Interracial Families in Jim Crow Mississippi

FAIN: FZ-287256-22

Kathryn Anne Schumaker
University of Oklahoma, Norman (Norman, OK 73019-3003)

Writing and revision of a book on the legal history of the color line in Mississippi.

This book will offer a new history of the color line in Mississippi told through the stories of interracial families. It centers the remarkable case of the Burnsides, who crossed the color line and “passed” as white while remaining in their tight-knit community. The book will explore how interracial families experienced the rise of Jim Crow and how they responded. Although segregationist politicians claimed to support the strict separation of the races, the continued existence of mixed-race families in Mississippi into the twentieth century reveals the contradictions and complexity of how segregation law was understood and enforced at the local level. Ultimately, white supremacists sought to erase the existence of such familial ties across the color line to perpetuate the myth of segregationists’ historic commitment to “racial purity.”

Associated Products

“Unlawful Intimacy”: Mixed-Race Families, Miscegenation Law, and the Legal Culture of Progressive Era Mississippi (Article)
Title: “Unlawful Intimacy”: Mixed-Race Families, Miscegenation Law, and the Legal Culture of Progressive Era Mississippi
Author: Kathryn Schumaker
Abstract: This article examines the enforcement of anti-miscegenation law in Progressive Era Mississippi by focusing on a series of unlawful cohabitation prosecutions of interracial couples in Natchez. It situates efforts to police and punish mixed-race families within the broader legal culture of Jim Crow, as politicians, judges, and district attorneys sought stricter enforcement of morals laws, including those barring interracial cohabitation. This article argues that the historic prerogative of white men to choose their sexual and domestic partners undermined the illegality of interracial marriage. Lynching deterred Black men from cohabiting with white women, but prosecutions for “unlawful cohabitation” did not effectively punish white men and Black women who formed lasting partnerships. This article relies on extensive research in local court records that reveal that prosecutions of white men and Black women often resulted in fines and, in many cases, had little effect on these mixed-race families. In Natchez and elsewhere, eugenic ideologies of “white racial purity” were no match for a patriarchal legal culture that gave white men leeway to ignore the law when it suited them, even amid outward denunciations of miscegenation. In Mississippi, many white men did not view relationships between white men and Black women as a clear threat to white supremacy, creating space for some interracial families to survive into the twentieth century.
Year: 2023
Primary URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/law-and-history-review/article/unlawful-intimacy-mixedrace-families-miscegenation-law-and-the-legal-culture-of-progressive-era-mississippi/C5AC64E059FA065204B460A2142B7A4C#article
Secondary URL: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0738248023000317
Access Model: Open access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Law and History Review
Publisher: Cambridge University Press

The Peach Tree King of Natchez (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: The Peach Tree King of Natchez
Abstract: This talk discusses the prosecutions of interracial couples in Natchez, Mississippi, in 1909. Among those prosecuted for "unlawful cohabitation" were numerous Jewish men who allegedly lived with Black women. This talk discusses the prosecutions and how they illuminate the problem of "whiteness" in the segregated South.
Author: Kathryn Schumaker
Date: 02/02/2023
Location: Zoom
Primary URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJs2GijD2VU
Primary URL Description: Link to YouTube recording of the talk

Tangled Fortunes: The Hidden History of Interracial Marriage in the Segregated South (Book)
Title: Tangled Fortunes: The Hidden History of Interracial Marriage in the Segregated South
Author: Kathryn Schumaker
Abstract: Interracial marriage was already illegal in some of the American colonies as early as the 1690s. But long before the Supreme Court declared interracial marriage constitutional in 1967, these families were far from rare. It took decades of hard work by Southern lawmakers and judges to create the illusion that they were, as Tangled Fortunes reveals in this new history of the rise and fall of the domestic color line. In Tangled Fortunes, historian Kathryn Schumaker narrates how the prohibition of interracial marriage became a priority for white supremacist lawmakers. To prevent white wealth falling into Black hands, they papered over the reality of interracial relationships, steered inheritances away from those who did not pass as white, and hardened the lines of racist exclusion. But they could neither erase the region's longer history of interracial relationships nor suppress the inheritance claims of biracial descendants dating back to the era of slavery. Tangled Fortunes sheds new light on the ways that interracial families overcame racist laws, uncovered closely kept Southern secrets, and battled to reclaim Black wealth--a fight that continues to this day
Year: 2025
Primary URL: https://search.worldcat.org/title/1428716478
Primary URL Description: WorldCat
Secondary URL: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/kathryn-schumaker/tangled-fortunes/9781541605312/
Secondary URL Description: Publisher's Website
Access Model: book
Publisher: Basic Books
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-1541605312
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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