"They Call it Marriage," a transformation of my dissertation, asks why stories of interracial marriage between black women and white men manifested symbolic power in the nineteenth century. It examines how broader political and social struggles affected 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.
After the Civil War, Louisiana authorities repealed the interracial marriage prohibition and permitted retroactive legitimation of "private religious" marriages. They exposed a concealed past in which many had refused to submit to the law as authoritatively given. Some people laid claim to the language of legitimate matrimony in defiance of state law, demanding justice on their own terms and with a keen awareness of competing jurisdictions. In highlighting their perspective, I focus on law as a terrain of struggle rather than a fixed set of rules.
The use of interracial marriage laws dated back to Louisiana's 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 both outside the law and subjected to constant scrutiny, often went to great lengths to attain, preserve, and escape marriage to each other. Situating these struggles amidst questions over whether American society was to be organized along lines of status or contract, "They Call it Marriage" 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 state's borders. This manuscript traces the rhetoric of interracial genealogy and racial indeterminacy in antecedents of Plessy v. Ferguson. Louisiana authorities' ongoing invocation of racial fluidity complicates any efforts to locate the transition point at which Louisiana abandoned a fluid racial system, offering a means of reconsidering racial binarism in Jim Crow segregation.
