Mixed-race relationships played a smaller role in Southern Discomfort than I’d planned (Maria was mixed-race at one point; for various reasons I decided I couldn’t make that work), otherwise I might not have read WHAT COMES NATURALLY: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America by Peggy Pascoe as research. The book takes its subtitle from Pascoe showing how “black” was a legal definition more than biological: to determine which marriages crossed the color line required laws identifying whether the cutoff was one-eighth, one-quarter or a single drop of black blood.
Pascoe looks at how miscegenation was coined in the 19th century as a more scientific sounding replacement for “amalgamation,” and the various court cases, laws and rationales for banning intermarriage (a longstanding and eerily familiar argument being that there was no discrimination as the laws applies to blacks and whites alike). All of which took various forms around the country, expanding to anti-Asian bans on the west coast while Oklahoma exempted white men who married native women (it was one way for native land to pass into white hands). The rise of organized resistance was extremely gradual: the NAACP didn’t want to jeopardize other civil-rights goals, other black leaders, such as Marcus Garvey, didn’t support intermarriage. The final victory in Loving was far from inevitable, given that a similar case had greenlit the marriage without changing the law. Very good. Very good.
I’m not sure now if I read VAGRANT NATION: Police Power, Constitutional Change and the Making of the 1960s by Risa Goluboff because Maria was a vagrant or if I read it because I’m a dork, then used some of the information. Goluboff looks at how cops routinely used vagrancy laws to coerce drifters, vagabonds and the unemployed into taking jobs for shit wages because the laws made it a crime for someone who was unemployed and with no fixed abode to refuse a job offer.
In theory, this let the authorities maintain order by corralling suspicious strangers, wanderers and people hanging around (for example) jewelry stores with no particular purpose. In practice it was an incredibly flexible concept that allowed cops to bust anyone they didn’t approve of — labor organizers, hippies, interracial couples, civil rights activists, homosexuals and buskers. Goluboff traces the challenges to vagrancy laww from 1949 (the first major challenge) through the Papachristou case that finally got them declared unconstitutional. This is a very dense, slow-going book, but it’s worth it if this kind of legal history interests you.
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