Monday, October 13, 2014

Love in the Time of Miscegenation



By Kathleen Rice Adams

She’s the sweetest rose of color this darky ever knew,
Her eyes are bright as diamonds, they sparkle like the dew;
You may talk about your Dearest May, and sing of Rosa Lee,
But the Yellow Rose of Texas beats the belles of Tennessee.


Those are the original lyrics to the chorus of “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” A folksong dating to early Colonial Texas, the first known transcribed version—handwritten on a piece of plain paper—appeared around the time of the Texian victory at San Jacinto in April 1836.

In its original form, the song tells the story of a black man (“darky”) who has been separated from his sweetheart and longs to reunite with her. The lyrics indicate the sweetheart was a free mulatto woman—a person of mixed black and white heritage. In those days, “person of color” was considered a polite way to refer to black people who were not slaves. “Yellow” was a common term for people of mixed race.

During the Civil War, “The Yellow Rose of Texas” became a popular marching tune for troops all over the Confederacy; consequently, the lyrics changed. White Confederates were not eager to refer to themselves as darkies, so “darky” became “soldier.” In addition, “rose of color” became “little flower.”

"Portrait of a Free Woman of Color
Wearing a Tignon"
Antoine Louis Collas, 1829
Aside from the obvious racist reasons for the modifications, legal doctrine played into the picture as well. Until the U.S. Supreme Court declared the practice unconstitutional in 1967, all eleven formerly Confederate states plus Delaware, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and West Virginia outlawed marriage and sexual relations between whites and blacks. In four of the former Confederate states—Georgia, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia—marriage or sexual relations between whites and any non-white was labeled a felony. Such laws were called anti-miscegenation laws, or simply miscegenation laws. In order to draw what attorneys term a “bright line” between legal and illegal behavior, many states codified the “single-drop rule,” which held that a person with a single drop of Negro blood was black, regardless the color of his or her skin or their distance from a black ancestor.

From its passage in 1865 until its repeal in 1962, Arizona’s miscegenation law was the most comprehensive in the country. Because all ethnicities were prohibited from intermingling with any other ethnicity, people of mixed race were not allowed to marry or have sexual relations with anyone. (Yes, that last bit was specifically stated in the law.)

"New Orleans' Voodoo Queen"
Marie Laveau (1774-1881)
was a free Creole of mixed race.
Texas’s miscegenation law, enacted in 1837, prescribed among the most severe penalties nationwide: A white person convicted of marrying, attempting to marry, or having sex with a person of any other ethnicity (including American Indians and Mexicans) was subject to a prison sentence of two to five years. Well into the twentieth century, it was not uncommon for the non-white half of the illicit relationship to be severely beaten or killed by irate local citizens.

The first American miscegenation laws arose in the Colony of Virginia and the Maryland Colony in 1691 and 1692, respectively. The last of the miscegenation laws flickered out in 2001, when Alabama finally removed the anti-miscegenation clause from its state constitution after a referendum passed with only sixty percent of the popular vote.



Footnote: For y’all Yankees out there... Only seven continental U.S. states never enacted miscegenation laws. All seven were among the twenty that composed the Union. Of the remaining thirteen, four—California, Indiana, Nevada, and Oregon—did not repeal their miscegenation laws until the period between 1948 and 1965.




17 comments:

  1. Kathleen,

    We are all of the same DNA (the same blood). The small differences in racial features derive from people living in gene pools separated by geographic location. Over hundreds of thousands of years, these (small) biological differences were created. Basing superiority of one set of differences over another is the real crime. From my point of view, such designations are artificial and should NEVER have existed.

    Such racist persecution is yet another example of man’s inhumanity to man.

    Charlie Steel

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    1. Charlie, I agree. Although I understand why the South thought its "peculiar institution" was necessary, I've never understood how anyone could justify such a thing morally. I've also never understood the stratification and segregation of society based on arbitrary criteria. (Just call me a bleeding-heart liberal.) It seems mankind has always needed a reason to feel superior to someone, and lacking any other reason, the most obvious choice is skin color because it's so visible. Sad, no?

