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Persecution and Perseverance: Black-White Interracial Relationships in Piedmont, North Carolina

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Persecution and Perseverance: Black-White Interracial Relationships in Piedmont, North Carolina PERSECUTION AND PERSEVERANCE: BLACK-WHITE INTERRACIAL RELATIONSHIPS IN PIEDMONT, NORTH CAROLINA by Casey Moore A thesis submitted to the faculty of The University of North Carolina at Charlotte in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in History Charlotte 2017 Approved by: ______________________________ Dr. Aaron Shapiro ______________________________ Dr. David Goldfield ______________________________ Dr. Cheryl Hicks ii ©2017 Casey Moore ALL RIGHTS RESERVED iii ABSRACT CASEY MOORE. Persecution and perseverance: Black-White interracial relationships in Piedmont, North Carolina. (Under the direction of DR. AARON SHAPIRO) Although black-white interracial marriage has been legal across the United States since 1967, its rate of growth has historically been slow, accounting for less than eight percent of all interracial marriages in the country by 2010. This slow rate of growth lies in contrast to a large amount of national poll data depicting the liberalization of racial attitudes over the course of the twentieth-century. While black-white interracial marriage has been legal for almost fifty years, whites continue to choose their own race or other races and ethnicities, over black Americans. In the North Carolina Piedmont, this phenomenon can be traced to a lingering belief in the taboo against interracial sex politically propagated in the 1890s. This thesis argues that the taboo surrounding interracial sex between black men and white women was originally a political ploy used after Reconstruction to unite white male voters. In the 1890s, Democrats used the threat of interracial sex to vilify black males as sexual deviants who desired equality and voting rights only to become closer to white females. Their campaign championed white supremacy and united all classes of white men by declaring it their Christian duty to protect white womanhood from black men. This tactic resulted in a landslide victory for Democrats in the 1898 election, while also leading to an increase in vigilantism as white men began increasingly lynching black men for sexual crimes against white women. iv While the taboo had its origins in the nineteenth-century, it remained in the state to some degree throughout the twentieth-century. The threat of racial mixing was used as an excuse to fight school integration in the 1950s. And in the 1960s, North Carolina witnessed the largest Ku Klux Klan reemergence of any southern state, coming to power with a familiar message: white supremacy, Christian duty and the protection of white women from deviant black men. This thesis further argues that the early criminalization of black men and deeply engrained taboo against racial mixing has continued to affect the white approval rate of interracial marriages and white approval in North Carolina. In 1976 two magistrates in Winston-Salem refused to marry a black-white couple because of deeply held religious beliefs against racial mixing. In the late 1980s, a Catawba County black-white couple reported having a cross burned on their lawn. While black-white interracial marriages were legal after 1967, a national Gallup poll found white approval of interracial marriage did not breach fifty percent until the late 1990s. While white North Carolinians did not publicly denounce interracial relationships and marriage, some discrimination still lingered privately and into the mid-1990s, interracial couples in the state continued to face disapproval from family members who believed such unions were unnatural. While the taboo against interracial marriage still exists for some North Carolinians, national studies depict that these tend to be older, white southerners who lived through segregation. White acceptance, however, should continue to rise with future generations of North Carolinians, who, studies have shown, are less inclined to view these relationships as taboo. v DEDICATION I must thank my family, especially my grandfather Pinkney Hull, for welcoming and loving my husband; proving that growth, love, and acceptance are possible at any stage in life. vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, I would like to thank my thesis advisor, Dr. Aaron Shapiro, who provided suggestions, support, and countless office hours to help me understand and interpret this topic. I would also like to thank my other committee members: Dr. David Goldfield and Dr. Cheryl Hicks whose comments and support helped to narrow my focus and create this thesis. My husband, Chris Moore, also must be acknowledged for providing technical assistance and helping me to interpret the quantitative data presented in this thesis. vii INTRODUCTION In 1944, Swedish economist Gunnar Mydral published a study on American race relations that exposed the influence of sexuality on segregation in the South. He argued that sex was the principle “around which the whole structure of segregation of the Negro” was organized. Social segregation, he found, could only be explained as a way to thwart the races from viewing one another as equals and possibly intermarrying.1 While Mydral’s observations depicted the South in general, his findings are relevant to North Carolina’s history specifically. To preserve the southern social order after Reconstruction, North Carolina’s political leaders engaged in a rhetorical battle to control the state which strategically utilized interracial sex and racial mixing. At the turn of the century, Democrats in the state used newspapers to print political propaganda vilifying black men as sexual predators while celebrating the white woman as the pillar of white supremacy. The campaign was a success. Antimiscegenation laws became more rigid and penalties increased. State and local judges established precedents invalidating out of state marriages and began using the court system to determine a person’s racial lineage. The number of black men lynched for sexual crimes against white women increased sharply after the campaign, as did the number of crimes committed against black men in the name of white supremacy. Fears of racial mixing, perpetrated by sensationalist news stories, helped pave the way for Democrats to take over the state politically and push for the enforcement of antimiscegenation laws and protection of white purity. In less than a 1 Gunnar Mydral, An American Dilemma (New York, NY: Harper and Brothers, 1944), 587, 606. viii decade, North Carolina Democrats had engrained the social taboo and fear of race mixing as inborn southern values, while coaxing the poor, white vote. Their campaign was so successful that remnants of the taboo remained in the white community into the late twentieth-century and continued to affect the rate of growth of black-white relationships and couples themselves. While researching black-white relationships, several questions drove my research. My first goal was to learn the extent to which black-white interracial couples were able to engage in relationships prior to the repeal of antimiscegenation laws and to learn how such relationships were policed. Second, in the period after Loving, I sought to understand if discrimination against black-white couples persisted and to what degree. Last, I wanted to compare experiences of couples in the Piedmont region of North Carolina to national polling data documenting the growing approval rate of interracial marriage amongst whites to learn the extent to which racial taboos had eroded in the state and what might have caused this change. This thesis argues that the creation of the taboo surrounding black-white interracial sex, while originally politically motivated, remained in the state to some degree throughout the twentieth-century. In the 1940s and 1950s, black men continued to be persecuted for supposed sexual crimes against white women; their persecutors using the same rhetoric Democrats forged in the 1890s. Likewise, interracial couples continued to be tried and convicted for violating antimiscegenation laws by biased judges and juries comprised of white men. Verdicts and judicial opinions were often steeped in religious language; another turn of the century political tactic to convince southern white men that the protection of white womanhood was their Christian duty. Evidence of the continuity ix of this belief can be found as late as 1976, when two Winston-Salem magistrates refused to marry a blind, interracial couple. Some interracial couples in the state reported discrimination even in the late twentieth-century. Oral histories and interviews conducted by the author revealed that while it had become politically incorrect to publicly denounce interracial couples or disapprove of interracial marriages, some North Carolinians still did so privately. Discrimination ranged from couples receiving poor service at restaurants to rude stares and verbal remarks. In the late 1980s, one couple reported having a cross burned on their lawn in rural Catawba County. The discrimination suffered by interracial couples must also be understood in terms of national public opinion polls which also reflected white disapproval in the time period. While the continuity of the taboo is difficult to measure, opinion polls and scientific studies, paired with census data, have shown that the growth of black-white interracial marriage remains slow and that white approval of these marriages only breached fifty percent nationally in the late 1990s. Sociologists have historically studied interracial marriage by interviewing interracial couples. These studies research the conditions under which the races are likely to
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