Boston, with its substantial Irish population, had a pattern of Irish, and other immigrant women, taking Negro grooms–perhaps because of the proximity within which they often worked and their differing notions about the taboo of race mixing. Boston was, for example, one of the most tolerant large cities in America with regard to interracial unions by 1900. In the period between 1900 and 1904, about 14 out of every 100 Negro grooms took white wives. Furthermore, black and white Bostonians cooperated politically to ensure that intermarriage remained legal throughout the nation.
Preface
This dissertation examines the history of mixed race in Boston since 1890. As such, various mixed race “phenomena” are investigated including, but not limited to, interracial marriage, community and settlement patterns, the politics of intermarriage, love and sex across the color line, and racial paranoia surrounding the issue of miscegenation. It also investigates the disastrous implications the one-drop rule has had for virtually every important institution in American life: love, family and kinship patterns, marriage, sex, filial ties, legal and jurisdictional matters, education, community migration and settlement patterns. Furthermore, it tracks the evolution of the assumption of race as a biological reality to its present day manifestation as a socially constructed phenomenon. Finally, it outlines the ways in which the one-drop rule, originally intended to deny the rights of African Americans, came (somewhat ironically) to galvanize the black community.
The Introduction to this study serves as a brief review of the literature on the history of the one-drop rule in America. It is this measure of blackness, which has made racial mixing, miscegenation, and therefore, mixed race identity in the United States, problematic in ways that it did not in other post-slave societies. This literature illuminates the ways in which the one-drop rule came to govern America’s unique binary racial system, beginning with its incarnation as a widespread and complicated system of laws during slavery that decreed slave status was inherited through the mother (also known as hypodescent) to the anti-miscegenation laws that sprang up after the Civil War making it illegal in this country for people of different races to marry one another. A secondary aim of the introduction will be to briefly discuss nineteenth century pseudoscientific theories of race and the mythology of “blood theory”.
Chapter one, A Sojourn in the City of Amalgamation, documents the relatively high number of blacks and whites who married in Boston during these years and the fight to keep interracial marriage legal. The politics of interracial marriage with a particular emphasis on the abolitionist legacy in Boston, beginning with the struggle to lift the ban on intermarriage in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 1843, is the origin from which this study germinates. It was in this radical environment that progressives, radicals and other heirs to the abolitionist legacy formulated a counter-philosophy that attempted to transgress America’s greatest fiction—the notion of the “one-drop” rule. In this way, cities like Boston became havens for interracial marriages and love across the color line, in general.
Chapter two, Interracial Paradise, examines the somewhat idyllic ways in which Boston was portrayed by anti-amalgamationists and southern apologists to the lost cause of the Civil War. It discusses important neighborhoods such as the South End, which was the stage upon which much of this drama took place and was the heart of Boston’s black community after it moved out of the confines of Beacon Hill. African Americans in Boston cautiously endorsed, but did not actively participate in, the campaign against the resurgence of anti-miscegenation laws in the early part of the 20th century. This lack of direct and substantial black participation in this campaign is significant. It is indicative of the dilemma that the issue of intermarriage represented for black Bostonians and their leaders.
Chapter three, Proving Ground, examines the political struggle over the issue of interracial marriage and the dilemma it posed for the Boston branch of the N.A.A.C.P., as well as the national organization, when Congress attempted to pass a national ban on intermarriage in 1915. The N.A.A.C.P. and its Boston branch constituted the principal opposition to the ban. This chapter examines the political struggle over the issue of interracial marriage and the dilemma it posed for leading organizations such as the N.A.A.C.P., not only in Boston but across the nation. That same year, the Boston chapter held several mass meetings to protest the pending anti-miscegenation legislation in Congress. The Boston branch was especially challenged when the Commonwealth of Massachusetts attempted to pass a statewide ban in 1927 in response to the Jack Johnson interracial marriage controversy. I will examine the steps that were taken not only by the Boston N.A.A.C.P. to organize black Bostonians to defeat the bill, but the involvement of William Monroe Trotter’s National Equal Rights League and the dilemma the intermarriage caused for black leadership in general.
Chapter four, Breach of Promise, takes a look at a case of passing which was the Van Houten case in Boston. The case caused quite a stir in the delicate balance of social and racial hierarchy in Boston as well as a reversal of fortune in the courts. The case was watched very closely by the press who fed the public’s appetite for every detail of the story, much like the drama that filled the pages of the romance novels on passing such as Nella Larsen’s Quicksand. Like the protagonist of that story, Anna Van Houten was cursed by her racial betrayal and in the end despised for her deception. Her case was an important turning point in the adjudication of interracial marriage since it necessitated a legal remedy against intermarriage in a state where it was supposedly legal.
