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Interracial Marriage
4 articles on Interracial Marriage
Marriage, Mixed
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass
Word Count: 4931 Includes: Colonial Chesapeake | Revolutionary Era and Early Republic | The Antebellum Era | Politics of Miscegenation in Civil War America | Politics of Intermarriage after Emancipation | Case of Frederick Douglass | BibliographyMarriage is regulated in the United States by state, not federal, law. Between the 1660s and the 1960s forty-one colonies or states passed laws regulating interracial marriage and sex. People of African descent were uniformly targeted by such laws, which also often prohibited whites from marrying Native Americans and those whose ancestors came from the Indian subcontinent, Asia, or the South Pacific. The history of slavery, emancipation, and the black freedom struggle cannot be understood without reference to interracial sex and marriage. Racially restrictive marriage laws—termed antimiscegenation laws after the Civil War—were an important milestone in the creation of racial slavery in antebellum America because they limited the possibility of color confusion in a system increasingly predicated on physiognomy. After emancipation, arguments about mixed marriage and interracial sex played a central—if not the central—role in the white supremacist construction of a system ...
Read full articleMiscegenation
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass
Word Count: 8See Marriage, Mixed. ...
Read full articleMarriage, Mixed
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century
Word Count: 3329 Includes: BibliographyMarriages between blacks and whites—and to a lesser extent between whites and members of other racial groups—have generated fear, anger, and opposition since the earliest days of the American colonies. As the European colonists to North America struggled to construct a new social order, discouraging and often outlawing marriages between different racial groups became an important tool in building a world where “white” and “black” would be clearly defined and where whites would be the dominant group in an emerging racial hierarchy. Laws prohibiting various forms of mixed marriage lasted for more than three centuries—from 1664to 1967—and they proved the most pervasive and durable of all forms of legal racial discrimination. Strong community opposition ensured that mixed marriages would be controversial even in states where they were legal. ...
Read full articleMiscegenation
Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 751From the Latin words miscere (to mix) and genus (race); referred to sexual relations across racial lines and is no longer in use because of its racist implications. The word miscegenation was coined by two Democrats during the presidential election campaign of 1864 in an attempt to embarrass and discredit Abraham Lincoln, the Republican incumbent running for reelection. In an anonymous pamphlet that appeared in December 1863 entitled Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races Applied to the American White Man and Negro, the authors played on white fears of interracial sex by pretending to issue a Republican-sponsored booklet advocating racial mixing and amalgamation. The real authors were David Goodman Croly, managing editor of the New York World, a staunchly Democratic paper, and ...
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