Americans born in the 21st century will shake their heads in disbelief on learning that 40 states once had laws prohibiting interracial marriage. The Supreme Court struck down the last of these statutes in the 1967 case of Mildred and Richard Loving, a black woman and a white man who were arrested and banished from Virginia for the crime of being married.
The couple became celebrities after the landmark ruling known as Loving v. Virginia. But Mildred and Richard wanted nothing to do with fame. They returned to the tiny, backwoods community of Central Point, in Caroline County, Va., and shunned publicity. Richard died of injuries sustained in a car accident in 1975. Mildred, who died this month, was quiet and self-effacing and maintained all along that they married because they were in love, not to fight a civil rights battle.
The particulars of the case — which featured a stereotypical Southern sheriff and a medieval system of laws — turned Caroline County into an emblem of blunt-force segregation. But the story was more complicated.
Like many rural areas in the Jim Crow South, Caroline County was governed by two competing racial ideologies. The impulse toward segregation was of course etched in law. But Central Point, which had been a visibly mixed-race community since the 19th century, was home to a secret but paradoxically open interracialism. The community’s story goes a long way toward explaining how the Lovings thought about race and why they behaved as they did.
Virginia slave owners, including Thomas Jefferson, were notorious for fathering children with their slaves. The 19th-century diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut could easily have been speaking of Caroline County planters when she wrote: “Like the patriarchs of old, our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines; and the mulattoes one sees in every family partly resemble the white children.”
Many of the mixed-race men and women in Caroline County settled in and around Central Point. They were already thriving by the early 20th century. Their church, St. Stephen’s Baptist, was, as one historian noted, “the largest and most costly house of worship in Caroline, white or colored.” People in the congregation and community were “as a whole, very nearly white,” the historian wrote, “and, out of their community, could not be recognized or distinguished as colored people.”
Inside Caroline County, Virginia’s strict laws on segregation applied. But when they ventured beyond Caroline County — where no one knew them — many of Central Point’s residents found it a simple matter to “pass” as white. They visited white-only movie houses and restaurants. They also served in all-white units of the segregated Army during World War II.
The community developed a system for protecting the racial identities of Central Pointers who moved away and married into white families. When they took their white relatives back with them to visit, their younger brothers and sisters, who attended the colored school, just stayed home. This was well known to the teachers at the school, who apparently accepted the absences without question.
The state officials who enforced segregation were clearly aware of what Central Point’s residents were up to and tried to stop it. They circulated lists of families described as descendants of black people. For a time, the state “corrected” birth certificates to note the “real” race of the bearer. It didn’t change things much in Central Point.
By the time that Richard and Mildred had begun to date in the 1950s, they had lived their whole lives in a community that had made an art form of evading Jim Crow restrictions on relationships.
Some accounts suggest that Central Point already had many other interracial unions — both legal and common law. So why were Mildred and Richard singled out for arrest? It is possible that someone who held a grudge against the couple complained to the sheriff. Such a complaint could have come from one of the local white men who had taken a black lover and used the law as an excuse not to marry.
The Supreme Court ruling underscored the stupidity and unfairness of segregation. And the case drew back the curtain on the secret history of race in the South. But for Mildred and Richard this struggle was not about changing the world. It was about fighting for the right to be married to one another and then returning to the community that was their home.
Posted: Wed 14 May 2008 14:00 Post subject: Re: Loving v. Virginia and the Secret History of Race
sagascend wrote:
(quoting Brent Staples)The 19th-century diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut could easily have been speaking of Caroline County planters when she wrote: “Like the patriarchs of old, our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines; and the mulattoes one sees in every family partly resemble the white children.”
Ironically, that quotation is fraudulent. It is an excellent example of deliberate falsification by schoolbook writers of the Jim Crow era. As is now well-known (given that Chesnut's original diary is easily available), her actual written words are: "and the mulattoes one sees in every family exactly resemble the white children." In the minds of Jim-Crow-era historians, it was inconceivable that "mulattoes" could look "exactly" like white children. C. Vann Woodward has a good account of the deliberate falsification, and how it was discovered among hundreds of other similar falsifications--many still in K-12 textbooks today--in The Strange Career of Jim Crow, 3d rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University, 1974).
