Interracial "University-Research" MLA-report
Introduction:
In 1800, a minister of the name Gloria Dei Church in Philadelphia refused to marry an interracial couple. "A negro came with a white woman," he wrote. "I referred him to the negro minister, not willing to have blame from public opinion, having never yet joined black and white. As a result, these frequent mixtures would soon force matrimonial sanction in early America. [1] Interracial couples were subject to harsh criminal actions, including the death penalty.
Early 1800-1824 (Time line)
[2]In one 1824 case in Virginia, an elderly man named Lewis Bourne unsuccessfully sued for divorce claiming that his much younger wife was involved in a seven-year relationship with a local slave. The court apparently concluded that Bourne had failed to adequately control his wife’s behavior and denied his petition. The next year, a poor North Carolina white woman named Polly Lane accused a slave named Jim of rape. Although Jim was quickly found guilty of the charge, the discovery that Polly was pregnant prior to the alleged rape led the court to reopen the case and ultimately acquit Jim. A slave was simply too valuable a capital asset to execute under such circumstances. After the Civil War, Hodes argues, consensual sex between a black man and a white woman became unimaginable in the white southern mind. White southerners conflated black male autonomy with sexual transgressions across thecol or line and justified terrorism and lynching on the grounds that they were necessary to protect the purity of white womanhood--even though less than a third of all lynchings even involved accusations of sexual assault. Interracial sex became transgressive in a way it had never been under slavery. Hodes’s overarching argument is that sexual liaisons between white women and black men were not always met with violent outrage in the South. Before the Civil War, southern law could tolerate a liaison between a white woman and a black man.
Works cited
Hodes, Martha. White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. xii + 338 pp. Bibliographical references and index. $30.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-300-06970-7.
