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The past is never dead. It's not even past NOT EVEN PAST Search the site ... IHS Roundtable – Loving v. Virginia After 50 Years Like 35 Tweet On March 23, 2017, the Institute for Historical Studies sponsored a roundtable on the landmark Supreme Court decision that struck down laws banning interracial marriage. Director of HIS, Seth Gareld, introduced the three panelists, who included Jacqueline Jones, Chair of the UT Austin History Department and well known to readers of Not Even Past, Kevin Noble Maillard, Professor of Law at Syracuse University and co-editor of Loving v. Virginia in a Post-Racial World: Rethinking Race, Sex, and Marriage, and Jeff Nichols, the director and screen writer of Loving, the 2016 feature lm devoted to telling the story of Richard and Mildred Loving and their road to the Surpeme Court. You can listen to an audio of the roundtable here. A transcript appears below. Transcription by Rebecca Johnston, Henry Wiencek, and Maria Hammack. GARFIELD: On behalf of the Institute for Historical Studies it is my pleasure to welcome you this afternoon to our panel commemorating the ftieth anniversary the Loving v. Virginia decision. This landmark decision struck down laws banning interracial marriage as a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th amendment. At the time so- called anti-miscegenation laws were on the books in 16 southern states including Texas. Many years ago sociologist C. Wright Mills observed that “No social study that does not come back to the problems of biography, of history, and of their intersections within a society has completed its intellectual journey.” The story of Mildred and Richard Loving and the watershed case that bears their name in many ways epitomizes such intersections. A story of love, on one hand, so tender, so private, and so ordinary, and on the other hand to persecuted, so public, and so extraordinary, as the couples’ marriage became engulfed by and deepened the broader political struggles for Civil Rights and racial equality in the South. So today, fty years after the Loving decision, we’re pleased to have an interdisciplinary panel composed of an historian, a legal scholar, and a lmmaker, to examine the historical origins of said anti- miscegenation laws in the United States, the battles to overturn them and the paths and challenges to greater colorblindness and marriage equality in the U.S. Richard and Mildred Loving (via Wikimedia Commons). GARFIELD: Our rst panelist is Dr. Jacqueline Jones, Chair of the History Department and Walter Prescott Webb Chair in History and Ideas/Mastin Gentry White Professor of Southern History at UT Austin. Professor Jones is the author of ten books, including A Privacy - Terms Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama’s America, published in 2013, which was a nalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She’s also the author of Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family from Slavery to the Present, which was also a nalist for the Pulitzer, and won the Bancroft Prize. Her current project is a full-length biography of Lucy Parsons, orator and labor agitator, who was born to an enslaved woman in Virginia in 1851. Professor Jones has won numerous grants and awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Jacqueline Jones. JONES: Thanks for the introduction, Seth. It’s really a pleasure to be here today, especially with my fellow panelists, Professor Maillard and Mr. Nichols, both of whom have done so much to advance our understanding of and appreciation for the Loving v. the State of Virginia decision: Professor Maillard through his wide-ranging book, Loving v. Virginia in a Post-Racial World, and Mr. Nichols, through the beautiful, compelling movie, Loving. My rst awareness of laws against intermarriage stems from my days as a high school student in Delaware, when I learned that my French teacher, my junior year, was not allowed to live with his wife in the state of Delaware. They lived in Pennsylvania just across the line instead. So among those sixteen southern states that banned interracial marriage through the 1960s was the State of Delaware. I grew up in a rigidly segregated little town of 500 people. There were four churches in this little town – two black, two white, three Methodist, one Presbyterian. This was a small town between Newark and Bloomington, Delaware. And if I’d learned anything from that experience, it was how presumably well-meaning white people could accommodate themselves to – acquiesce in – forms of discrimination such as anti-miscegenation laws, so-called. My parents and my extended family saw this as customary, as a matter of tradition, something that really did not affect them or other churchgoers at this time. So a reminder, here, as we look back to 1967 and wonder how people could so persecute a couple for their relationship, we have to remember how many people were indifferent, and some of course were actively outraged. White tenants seeking to prevent blacks from moving into the Sojourner Truth housing project in Detroit, 1942 (via Wikimedia Commons). By way of introduction, I would just like to restate what Seth already mentioned in his introduction – the obvious central paradox that informs our understanding of the institution of marriage, that it is built on the most private, intimate of human relationships, and yet it is not only highly public, but also highly politicized. Specically in the South, but not only in the South, the states’ regulation of interracial marriage has been a means to further and preserve white supremacy. I’d like to very briey discuss four themes today. First of all, I want to distinguish between interracial sex and interracial marriage. They are related, but they’re not the same thing. Secondly, I want to remind us to remain alert to the hypocrisy and dissembling. We’ll hear much about white men who objected to race mixing and miscegenation, but that is only partially true. Let’s see what they do and not just what they say. Certainly, there were distinct limits to their outrage. Third, the subject of interracial marriage has a history. We can compare, for instance, the Antebellum period in American history to the period after the Civil War and see how attitudes towards relationships, especially marriages between white men and black women, changed over time. And nally, I want to suggest that interracial marriage is a complicated question, revealing of denitions of family, race, power, and citizenship. Those of you who know me and know my work know that I object to the word “race” for its imprecision, but mainly because it doesn’t really exist. It’s a ction. Racial ideologies of course are very powerful, and have had a pernicious inuence on this country. But that’s very different from the idea of race, which presupposes a hierarchy of racial groups and the notion itself of course seeks to categorize people into certain groups. I’ll be using the term race, though, even though I don’t think it really exists, except as an ideology, a political strategy. And the strategy here is among people who seem to construct hierarchies of power based on lineage and gender, and skin, color, and class. So, here, at the beginning of my rst point, which is distinguishing between interracial sex and interracial marriage, let’s go back to the 17th-century Chesapeake, Maryland and Virginia, those colonies, and reect on the reality of colonial settlements, which had too much land and too few workers. We see, early in the century, masters of indentured servants, white and black, impregnating their women servants in order to extent those servants’ indentures. That is, in order to extend their time of service. It was illegal for a young woman who was a servant to become pregnant. She could be forced to serve more than the customary seven years if she did become pregnant. So what happened was ocials in the Chesapeake began to pass laws saying that if an indentured servant became pregnant, her time would be given or sold to another master. That was to discourage masters from impregnating their servants and making them spend longer on their indentures. Slaves working on a plantation, circa 1862–1863 (via Wikimedia Commons). Also during this period we nd a very distinct development, and that is the colonies decide that legal status should ow from the mother’s status, and not from the father’s status. That was primarily because slave owners, again, were impregnating enslaved women. As a result, regardless of the father’s status, regardless of the physical appearance of the children, the children were, of course, legally enslaved. And I think this fact shows the “why?” of race. People often talk about race-based slavery. But in fact, children with one white parent or one black parent were of neither race. It’s very dicult to speak in racial terms of children whose parents are mixed. But in any case, we do nd, throughout the Antebellum South, by the late Antebellum period, clear evidence that many children of slave owners have become enslaved, because they are the offspring of white men physically and sexually abusing enslaved women. The term miscegenation was actually coined during the American Civil War, and the aim here of laws against miscegenation was to uphold the authority of well-to-do white men who sought to control land, labor, and inheritances to the detriment of white women. And also the detriment of black and Native American men and women. Before the Civil War, black-white marriages were not encouraged, certainly, but they were in many cases tolerated, because they didn’t threaten the racial hierarchies embedded in the institution of slavery.

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