Mixed Race Studies

“They Call It Marriage”: the Louisiana Interracial Family and the Making of American Legitimacy

Book Manuscript In Progress

Diana Irene Williams, Assistant Professor of History, Law and Gender Studies
University of Southern California

Winner of the 2008 William Nelson Cromwell Dissertation Prize in Legal History.

“They Call it Marriage” examines interracial marriage between black women and white men in nineteenth-century Louisiana. It explores how broad political and social struggles affected the ways white men and black women related to each other. And it considers why mid-nineteenth-century 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After the Civil War, Louisiana authorities repealed the interracial marriage prohibition and permitted retroactive legitimation of “private religious” marriages. In doing so, they exposed an obscure 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 regional, religious, and civil jurisdictions. In highlighting the perspective of those outside the legal profession, I focus on law as a terrain of struggle rather than a fixed set of rules.

The use of interracial marriage laws to regulate the inheritance of both property and social status dated back to Louisiana’s earliest French colonial government. Mandating that mixed-race children inherit the status of their (black) mother only, these regulations 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…

…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’ persistence in invoking racial fluidity well into the 1890s complicates historians’ efforts to locate a transition point at which the region exchanged a fluid Latin racial system for a strictly binary American one. In this regard, “They Call it Marriage” explores the gendered history of private life in order to offer a means of reconsidering the nature of Jim Crow segregation.

Chapters

1. Licensing Marriage in Early Louisiana
2. “Religion Law” vs. Civil Law
3. Quadroon Balls, Plaçage, and Consensus Narratives
4. Concubinage and Legal Narratives
5. Forced Heirs and Family Drama
6. Interracial Marriage and the Law in Post-emancipation Louisiana
7. “Bastards Begat by their Masters”

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