Race, Marriage, Class and Color in Boston, 1890-1930
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University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014 1-1-2008 City of amalgamation: race, marriage, class and color in Boston, 1890-1930/ Zebulon V. Miletsky University of Massachusetts Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_1 Recommended Citation Miletsky, Zebulon V., "City of amalgamation: race, marriage, class and color in Boston, 1890-1930/" (2008). Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014. 931. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_1/931 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014 by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2014 https://archive.org/details/cityofamalgamatiOOmile This is an authorized facsimile, made from the microfilm master copy of the original dissertation or master thesis published by UMl. The bibliographic information for this thesis is contained in UMTs Dissertation Abstracts database, the only central source for accessing almost every doctoral dissertation accepted in North America since 1861. Dissertation UMI Services From:Pro£vuest 300 North Zeeb Road P O Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106-1346 USA 800 521 0600 734 761 4700 web www il proquest com CITY OF AMALGAMATION: RACE, MARRIAGE, CLASS AND COLOR IN BOSTON, 1890-1930 A Dissertation Presented by ZEBULON V. MILETSKY Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY September 2008 W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies UMI Number: 3337029 Copyright 2008 by Miletsky, Zebulon V. All rights reserved INFORMATION TO USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleed-through, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. UMI Microform 3337029 Copyright2009by ProQuest LLC All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 © Copyright by Zebulon V. Miletsky 2008 All Rights Reserved DEDICATION To my parents, whose love and sacrifice inspired this work. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Naturally one incurrs a great many debts in the completion of a doctoral dissertation and this project is no exception. I would like to thank all of the Professors of the Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. I am particularly indebted to the members of my dissertation committee, John H. Bracey, Ernest Allen, Manisha Sinha and Agustin Lao-Montes, as they helped to formulate and guide this project from its inception to its current form. Special thanks are due to my dissertation advisor, John H. Bracey, whose encyclopedic knowledge of the Afro- American experience is the foundation of our graduate program. Ernest Allen's graduate seminar on the "Social Construction of Race" and many engaging conversations helped me to formulate an interdisciplinary approach to this subject. His mentorship over the years has pushed me to become a better student and teacher. Special thanks also go to Manisha Sinha. for all her advice and for the high standards of scholarship and professionalism that she exudes. Recognition is also due to our Graduate Program Director, Robert Paul Wolff for garnering funds to support our graduate educations as well as Esther M.A. Terry, whose leadership as chair made the program possible. I would like to thank the Gilder Lehrman Institute for American History for a generous research grant to support the early stages of my dissertation. I am particularly indebted to Monmouth University for awarding me a Minority Dissertation Fellowship. Special thanks are due to JoAnn Moody and the Northeast Consortium for Faculty Diversity. Thanks also go to the numerous faculty members at Monmouth who welcomed me into the community, especially Oty Agbajoh-Laoye, Bill Mitchell and Fred McKittrick. I would also like to thank my fellow graduate students at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. David Goldberg, Shawn Alexander. Stephanie Evans and Dan McClure deserve special mention as they have read my work over the years and offered invaluable feedback and resources. Tricia Loveland, the departmental secretary has been a miracle worker and I could not have completed this without her help. Lastly I am indebted to Robert Hall of Northeastern University, Gerald Gill of Tufts University, Bill Strickland and Micheal Thelwell of the University of Massachusetts Amherst for being especially supportive of my efforts over the years and for being pillars in the community and my models for engaged, activist scholarship. Very special thanks go to Robert C. Hayden, the dean of Boston's black history. Reading his book. Blacks in Boston: More Than 350 Years, is what sparked my interest in African- American history as a young person. I need to thank my parents who sacrificed so much for their beliefs, which they passed on to me. This dissertation is dedicated to them. 1 also need to thank the rest of my family, especially my grandmother for her infinite wisdom. My uncle, Paul Deare. I also wish to thank my brother Jamie for his steadfast support over the years. Finally, I would like to thank Karla for all of her help and dedication to this project as an expert editor and typist. She believed in me before this project began and I thank her for her love, faith and perseverance over all of these years. vi ABSTRACT CITY OF AMALGAMATION: RACE, MARRIAGE, CLASS AND COLOR IN BOSTON, 1890-1930 SEPTEMBER 2008 ZEBULON V. MILETSKY, B.A., BOSTON COLLEGE M.A., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor John H. Bracey, Jr. This dissertation examines the evolution of early race relations in Boston during a period which saw the extinguishing of the progressive abolitionist racial flame and the triumph of Jim Crow in Boston. I argue that this historical moment was a window in which Boston stood at a racial crossroads. The decision to follow the path of disfranchisement of African Americans and racial polarization paved the way for the race relations in Boston we know and recognize today. Documenting the high number of blacks and whites who married in Boston during these years in the face of virulent anti- miscegenation efforts and the context of the intense political fight to keep interracial marriage legal, the dissertation explores the black response to this assault on the dignity and lives of African Americans. At the same time it documents the dilemma that the issue of intermarriage represented for black Bostonians and their leaders. African Americans in Boston cautiously endorsed, but did not actively participate in the Boston N.A.A.C.P/s campaign against the resurgence of anti-miscegenation laws in the early part of the twentieth century. The lack of direct and substantial participation in this vii campaign is indicative of the skepticism with which many viewed the largely white organization. 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 1 00 Negro grooms took white wives. Furthermore, black and white Bostonians cooperated politically to ensure that intermarriage remained legal throughout the nation. viii PREFACE This dissertation examines the history of mixed race in Boston since 1 890. 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 ix secondary aim of the introduction will be to briefly discuss nineteenth century pseudoscientific theories of race and the mythology of "blood theory".