10-04-2025
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
‘Tangled Fortunes' Review: The Legal History of Interracial Marriage
In its landmark 1967 Loving v. Virginia ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court finally bestowed protection on interracial marriages. Relationships between black people and white people had always existed, but before Loving, particularly in the segregated South, such couples could face fines and even incarceration.
Kathryn Schumaker's 'Tangled Fortunes' traces the complex interactions between the changing legal landscape and the realities of interracial love, cohabitation and marriage in Mississippi from Reconstruction to the mid-20th century. Ms. Schumaker, a senior lecturer of American studies at the University of Sydney, makes her most profound contribution in emphasizing the economic motives behind the state's racist prohibitions.
'These laws did not prevent the formation of interracial families,' she writes. 'What they did was ensure that white wealth would remain in white hands.' Delegitimizing interracial unions dispossessed both surviving partners and biracial offspring, Ms. Schumaker argues.
Interracial marriage was briefly legal in Mississippi (as in every Deep South state, save Georgia) in the 1870s. The renewed political ascendancy of white supremacists after Reconstruction brought marital restrictions. These laws, Ms. Schumaker shows, were both confusingly written and selectively enforced. White men coupled with black women sometimes escaped legal consequences, while black men, even those inaccurately targeted, might be confronted by murderous lynch mobs.