Historical falsification is still popular. I myself am often quoted, especially in Wikipedia, as writing that, "about one-third of self-identified "White" Americans have detectable sub-saharan or Native American DNA admixture. The underlined words are totally fraudulent. They are inserted by Afrocentrists and White supremacists alike to discredit the discovery that there was "race-mixing" in America's past.
Posted: Wed 14 May 2008 19:01 Post subject: Re: Loving v. Virginia and the Secret History of Race
fwsweet wrote:
sagascend wrote:
(quoting Brent Staples)The 19th-century diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut could easily have been speaking of Caroline County planters when she wrote: “Like the patriarchs of old, our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines; and the mulattoes one sees in every family partly resemble the white children.”
Ironically, that quotation is fraudulent. It is an excellent example of deliberate falsification by schoolbook writers of the Jim Crow era. As is now well-known (given that Chesnut's original diary is easily available), her actual written words are: "and the mulattoes one sees in every family exactly resemble the white children." In the minds of Jim-Crow-era historians, it was inconceivable that "mulattoes" could look "exactly" like white children. C. Vann Woodward has a good account of the deliberate falsification, and how it was discovered among hundreds of other similar falsifications--many still in K-12 textbooks today--in The Strange Career of Jim Crow, 3d rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University, 1974).
Historical falsification is still popular. I myself am often quoted, especially in Wikipedia, as writing that, "about one-third of self-identified "White" Americans have detectable sub-saharan or Native American DNA admixture. The underlined words are totally fraudulent. They are inserted by Afrocentrists and White supremacists alike to discredit the discovery that there was "race-mixing" in America's past.
Frank, you should write a letter to the New York Times and point out the fraudulent Chestnut quote. You could gain some publicity for your book by listing yourself as the author of Legal History of the Color Line.
Quote:
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Americans born in the 21st century will shake their heads in disbelief on learning that 40 states once had laws prohibiting interracial marriage. The Supreme Court struck down the last of these statutes in the 1967 case of Mildred and Richard Loving, a black woman and a white man who were arrested and banished from Virginia for the crime of being married.
The couple became celebrities after the landmark ruling known as Loving v. Virginia. But Mildred and Richard wanted nothing to do with fame. They returned to the tiny, backwoods community of Central Point, in Caroline County, Va., and shunned publicity. Richard died of injuries sustained in a car accident in 1975. Mildred, who died this month, was quiet and self-effacing and maintained all along that they married because they were in love, not to fight a civil rights battle.
The particulars of the case — which featured a stereotypical Southern sheriff and a medieval system of laws — turned Caroline County into an emblem of blunt-force segregation. But the story was more complicated.
Like many rural areas in the Jim Crow South, Caroline County was governed by two competing racial ideologies. The impulse toward segregation was of course etched in law. But Central Point, which had been a visibly mixed-race community since the 19th century, was home to a secret but paradoxically open interracialism. The community’s story goes a long way toward explaining how the Lovings thought about race and why they behaved as they did.
Virginia slave owners, including Thomas Jefferson, were notorious for fathering children with their slaves. The 19th-century diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut could easily have been speaking of Caroline County planters when she wrote: “Like the patriarchs of old, our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines; and the mulattoes one sees in every family partly resemble the white children.”
Many of the mixed-race men and women in Caroline County settled in and around Central Point. They were already thriving by the early 20th century. Their church, St. Stephen’s Baptist, was, as one historian noted, “the largest and most costly house of worship in Caroline, white or colored.” People in the congregation and community were “as a whole, very nearly white,” the historian wrote, “and, out of their community, could not be recognized or distinguished as colored people.”
Inside Caroline County, Virginia’s strict laws on segregation applied. But when they ventured beyond Caroline County — where no one knew them — many of Central Point’s residents found it a simple matter to “pass” as white. They visited white-only movie houses and restaurants. They also served in all-white units of the segregated Army during World War II.
The community developed a system for protecting the racial identities of Central Pointers who moved away and married into white families. When they took their white relatives back with them to visit, their younger brothers and sisters, who attended the colored school, just stayed home. This was well known to the teachers at the school, who apparently accepted the absences without question.
The state officials who enforced segregation were clearly aware of what Central Point’s residents were up to and tried to stop it. They circulated lists of families described as descendants of black people. For a time, the state “corrected” birth certificates to note the “real” race of the bearer. It didn’t change things much in Central Point.
