STOKES FILM JOURNAL 1 (2010) Miscegenation in and after The Birth of a Nation Melvyn STOKES University College London, UK American Laws Against Miscegenation Ann Dunham was born in Kansas in 1942. Her father, once an oil rig worker, served in the army during the Second World War. Her mother worked in wartime industry. Once the war ended, the two elder Dunhams studied at college under the G.I. Bill of Rights and relocated several times, ending up in Hawaii. Meanwhile, a man called Barack Obama, born in Kenya, had spent part of his childhood herding goats in Africa. Eventually, he won a scholarship to the University of Hawaii, where he met Ann Dunham. The couple, one black, one white, married in February 1961 and, six months later, had a baby boy they named after his father. That boy grew up to become the forty-fourth president of the United States. Most of the discussion dealing with Barack Obama in terms of race has centered on the fact that he is the first African American to be elected president. But it is also crucial to point out that when he was born, in 1961, of a white mother and black father, many states of the United States still banned marriages between people of different races. Although the Supreme Court of California had declared the state law dealing with this issue unconstitutional in 1948, and seven other states repealed their laws against interracial marriage between 1951 and 1958, there were still twenty-two American states that forbade Page 1 STOKES FILM JOURNAL 1 (2010) inter-racial marriage at the time of Obama’s birth.1 In sixteen of these states, predominantly but not exclusively in the South, such laws would last until 1967, when the United States Supreme Court – in the appropriately-named case of Loving v. Virginia – finally ruled that they were unconstitutional. The first laws against racial intermarriage in what would eventually become the United States had been passed in the seventeenth century. The Maryland General Assembly pioneered the way in 1661 with a statute describing intermarriage between black women and white men as “the disgrace of the nation.”2 Colonial legislatures were well aware of racial issues. In fact, representative government and slavery in Britain’s American colonies emerged almost simultaneously. In 1619, the Virginia colonists were granted the right to hold an annual general assembly. One month later, twenty black Africans landed at Jamestown.3 During the next two centuries, millions followed. Legislators in colonial assemblies and later state legislatures would continue to press for laws proscribing inter-racial marriage. Between the American Revolution and the Civil 1 The Obama family was fortunate to be living in Hawaii, which had never enacted such legislation. 2 Susan Courtney, Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation: Spectacular Narratives of Gender and Race, 1903-1967 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005),10. 3 John Hope Franklin and Alfred A. Moss, Jr., From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 7th ed., 1994), 56; Philip S. Foner, History of Black Americans: From Africa to the Emergence of the Cotton Kingdom (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1975), 186-87. Page 2 STOKES FILM JOURNAL 1 (2010) War, however, Elise Lemire points outs, such laws were apparently less necessary since novelists, writers of short stories, poets, journalists and political cartoonists all produced a large range of work “teaching whites that blacks are physically and socially inferior and to thereby treat them accordingly.” Lemire identifies three peaks in white American anxiety about inter-racial relationships: at the start of the nineteenth century when Thomas Jefferson was attacked by his Federalist opponents for having a relationship with one of his slaves; in the 1830s, as the strength of abolitionism rose; and in the 1860s, after Lincoln’s Proclamation of Emancipation.4 During the Civil War, the phenomenon many had criticized and tried to ban finally also acquired its own name. Two Democratic Party publicists, David G. Croly (the father of political theorist Herbert Croly) and George Wakeman, attempted to undermine support for the Republican party during the presidential election of 1864. They wrongly suggested that Lincoln and the Republican leadership supported intermarriage between the races – a process to which they gave the name miscegenation, a term created from the Latin words miscere (to mix) and genus (race).5 4 Elise Lemire, “Miscegenation”: Making Race in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 1-2 5 Anon. [David Goodman Croly and George Wakeman], Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro (New York: Dexter, Hamilton and Co., 1864); Sidney Kaplan, “The Miscegenation Issue in the Election of 1864,” Journal of Negro History, 34, no. 3 (July 1949): 274-343, explanation of the etymology of the term on 277. Also see Lemire, “Miscegenation,” 116-18. Page 3 