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  2. Oops. Reckon I would've been in a heap o' trouble thanks to my non-white spousalperson. All of the above, however, is something we might keep in mind for our storytelling. Darn good post, Kathleen. Thanks.

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    1. Frank, you and your spousalperson definitely would have been in deep doo-doo. It's difficult to imagine, isn't it?

      The first time I ran across the concept of miscegenation was in the 1936 film Show Boat, which my mother loved. I was just a kid then, and I remember thinking how odd the notion was. Until I started researching miscegenation for a story, I didn't realize laws were almost nationwide and stuck around so long. Alabama, in particular, should be ashamed of itself.

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  3. It's incredible to think Arizona’s miscegenation law staye don the books until 1962. Thanks for the perspective, Kathleen.

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    1. Not so incredible. I was raised in the south and as a boy knew men whose form of amusement was to sit on their back porches, facing the railroad tracks, and shoot shotguns and small caliber rifles at brakemen on passing trains, trying to knock them off and under the wheels. Any deaths were, of course, ruled as accidental.

      De facto slavery still existed in the big timber tracts and large farms. May still exist for all I know now.

      You yankees have never had a clue.

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    2. Tom, like you I was a mite surprised by how long miscegenation laws persisted in quite a few states.

      Frank, I was a child of the South, too. I remember seeing segregated facilities with "white only" signs as recently as 1973. One of the images I'll never forget is George Wallace and the National Guard on the steps of that school in Alabama. I attended 10th grade in an Alabama high school 1972-73. I could've done without some of the things I learned that year.

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    3. Water fountains and gas station rest rooms ALL had those signs. And cafes would only serve blacks out the back door. A different world.

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  4. Fascinating as usual. Having grown up in the 'North', this history I find so interesting. I believe that is why stories of the trials of those early days draw me. It was something I didn't know, and I don't like not knowing. Thank you for adding to my knowledge. I so appreciate it, for there are not enough hours in the day for me to dig it all out myself. Doris

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  5. And adding to that, it really wasn't an issue I had to deal with growing up, personally. What I knew was what I saw on TV, newspapers, etc. It never made sense to me that you could look down on someone who looked different. (Must have led a sheltered childhood, but one filled with knowledge and parents who were a bit different from the norm) Doris

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    1. Doris, other than two years in Colorado and one year in Montana, I spent my formative years all over the South. Attitudes differed a bit from place to place, but overall the experience taught me a valuable lesson, I think: Closed minds and inflexible biases harm the perpetrators as well as the victims. I'm not saying the harm is equal, because it's not. But imagine living your whole life inside a prison of your own making simply because you choose not to look beyond the bars.

      (I loved Colorado Springs and Bloomfield, by the way. Haven't been to either in years, but back then both were enchanting. Garden of the Gods exudes a raw beauty, and Manitou Springs was about the prettiest place I'd ever seen.)

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  6. Truth is, a lot of Southerners can't be so sure of their lineage. Family secrets were well guarded.

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    1. Southerners have always been good at hypocrisy. In a lot of areas in the South, wealthy men kept women of color as mistresses right out in the open, and nobody said a word. Among the high-born Creole French in Louisiana, for example, plaçage was an honorable tradition.

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  7. Wonderful post, as always, Kathleen. I love the way you deal with this in some of your stories. It makes me want to try to do it, too--because it's such a different "take" on things. Just a decade or so ago, there was a young black man who was killed in Durant, OK, when he stopped at a Love's station for gas--some guy stabbed him! This is a crazy world we live in.
    Cheryl

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    1. Can you imagine what it must be like to be on the receiving end of racial prejudice? Just because your skin is the "wrong color," you're somehow less than human. Women have been (and still are, in some ways) suppressed, so we have at least a marginal understanding of the issue...which is what makes it doubly unconscionable, IMO, for women to participate in institutionalized bigotry. The whole situation is sad.

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    2. We're in agreement there. I've never understood women who rail against not being paid for equal work and other issues, but turn around and discriminate on others just because of their race or religion. Makes absolutely no sense.

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  8. Wow - took that long, huh? Fascinating info, Kathleen. Great post.

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