Yankee Babylon

5 Comments

1. When the laws were overturned in 1967 Virginia, South Carolina, Texas and Georgia’s laws banned marriage with all non-whites. Tennessee and North Carolina’s barred marriage with Blacks and Indians which of course were the only non-whites one was generally likely to encounter in one’s life assuming you didn’t leave the state

   The key there being “when the laws were overturned in 1967.”

   Both the anti-miscegenation laws and the color line evolved over the course of three hundred years. There wasn’t just one anti-miscegenation law in every Southern state. They were changed over the years and were passed at different points in time.

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-miscegenation_laws_in_the_United_States#Anti-miscegenation_laws_overturned_on_12_June_1967_by_Loving_v._Virginia

   Thus, you will see that the anti-miscegenation laws of Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Kentucky, Florida, Delaware, and West Virginia only applied to African-Americans and did not apply to Indians. I think there is an error in the Wikipedia entry because I believe Mississippi did eventually pass an anti-miscegenation law that applied to “Mongoloids.”

   Virginia passed the Racial Integrity Act in 1924 (almost three hundred years after the frontier passed through Virginia) which criminalized intermarriage with Indians. This was due to the tireless efforts of Walter Plecker to classify “Indians” as African-Americans. Some “Indians” were really mulattoes claiming Indian ancestry to pass the color line.

   As far as this pertains to the Choctaw Indians, an Indian tribe from Mississippi and Alabama, intermarriage with them was never criminalized in the Old Southwest. That is why there are so many Choctaws like MacDonald King Ashton who are predominantly European in ancestry.

   In any case, the original point stands: White Southerners did not treat the Indians like they treated African-Americans. In every Southern state, intermarriage with African-Americans was criminalized, but this was not true of Indians.

2. Here’s an essay on Georgia’s anti-miscegenation law which was stronger than those of other states prior to Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924:

   http://mgagnon.myweb.uga.edu/students/3090/05FA3090-Paul.htm

   At the basis of anti-miscegenation laws lay the white-supremacist belief that white womanhood — a symbol of white purity and superiority — had to be protected from the innate lust of the black. Out of all the multitude factors of discrimination, miscegenation, and racial amalgamation, was the by far the one that instilled most fear and images of utter ruin in the minds of the whites. Georgia, and more specifically the greater Atlanta area including Fulton County and the Southern belt including Macon, Columbus, and Albany, encompassed this belief perhaps more than any other state (except for its bordering sister states that had similar racial paradigms). To fully delve into the impact that anti-miscegenation laws portended, and how they eventually ended and what changes they brought about, a closer look into their whole course must be chartered, specifically in the greater Atlanta area. When the Supreme Court ruled in 1967 in Loving vs. Virginia that all state anti-miscegenation statutes were void, the greater Atlanta area slumbered to its reality, and de facto acceptance of miscegenation was extremely painful and slow.

3. I’m sorry Hunter but you are incorrect about Virginia’s original anti-miscegenation law from 1691.

   The relevant text of the statue reads:

   “Be it enacted by the authoritie aforesaid, and it is hereby enacted, that for the time to come, whatsoever English or other white man or woman being free shall intermarry with a negroe, mulatto, or Indian man or woman bond or free shall within three months after such marriage be banished and removed from this dominion forever, …”

   http://www.virtualjamestown.org/laws1.html

   That is 1691 and is most definitely not after the frontier. That is the first anti-miscegenation law. The one that was copied by Massachusetts almost word for word and enacted in 1705 which also banned intermarriage with Indians there.

   It had been illegal to marry an Indian under Virginia law for 52 years before the birth of Thomas Jefferson and it would remain illegal under Virginia law for 141 years after his death.

   The racial integrity act of 1924 enacted the one drop rule and strengthened the law to cover all non-whites. Indians had always been illegal since 1691 though.

   North Carolina banned marriage with Indians and Negros in 1715.

   goo.gl/v2MvY

   You say it proves “The South” didn’t treat Indians like blacks. What it really proves is the new states watered down the statutes of the original South.

   Glory to the Old Dominion. Glory to the Old North State.

4. The key there being 1691: 83 years after the founding of Jamestown colony.

   http://www.virtualjamestown.org/laws1.html

   The same website shows how both the anti-miscegenation laws and the color line and relations with the Indians evolved in Virginia over the course of the seventeenth century. The first anti-miscegenation laws were passed in the early 1660s in Virginia and Maryland and applied to negroes. Virginia spent much of the 1600s practicing white slavery with indentured servants and trying to Christianize the Indians.

   http://www.virginiamemory.com/online_classroom/shaping_the_constitution/doc/plecker_letter

   “The Racial Integrity Act was subject to the Pocahontas exception. Since many influential Virginia families claimed descent from Pocahontas, the legislature declared that a person could be considered white with as much as one-sixteenth Indian ancestry.”

   Thomas Jefferson is the best example of the how racial attitudes varied in the South toward Indians. This comes from Winthrop Jordan’s White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward The Negro, 1550-1812:

   “Nowhere was Jefferson’s efforts to Americanize the Indian more apparent than in his reiterated hope for cultural and physical amalgamation of Indians with white Americans. Together they formed one nation: “We, like you,” he once addressed an Indian chief, “are Americans, born in the same land, and having the same interests.” His purchase of Louisiana raised the possibility of encouraging the Indians to remove beyond the Mississippi, but he preferred that they be encouraged to give up hunting and farming and cede the resultant surplus of land to the United States. “In truth,” he wrote, “the ultimate point of rest and happiness for them is to let our settlements and theirs meet and blend together, to intermix, and become one people.” This would “best promote the interests of the Indians and ourselves, and finally consolidate our whole country to one nation only.” Ten years later in 1813 he wrote regretfully that war had now intervened: “They would have mixed their blood with ours, and been amalgamated and identified with us within no distant period of time.”

   Amalgamation and identification, welcomed with the Indian, were precisely what Jefferson most abhorred with the Negro. The Indian was a brother, the Negro a leper. White Americans had always regarded the two peoples as very different, Jefferson underlined the dichotomy with a determined emphasis not matched by other men. His derogation of the Negro revealed the latent possibilities inherent in an accumulated popular tradition of Negro inferiority; it constituted, for all its qualifications, the most intense, extensive, and extreme formulation of anti-Negro “thought” offered by any American in the thirty years after the Revolution.”

5. The ultimate example of the romanticization of the Indian was James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans.

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_of_the_Mohicans
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_of_the_Mohicans_(1992_film)

   I’ve always found it amusing how the Indians were often honored and respected (think of the Apache helicopter or Tomahawk missiles or the Florida State Seminoles or the Atlanta Braves or the Washington Redskins or the North Dakota Fighting Sioux) while the Negro was never romanticized except at great distance.

   The Indian was always contrasted with the Negro. He was a “savage,” a product of his uncivilized wilderness environment, whereas the Negro was thought to be racially inferior. This shows that popular racial stereotypes were a product of experience and observation and were almost always based upon truth.

   Indians were often considered an honorable opponent. Their savagery was often compared to Germanic barbarians fighting against the Roman Empire. The Negro didn’t have honor. Even when they lived in cities and practiced iron working, they were still considered inferior.