By the time that Richard and Mildred had begun to date in the 1950s, they had lived their whole lives in a community that had made an art form of evading Jim Crow restrictions on relationships.
Some accounts suggest that Central Point already had many other interracial unions — both legal and common law. So why were Mildred and Richard singled out for arrest? It is possible that someone who held a grudge against the couple complained to the sheriff. Such a complaint could have come from one of the local white men who had taken a black lover and used the law as an excuse not to marry.
The Supreme Court ruling underscored the stupidity and unfairness of segregation. And the case drew back the curtain on the secret history of race in the South. But for Mildred and Richard this struggle was not about changing the world. It was about fighting for the right to be married to one another and then returning to the community that was their home.
Staples is basically repeating an old Ebony article:
Posted: Wed 14 May 2008 19:42 Post subject: Walter Plecker and Brent Staples
Quote:
The state officials who enforced segregation were clearly aware of what Central Point’s residents were up to and tried to stop it. They circulated lists of families described as descendants of black people. For a time, the state “corrected” birth certificates to note the “real” race of the bearer. It didn’t change things much in Central Point.
Staples is referring to Walter Plecker, though I doubt he's even heard of him; I doubt he's heard of Melungeons either.
Quote:
Plecker's Infamous 1943 List
The head of Virginia’s Bureau of Vital Statistics from 1912 to 1946, Walter Ashby Plecker, believed “there is a danger of the ultimate disappearance of the white race in Virginia, and the country, and the substitution therefore of another brown skin, as has occurred in every other country where the two races have lived together.” This “mongrelization,” in Plecker’s view, caused of the downfall of several earlier civilizations. He was determined to prevent this in America, or at least in Virginia.
In January of 1943, Plecker sent a circular to all public health and county officials in Virginia, listing, county by county, the surnames of all families suspected of having African ancestry. The cover letter stated that they were “mongrels” and were now trying to register as white. The names listed in the southwestern Virginia counties included Collins, Gibson, Moore, Goins, Bunch, Freeman, Bolin, Mullins, and others described as “Chiefly Tennessee Melungeons.”
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I sent the following letter to the editor. Five-to-one odds that they do not publish it.
====
Regarding your “Editorial Observer” column titled “Loving v. Virginia and the Secret History of Race” by Brent Staples, published on May 14, 2008. The author inaccurately quotes Mary Boykin Chesnut as writing, “our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines; and the mulattoes one sees in every family partly resemble the white children.” The word “partly” is fraudulent. Mary Chesnut’s actual words were, “the mulattoes one sees in every family exactly resemble the white children.” The change from “exactly” to “partly” was deliberate falsification by Ben Ames Williams when he edited Chesnut’s diary for publication in 1905.
Historical falsification was not uncommon at the beginning of the Jim Crow era and this one is well known to historians. More recent editions of Chesnut’s diary than the falsified Williams edition of 1905 correctly shows her actual words. I recommend C. Vann Woodward, ed. Mary Chesnut's Civil War (New Haven: Yale University, 1981) page 29. You will also find an account of the Williams falsification in Lawrence Raymond Tenzer, The Forgotten Cause of the Civil War: A New Look at the Slavery Issue (Manahawkin NJ: Scholars' Pub. House, 1997) page 23.
The four most often-given justifications for Williams’s deliberate fraud are: (1) Surely Mary must not have really meant “exactly” since mulattoes cannot exactly resemble whites. (2) Mulattoes can resemble whites, but printing such a fact would be destructive of society’s well-being, so it is best kept hidden. (3) The word “exactly” in the 1860 meant something different than in 1905. (4) Williams meant well, so it is not a reprehensible historical falsification.
Whether or not such justifications are persuasive, the fact remains that the Times published a fraudulent quotation and that even a cursory web search would have shown that the quotation was fraudulent.
Frank W. Sweet
Frank W. Sweet is the author of Legal History of the Color Line, an analysis of the nearly 300 appealed cases that determined Americans’ “racial” identity over the centuries. He was accepted to Ph.D. candidacy in history with a minor in molecular anthropology at the University of Florida in 2003 and has completed all but his dissertation defense.
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