Philadelphia Inquirer – Feb. 2, 2010
“Former President Harry Truman said yesterday he did not believe white persons should marry Negroes. He said that racial intermarriage ran counter to teachings of the Bible.” – New York Times, Sept. 12, 1963
Last year, one of our eleventh graders wrote a paper examining the controversy over interracial marriage from the mid-1950s to the mid-’70s. The student, Susannah Ivory, wanted to know more about the public debate surrounding Loving v. Virginia, the 1967 Supreme Court decision that unanimously struck down laws banning interracial marriage.
To keep the project manageable, Susannah restricted herself to one newspaper, the New York Times. She ran a search of its historical database for all of the items in which miscegenation or interracial marriage were mentioned during the two-decade period. Since the advent of digitized, online newspaper archives, data of this sort can be gathered in minutes; research opportunities are limited only by a student’s ability to pose good questions.
A graph of the results showed two striking peaks: a big one in the mid-’60s, which was no surprise, and a completely unexpected bump in 1956 and ’57. The articles revealed that the mid-’50s spike stemmed from the relaxation of censorship laws prohibiting the depiction of interracial relationships in books and films. For the first time, the public had an opportunity to experience and react to this type of integration – a decade before the Supreme Court got involved.
A typical 1958 article began, “A new novel by Legette Blythe titled Call Down the Storm is planned for publication next month by Holt. It is a story of miscegenation and racial integrations from the closing years of the Reconstruction period to the present.”
Mentions of miscegenation disappeared almost completely from the Times by the end of the decade, but they resumed again in the early ’60s as couples began to challenge the laws against interracial marriage in state courts. This time, higher-profile individuals and groups began to weigh in.
“Interracial marriage is completely compatible with the doctrine and canon law of Roman Catholicism, a national church organization said today,” one 1963 article read. ” ‘Races do not marry,’ the statement declared. ‘Nations do not marry. Classes do not marry. Only persons marry.’ ” So much for President Truman’s claim, two months earlier, of biblical prohibition.
In 1964, an article reported that a group of scientists working for the United Nations had issued a study stating “there is no biological justification for banning interracial marriages, nor for any advice aimed at banning them.”
Susannah ended her paper with a reference to our own era: “The striking down of the anti-miscegenation laws represented a major step forward toward a more open and accepting society, but the time has come again for such a leap. Homosexual couples are now in the same situation that mixed-race couples were a half-century ago, and they face the same challenges.”
In Loving, the court wrote, “Marriage is one of the ‘basic civil rights of man.’ … To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes … is surely to deprive all of the state’s citizens of liberty without due process of law.” It doesn’t seem like much of a stretch to suggest that these sentiments could apply to same-sex couples.
Today, the United Nations and the Catholic Church both find themselves involved in the debate over same-sex unions. Two years ago, on the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a headline read, “In Europe, same-sex showdown moves to U.N.” The accompanying article noted that 27 European countries supported a new declaration decriminalizing homosexuality, but the Vatican was resisting it. The Bush administration refused to sign on to that declaration, but the Obama administration joined 70 or so countries in supporting it last year.
Not surprisingly, the most cogent arguments in favor of personal freedoms often come not from governments or organizations, but from the individuals fighting for them. From a 1972 article, Susannah quoted the black mayor of Tuskegee, Ala., who was married to a white woman.
“A lot of things went through our minds,” he said. “We felt there might be actual physical danger. We thought about hurting our friends and relatives. We even thought about the effect it would have on my political career. Finally we came to the point and said, ‘To hell with it. I love you, and you love me. We’re going to do the only honest and right thing.’ ” Sometimes it’s that simple.
Grant Calder teaches history at Friends’ Central School. The full text of the paper is available at researchproject.friendscentral.org.
As a former journalist, it is so painful to watch what’s happening in the industry these days. Your point about these unbelievable resources being available at a moment’s notice to these kids is so true. But I do wonder what will fill the search engines when there are longer reporters covering these stories. It’s the old line about journalism being the first draft of history….
Mr. Calder, you conveniently forgot to include the 2nd half of the sentence from your Loving v. Virginia quote. Marriage is indeed one of the “basic civil rights of man” — but that’s because, the Court made quite clear, it is “fundamental to our very existence and survival.” So it’s not only a stretch to say that Loving’s sentiments could apply today. It’s downright disingenuous.
Interpreting the law has always involved deciding whether to construe its phrasing broadly or narrowly. I choose broadly. The 9th Amendment, my favorite, reads “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights [speech, religion, etc.] shall not be construed to disparage or deny others retained by the people.”
The court stated that marriage is a fundamental human right and, since the evidence suggests that human beings successfully established themselves as a species on this planet long before there was “marriage,” I don’t see that the role the institution may play as a mechanism for encouraging orderly human procreation requires “narrowly” defining it to include only heterosexual couples.
Mr. Calder, true enough, but when interpreting what the “law” is, one is not free to simply decide which words on a sheet of paper (or on a computer screen) they pick and choose to see. In other words, you can’t delete words from a sentence to make it mean what you want it to mean. To illustrate: “I love to play basket ball just like Barack Obama.” vs. “I love . . . Barack Obama.” Fair quotation?
I’m not debating what the law is, I’m proposing that it be changed and suggesting how one might argue for the change based upon the phrasing of a court decision in a related case.
The phrase “a fundamental human right” seems pretty clear. My guess is that the use of the phrase “essential to our existence and survival” in the Loving case was intended to strengthen the court’s claim that marriage is a right, not to restrict it to heterosexual couples.
Just once, I would love to hear an actual explanation of how people will be affected by two men or women marrying each other. All I have ever heard is religious semantics.
I was moved by the anecdote at the end of this article. It all comes down to love. It’s a love story. I was struck by how easily those comments could be made by a gay person (in public life) about his/her partner.
Some comments are definitely in order here. First, for the benefit of the august columnist who wrote the above screed and who seems mentally stuck in the Sixties, I challenge you, instead of teaching political correctness and liberalism, to present BOTH sides of the debate to your students. Second, for the benefit of JS27 and the other marriage redefiners here, here’s the real deal on marriage. Whether one believes in God or not, it is an undeniable fact that tens of millions of years of evolution have devised sexuality for the purposes of pro-creation. Nature is a very harsh mistress, as numerous televised documentaries about the natural world have shown us. We can, with all honesty, call a homosexual an evolutionary dead end; an individual whom nature, for reasons that may always remain obscure to us, did not intend to reproduce. In response to what we can call the naturalness of marriage as traditionally understood, during millenniums of human history, societies and peoples have endowed marriage with religious ceremonies and special legal status due to the uniqueness and centrality it has to the survival of the human race. Therefore it is also incumbent upon both citizen and public official to continue to recognize the centrality of marriage and to maintain that centrality in law, and to reject all attempts to abolish it or legalize so-called alternatives. Let the members of the demimonde live out their lives and conduct their private business privately, far from the public eye and far from public institutions.
First, nature doesn’t “intend” anything.
Second, to a large extent we now hold our genetic future in our hands. Many individuals these days lead long and full lives who would never have survived under your “harsh mistress.”
Third, some gay parents have children who do carry their genes. Others, who want children, may choose to adopt. Adoption is not technically procreation but it certainly contributes to the larger gene pool. Consider the number of biologically Asian children growing up with non-Asian parents in the U.S., for example.