this kind of evidence. It's often conflicting evidence, and the it doesn't always go the way that you think it does. I think we have this assumption that if someone made an accusation that someone had African ancestry, that that was enough. But in fact, what I find in these cases that it's not always enough, and even the Mississippi Supreme Court is willing to side, in some cases, with these defendants who are accused of being involved in interracial marriages because they say the evidence is too weak, or they say it wasn't proven that there are different racial classifications, and that's the case that I opened the book with. Ralphine Burns and William Dean are really interesting because they're prosecuted twice. The first time the prosecution gets dropped. The second time, Ralphine's lawyer just argues that they didn't prove that she was Black. And in fact, there's not very much in trial record to demonstrate that the prosecutor proved that Ralphine was Black. And so the Mississippi Supreme Court, they stopped short of saying this was a marriage, but they say this looks a lot like a legal marriage, and the burden is very high for saying that the courts can break up that kind of marriage and throw you in jail for it. So they're not willing to go that far. They're really willing to defer to this idea that if people live together, if they cohabit, we should assume that that's a legal union, and that creates a standard of evidence that some prosecutors found really hard to overcome. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  30:17  
I want to switch gears slightly and ask you, you live and teach in Australia and you're teaching in a United States Studies Center in another country. So I want to ask about what that's like to be studying the United States from another country, how that frames your thinking about the United States, and if that has changed at all the ways that you perceive the United States as a subject of study.

Dr. Kathryn Schumaker  35:14  
That's a great question. I think I often get asked by my students, and sometimes also, you know, I'm asked to comment on various events, like during the campaign, when Donald Trump made this assertion that Kamala Harris wasn't really Black, that she was sort of using this herBlack identity opportunistically. This is the kind of thing that Australian audiences don't always understand, that Americans have really assimilated. So we sort of take for granted that this idea that not just that sort of ancestry makes your racial classification, and that whiteness, of course, is the is the outlier, that a person who's white doesn't have any other ancestry, which, as I just mentioned, is not true in many cases, but when it comes to things like that idea of the one drop rule, how it actually works in everyday life, it's really complicated. And I think one of the things that I've become much more conscious of, especially when we think about like identity politics and like why things like racial identity matter, and how someone like Kamala Harris is a challenge for certain people to understand is that Americans cling very strongly to these, these racial classifications, which really have a history in ideas of subjugation, in this effort to separate people so that you know you could elevate white people above all others. And so this idea that a person can be biracial is not a new idea. Many of the people in this book are dealing with these complicated questions of identity, and they don't always identify the way that other people think that they should. And so one thing that I've been really attuned to, and that I was attuned to in the book as well, is like how especially the language of passing. And I'm not the first person to make this observation, by any means, but that this language of passing that we have, that a person can quote, unquote, pass as white, isn't in a sense like an assertion of this idea of racial essentialism, that we think, "Well, they're but they're not really white," right? And I think in the book, I tried to be really conscious of using language that gives a bit of agency, like people identified how they identified, and not everyone who identified as white was quote, unquote passing, because I think that a lot of these people in the book who are defending their whiteness did believe that they were white people, and they did identify as white people. And I think that that's the kind of moment where living in the United States and being so saturated in these ideas, and especially in this idea of the one drop rule, that it really is so kind of overpowering and so naturalized. Really living in a place like Australia, which is quite a multicultural society, like Australia really embraces its identity as a multicultural society. This doesn't mean that Australia doesn't have problems of race and racism. Absolutely does. They're different and distinct from those in the United States. But of course, when I, you know, look back at the US, the US seems stranger in a lot of ways, and I do feel a bit, yeah, more invested in sort of explaining and trying to disentangle why that is. And, you know, I think with the Kamala Harris dust up with Donald Trump, like one of the things that I think was kind of the key thing there, right? Is that what we had was a white man trying to ascribe a racial identity to a woman who identifies both as biracial but also as a Black woman. And I think that, you know, that's, that's what matters there, right? Is it's about who gets to say, who gets to decide, which classification do you go in, and do we challenge the whole scheme, these classifications, and what are the stakes of that? And again, who gets to decide? I mean, this is very important, obviously, for Native Americans and for indigenous identity and tribal membership, this idea of sovereignty, right? Like we decide, and I think that that's something that I try to be much more conscious of and to not kind of use that language that then reifies those kinds of racist ideas, which are really problematic because, of course, whiteness is not pure. Like lots of Americans, have mixed ancestry. Sometimes they know about it, sometimes they don't. Sometimes ancestry teaches them about it. And I think that embracing the complexity while also acknowledging, like the work these racial classifications are trying to what it's trying to do, has become more important to me as a teacher, especially.

Speaker 1  39:51  
I would love to encourage listeners to get a copy of your book. Can you please tell them how to do so?

Dr. Kathryn Schumaker  39:56  
You can find the book at your favorite bookseller. It's probably easiest to find it online. I know there's, of course, independent bookshops sell online, but also, of course, Barnes and Noble, Amazon, all of those places. And yeah, it's available wherever you get your favorite literature. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  39:57  
Is there anything else you wanted to make sure we talk about?

Dr. Kathryn Schumaker  40:03  
I think one of my worries when I was writing the book, but also nearing completion and feeling that pressure to finish the project, is a kind of concern that a person could read the story in a way that says that Jim Crow was not this harsh, horrible, punitive system. And I think the takeaway that I would like people to have is that, in fact, the lesson should really be the opposite, which is that Jim Crow was an arbitrary system. It was an arbitrary system of law. It was not coherent. And I think that that's part of why violence and intimidation and lynching were such an important part to keeping the legal regime in place. Because these southern politicians, they knew about the hypocrisy of Jim Crow. They knew about the hypocrisy of this idea that it was separate and equal, and that, you know, the races did not mix, like they knew that this wasn't true. And so I think the lesson here is really that the law matters, but that we have to understand that Jim Crow law often operated in ways that was arbitrary, and that was what made living under this regime so difficult for so many Black people, because they didn't you couldn't always predict when you would run afoul, not just of the law, but also the kind of social rules, because thee culture is changing, the politics are changing. And what I found with this story is that it becomes much more dangerous and much more perilous for these interracial families to exist in the World War II period and after. Southerners become very, very, white southerners become very self conscious about the vulnerability of Jim Crow, because they know that as a system of law, not only is it discriminatory and violates all kinds of principles of constitutional law and fairness, especially the 14th Amendment, but they also understand that this hypocrisy makes them vulnerable. It makes them vulnerable to outside attack. It makes them, you know, look like they are upholding a system of law that is not obeying this idea of the rule of law, which is so fundamental to the United States and to the US Constitution. And so I think, you know, that wasn't where I thought the story would get more complicated, but it becomes much more difficult. And in fact, the laws change. They become much harsher, and prosecutions of these kinds of couples, including Black women and white men, become much more punitive and much more common during World War II and after. And so this idea, again, that crossing the color line either way was was kind of the cardinal sin that you could commit is really something I think that's a product of that more recent era, and that's, I think, in part, by young people who grew up in the 40s and 50s, saw it this way, and they didn't know this longer history because it was suppressed, but it was part of this political project to make Jim Crow look rational when it never was.

Speaker 1  43:29  
Katie, thank you so much for speaking with me. I really enjoyed your book, and I've just had so much fun speaking with you today. 

Dr. Kathryn Schumaker  43:37  
Thank you, Kelly. It's been wonderful to have this opportunity to talk about the book.

Speaker 2  43:40  
 

Teddy  44:28  
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