Introduction
Race and racial identity are perhaps the single most important social markers of identification in American life and culture. They serve as automatic registers of information about a person—their history, their background, their politics, and even, perhaps, their socioeconomic status—and yet for all the things we ask it to do for us, race falls incredibly wide of the mark. Race cannot, for example, tell us, who we’re going to become in the future, or what we can accomplish, or for that matter who we are. Social scientists, anthropologists, and biological scientists all tell us that race is not real—that there is no biological basis for race in human physiology—and yet, we live and operate on a day-to-day basis as though it were. What is the impact of this enduring paradox—America’s greatest fiction, one that we have lived and propagated now for more than four centuries?
As we have seen in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, whiteness became highly sought after as the preferred status of choice that conferred all the benefits of racial privilege—and until the 1950s, naturalized citizenship. However, it should be mentioned that whiteness as a concept is far more significant for what it is not, then for what it is—namely, not black. Therefore, although America differs in its racial formulas of determining who is white and who is not, the main reason for the invention of whiteness, escape from the racial curse of blackness, remains intact in many Latin American and Caribbean countries. Gilberto Freyre’s notion of Brazil as an interracial democracy that is different from a racist United States is a good example of this phenomenon. Their odyssey over the highly contested and often controversial terrain of race and national identity has been a long and difficult journey. Burdened by a dual legacy of colonialism and foreign occupation, many of these republics, with the exception of perhaps Cuba, Haiti and anglophone West Indian countries, have suffered from a seeming inability to use blackness as a collective national organizing principle. Several of these countries have vacillated between ideologies that are based on white supremacy and reinforced by a legacy of historical amnesia. Scholars of race in Latin America have characterized this as an outright state of denial, for some, of their true racial make-up.
It is this unique binary racial system then, which has made racial mixing, miscegenation and a mixed race identity in the United States problematic in ways that it did not in other post-slave societies. It has had disastrous implications for virtually every important institution in American life: family and kinship patterns, marriage, filial ties, legal and jurisdictional matters, education, love, community migration and settlement. Race in the United States, for example, creates the odd and strange phenomenon that a white woman is able to give birth to a black child, but a black woman can never, under any circumstances, give birth to a white child. This was the basis for a widespread and complicated system of laws during slavery that decreed that slave status was passed on by the mother and miscegenation laws that sprang up after the Civil War making it illegal in this country for people of different races to marry one another. Moreover, racial classification in America has created an entire mythology that we still unflinchingly believe is based on the archaic and unsound biological concept of blood theory. It is still commonplace to hear someone characterize a mixed person, for example, as having “mixed-blood” and subscribe to the mythical concept of the one-drop-rule, also known as hypo-descent, meaning that racially mixed persons are assigned the status of the subordinate group in their ancestry.
In the United States, blood theory and pseudo-scientific theories of race reached their pinnacle in the late-nineteenth century with scientists engaged in a constant effort to prove that the Negro was a member of “a separate and permanently inferior species,” and, “not simply a savage or semi-civilized member of the same species.” The basic assumption was that race was a biological phenomenon and an essential one at that.
It has become common practice of late in scholarship dealing with race and racial identity to point to the phenomenon of race as a socially constructed fallacy that has no basis in biological or scientific fact. Increasingly, terms such as construction, invention, and idea have replaced the once dominant scientific and empirical terminology used to describe race, a phenomenon that had, and still has, profound implications for the stratification of society. However, as eager as anthropologists are to proclaim the premature death of race, it is imperative to acknowledge the powerful and important social role that race still plays in our daily lives, cultures, and lived experiences, not to mention the endless sea of ink that has been spilled over the nature and image of the Negro. The theorem posed by W. I. Thomas in the year 1928, seems applicable here. It states, “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” Perhaps one of the biggest limitations of these modern approaches is a marked tendency to critique ideas about race by challenging the validity of the concept of race itself. Because the discipline of anthropology has effectively moved to a “color blind” position, one which increasingly views society through the lens of ethnicity rather than race, it has confused the issue by distorting the role that race plays in society. By denying the importance of race and the way in which racial categories are formulated in the first place, it has among other things, opened itself up to a racial discourse that allows conservatives to advance the false ideal of a color-blind society…