STOKES FILM JOURNAL 1 (2010) In the four decades after 1890, miscegenation became increasingly salient as an issue in political discourse. Social changes within the United States were a major cause of this. Three major population movements occurred. The first was the increasing migration of African Americans to northern and western cities, abandoning the rural South in search of industrial jobs.6 This meant that many communities outside the South also began to experience racial tensions for the first time. It was a race riot at Springfield, Illinois, in 1908 that led to the organization a year later of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.7 The second movement was that of Japanese immigrants into California – an influx of around 100,000 people that prompted hysterical talk of a “yellow peril” and demands for Japanese exclusion.8 The third and greatest population movement was the change in general patterns of immigration from Europe, which saw the “old” immigration 6See Carole Marks, Farewell—We’re Good and Gone: The Great Black Migration (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989; Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (New York: Vintage Books, 1992). 7 On the race riot and organisation of the NAACP, see Charles F. Kellogg, NAACP: A History of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), 1, 9-30. 8 On Japanese immigrants to the West Coast, see Roger Daniels, The Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese Movement in California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2nd ed., 1977). Page 4 STOKES FILM JOURNAL 1 (2010) from northern and western Europe replaced by the ostensibly less assimilable “new” millions from southern and eastern Europe.9 In the early twentieth century, white Americans tried to shore up their ascendancy by introducing broader restrictions on immigration. They also endeavored to preserve the purity of their own race by passing new laws against miscegenation: between 1887 and 1930 at least forty-one attempts were made to ban interracial marriage in Mid-Atlantic and East North Central states.10 In the South, laws of this type were mainly designed to prevent marriage between blacks and whites. In some Western states, however, they were much more complex, at times banning marriage between whites and Orientals, Indians, and Mexicans.11 Racial Ideas and D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation 9 For the “new” immigration and the Dillingham Commission report of 1911, see Thomas Kessner, The Golden Door: Italian and Jewish Mobility in New York City 1880-1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 24-26. 10 David H. Fowler, Northern Attitudes towards Interracial Marriage: Legislation and Public Opinion in the Middle Atlantic States and the States of the Old Northwest, 1780–1930 (New York: Garland, 1987), 273. On the basis of Fowler’s information, there were actually forty- two attempts, all of which failed. Ibid., 271, n.1. 11 If anti-miscegenation laws were oldest in the South, they were most complicated in the West. See Arlene Hui, “Miscegenation in Mainstream American Cinema: Representing Interracial Relationships, 1913–1956” (Ph.D. diss., University of London, 2006), 28–29. Page 5 STOKES FILM JOURNAL 1 (2010) The idea of a pure white race can be traced back at least as far as Tacitus. “In the peoples of Germany,” maintained the Roman historian, “there has been given to the world a race untainted by intermarriage with other races . pure, like no one but themselves.”12 In the 1850s, French aristocrat Arthur de Gobineau had declared his opposition to racial mixing to protect the purity of what he described as the “Aryan” race.13 In D. W. Griffith’s notorious film The Birth of a Nation (1915), when the Union veterans offer shelter in their log cabin to the ex-Confederate Cameron family, who have escaped being arrested by black soldiers, an intertitle observes with satisfaction that “the former enemies of North and South are united again in common defence of their Aryan birthright.” It is possible that what Griffith had in mind, however, was an alternative cluster of ideas to those involving Aryanism. Rather than having its roots in the work of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century philologists, as Aryanism did, “Anglo-Saxonism” originated in the outlook of English religious and political reformers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries who invented the historical myth of pure, libertarian and democratic Anglo-Saxons to justify their own actions. In the United States in the last years of the nineteenth century, Anglo-Saxon ideas and ideals were far more widespread than notions of Aryanism. They attracted the interest of many educated native-born Americans. They were especially influential at Johns Hopkins University where, from 1881, historian Herbert Baxter Adams 12 Tacitus, as quoted in Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), 12.