A Story from Warren Michigan

[Judas Maccabeus]

After reading this story...
 
I was not aware that some northern cities in the last part of the 20th century, dealt with racist issues, just as much as many places in the south.

I was not aware that "mixed-marriages" bothered white people more than having blacks live in their neighborhood. (Or at least that is what they said.)

A question I have, Did African-Americans eschew interracial marriages as much as Whites in the last half of the 20th century?

During the same period we were having riots in Baltimore, after MLK’s death,a number of mostly black shopping areas were burned, by rioters. This went on for three days. In the last year s of the Johnson administration, the election for governor featured a candidate that ran for the Democratic Party. His slogan, your home is your castle, protect it! An anti-open housing slogan, to say the least. The winning candidate was Spiro Agnew.

Segregation persists to a degree in Baltimore, mostly in older neighborhoods. Newer neighborhoods, like mine, segregated from the beginning, hence no one could be seen as an invader. Fun Fact-a scandal arose when a baseball player that was traded to the Orioles , and could not find housing, largely due to racism. A straw purchaser bought what he wanted, there were no protests, I mean, do you want to get rid of Frank Robinson?

The first house my wife and I owned had a deed covenant that it could never be sold or rented to a black, Chinese or Jew. They were all declared “inoperative” by Marylands Supreme Court. The selling real estate agent got a charge out of that, it was one of my colleagues from work, and he had never sold one of those before. He happened to be black, this was 1985.

I don’t think there is much of that any more, but the former pastor of the C&MA church i attended found an excuse not to marry A gal from our church to a black man. She was married in New Jersey by a new Bible school grad from our church that had taken a church up there. When the old guy died, the guy from NJ was called, and a serious effort was made to stamp out the remaining raceism. Sadly, it was in general a failure.It was one of the factors that sank our former church.

[barnhart]

A question I have, Did African-Americans eschew interracial marriages as much as Whites in the last half of the 20th century?

I am reticent to answer as I have no first hand experience but to my eye any black resistance to intermarrying was on the grounds of poor taste, similar to resistance rich people might have to their daughter marrying a laborer, or like the advice my father gave me, "don't marry a rich girl, they have different expectations." Whereas white resistance was based in morality, thus the violent resistance and righteous anger. These responses are not the same nor should one be used to minimize the other.

[Ken]

Whereas white resistance was based in morality, thus the violent resistance and righteous anger. These responses are not the same nor should one be used to minimize the other.

I disagree. White resistance wasn't based on morality. It was based on racism and racism is immoral. They may have couched their racism in moral anger to disguise the racism. But it was still racism and therefore, immoral.

Here is one scholarly paper on the subject: https://artsci.wustl.edu/before-loving

The opinions of the black community about interracial marriage were mostly ignored until 1970 because it was assumed that only whites felt strongly about it. Most information on the attitudes of the black community on this topic come from the black press. Unlike whites, they were not concerned with racial purity because they already had mixed roots, nor was it a matter of being discriminated against because that was already a fact of life. Blacks viewed whites as “oppressors and persecutors, inhumane and untrustworthy.” A 1958 poll from the Pittsburgh Courier showed that the leading explanation as to why blacks opposed interracial marriage was that they did not believe a white person could overcome stereotypes and see their partner as equal. Interracial relations and sex were associated with abuse and exploitation. They were suspicious of whites that would make themselves vulnerable to racial hatred. Besides that, many saw marrying a white person as trying to escape blackness (similar to racial passing) because it “allowed individual success at the price of group loyalty and advancement.” White expert opinion agreed claiming that “for the Negro, the white person is the symbol of status and achievement and is therefore desirable as a marriage partner.” In some cases, intermarrying was seen as a lack of pride in the black identity, a form of assimilation than rather than “pitch in and make the race worth belonging to” they escaped to a race that’s “already made.” One black woman expressed in a 1951 edition of ​Ebony​ that “Every time we lose a man to a woman of another race, it means one more Negro woman will be husbandless”. Another charged that “black male-white female marriages were unhealthy manifestations of the sexualized racial hierarchies that defined white women as more beautiful than black women.” Again, white psychological experts would have agreed with this, marrying “with a white woman or even a light-skinned Negro woman is thus viewed as ‘status-giving’.” Blacks had many varying and mixed opinions on interracial marriage but were on the whole vastly more accepting. In a 1958 poll, 66% of southern blacks and 87% of northern blacks believed that social meetings between whites and blacks would help overcome racial discrimination; in contrast, only 49% of northern whites and 10% of southern whites agreed with the same statement. Most blacks were not blatantly against interracial marriage because of community principles of individual freedom regardless of race. One of the experts from the 50s that cast interracial marriage as troublesome observed that when it came to black families “their treatment of the white spouse was not conditioned to the same extent by automatic disapproval of interracial marriage, but depended on their judgment of the white spouse as a person rather than as a violator of mores”.

Some saw it as a positive step towards ending racial discrimination or that it proved that blacks were humans capable of being loved. Additionally, in an era “where blacks were seeking equality and racial integration, any public support for racial separatism, even in marriage, was suspect.” With this in mind, black leaders of the civil rights movement “sought to divorce the issue of interracial marriage from the larger civil rights agenda” because they did not always think it was best for the community yet they did not want to be hypocritical by condoning anti miscegenation laws. Thus, there was not outspoken disdain for interracial marriage.

Thus, when interracial marriage was touched on in the newspapers it was with a much more tolerant attitude. In a 1959 edition of the ​Daily Defender ​(now called the ​Chicago Defender​), after the marriage of Dorothy Dandridge to a white man, a reader wrote to the editor that interracial marriage was “quite a problem solver for those who insist on separating the races despite the fact that all involved are human beings...Let us have more such marriages. After all we are all humans and in many instances Americans alike. Why let color of the skin be a barrier.” Celebrities that intermarried not only felt pressure from those against interracial relations but also by “well-wishers who essentially deputized them to be ambassadors of racial enlightenment.”

Three widely read newspapers, ​Jet​, ​Ebony​, and ​Negro Digest​ were constantly talking about the positive side of interracial marriage on account of the owner of all three being in favor of it. This “refuted segregationists’ claims that the color line was a permanent barrier that could not be crossed and that whites could never accept blacks as their social equals.” The way they covered interracial marriage sought to normalize it: “The magazines’ frequent coverage of lavish wedding ceremonies suggested that interracial love that once had to be hidden could now be celebrated openly among family and friends.” This attracted some attention from people who thought the frequent coverage would intensify demands for segregation or perpetuate the bigoted belief that the only way blacks can gain equality is through association with whites.

[barnhart]

Not all morals are good. Some are evil.

[Ken]

Not all morals are good. Some are evil.

I read the story and I guess I missed the moral argument in favor of terrorizing a mixed race family and running them out of your town.