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Title: 'They Call it Marriage': The Louisiana Interracial Family and the Making of American Legitimacy

Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis

Publication Year: 2007

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Abstract: They Call it Marriage asks when and why stories of interracial marriage between black women and white men manifested symbolic power in the nineteenth century U.S. It examines how political and social struggles at local and national levels transformed and/or failed to transform the ways white men and black women related to each other. And it considers why Louisiana was such an important setting for national struggles over race, gender, legitimacy, and power.Many states that had not yet legally prohibited interracial marriage did so following the Civil War. In Louisiana, the opposite occurred: Reconstruction authorities repealed such laws, enabling interracial couples to retroactively legitimate private religious marriages. The acknowledgment and registration of these previously unlawful rituals exposed a concealed past in which many had refused to submit to the law as authoritatively given. Some people undertook wedding rituals and laid claim to the language of legitimate matrimony in defiance of state law. They Call it Marriage highlights their perspective on the law, not as a fixed set of rules but as a terrain of struggle, demanding justice on their own terms and with a keen awareness of competing jurisdictions. The terms black and white hardly capture Louisianas simultaneously Caribbean and Southern ethno-racial landscape. Yet the use of marriage laws to order the population into categories of blanc and noir dated back to its French colonial government. Structuring interracial sexual relations by mandating that children inherit the status of their (black) mother only, these binary demarcations established the parameters of enslaved and racialized populations. Because legal kinship affected titles to household property in Louisiana, these laws encouraged distant kin and creditors to monitor interracial families internal affairs. Black women and white men, whose relationships were thus at once outside the law and subjected to constant scrutiny, often went to great lengths to attain, preserve, and occasionally escape marriage-like conditions with each other.Reconstruction required articulating new theories of family relationships, particularly where such couples were concerned. Women of color were considered innocuous in the role of white mens servants and slaves. But when they claimed the status of wives, their relationships were deployed in political rhetoric and literature as metaphors for profligacy and misrule. They Call it Marriage outlines changes in these couples status over the course of the nineteenth century, foregrounding both the family unit and gendered institutional roles within it. Situating these struggles over legitimacy amidst questions over whether American society was to be organized along lines of status or contract, it explores the dialectic between marriage as a gendered form of bondage and as a symbol of the exercise of free will and individual autonomy.The disputed illegitimate past of Louisiana interracial families had significance beyond the states borders. Perceived as the center of American race mixing, the state served as a crucial staging ground for struggles over civil rights. They Call it Marriage connects these roles by focusing on the rhetoric of color blindness and racial indeterminacy in local antecedents of Plessy v. Ferguson, the landmark Louisiana segregation case. In a number of these cases, the defense invoked the plaintiffs interracial genealogy in order to call into question their status as colored, arguing that without a firmly established racial identity, they lacked legal standing to sue. State authorities ongoing promotion of racial ambiguity and fluidity complicates any efforts to locate the transition point at which Louisiana is supposed to have abandoned a Latin three-caste racial system. It thus offers a means of reconsidering long-held beliefs about the importance of racial binarism in Jim Crow segregation.

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Authors: Williams, Diana Irene

Institution: Harvard University

Department: History of American Civilization

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Degree: Doctor in Philosophy

Publisher Location: Cambridge, MA

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Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Family and Marriage, Race and Ethnicity

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