Racial Union: Law, Intimacy, and the White State in Alabama, 1865-1954

by Julie Lavonne Novkov

Overview

In November 2001, the state of Alabama opened a referendum on its long-standing constitutional prohibition against interracial marriage. A bill on the state ballot offered the opportunity to relegate the state's antimiscegenation law to the dustbin of history. The measure passed, but the margin was alarmingly slim: more than half a million voters, 40 percent of those who went to the polls, voted to retain a racist and constitutionally untenable law.

Julie Novkov's Racial Union explains how and why, nearly forty years after the height of the civil rights movement, Alabama struggled to repeal its prohibition against interracial marriage---the last state in the Union to do so. Novkov's compelling history of Alabama's battle over miscegenation shows how the fight shaped the meanings of race and state over ninety years. Novkov's work tells us much about the sometimes parallel, sometimes convergent evolution of our concepts of race and state in the nation as a whole.

"A remarkably nuanced account of interlocked struggles over race, gender, class and state power. Novkov's site is Alabama, but her insights are for all America."
---Rogers M. Smith, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania

"Hannah Arendt shocked Americans in the 1950s by suggesting that interracial intimacy was the true measure of a society's racial order. Julie Novkov's careful, illuminating, powerful book confirms Arendt's judgment. By ruling on who may be sexually linked with whom, Alabama's courts and legislators created a racial order and even a broad political order; Novkov shows us just how it worked in all of its painful, humiliating power."
---Jennifer L. Hochschild, Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government, Professor of African and African American Studies, and Harvard College Professor

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780472022878
Publisher:	University of Michigan Press
Publication date:	09/11/2009
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	368
File size:	430 KB

About the Author

Julie Novkov is Associate Professor of Political Science and Women's Studies at the University of Albany, SUNY. She is the author of Constituting Workers, Protecting Women: Gender, Law, and Labor in the Progressive Era and New Deal Years.

Table of Contents

\rrhp\ \lrrh: Contents\ \1h\ Contents \xt\ Chapter 1. The Criminal Ban on Miscegenation as a Contested Site Regulating Interracial Intimacy and Building the State: Ninety Years of Bounded Development Antebellum Regulation of Interracial Intimacy State-Level Political Development and the Construction of Identity Alabama as a Significant Site Regulating Interracial Intimacy and the Development of the Supremacist State Chapter 2. Creating a Constitutional Order: 1865---82 Political and Social Upheaval The Threat of Interracial Relationships Ellis v. State and the Initiation of the Struggle Burns v. State and the Interpretive Challenge Ford, Green, and Hoover: Chipping Away at Burns Pace and Cox v. State and Pace v. Alabama: Constituting the State The New Constitutional Order and the Cornerstones of White Supremacy Chapter 3. The Elements of Miscegenation and Its Threat to the Family: 1883---1917 Political Consolidation, the Constitution of 1901, and Supremacist Ideology Racial Mixing, White Supremacy, and Violence Evidentiary Considerations and the Elements of Miscegenation The Relationship between Interracial Intimacy and Adultery or Fornication Confessing Miscegenation Establishing Female and Male; Establishing Black and White Interracial Rape The Constitutionalization and Formalization of White Supremacy Chapter 4. Litigating Race: 1918---28 Democratic Hegemony in Alabama's Politics The Birth of a Nation and the Rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan The Triumph of Eugenics and the Threat of Racial Mixing Eugenics as an Opportunity for Black Defendants Metcalf and Rollins: Establishing Whiteness Reed and Wilson: The Debate Expands Weaver v. State and the Effort to Achieve Judicial Resolution The Statutory Redefinition of Race The Battle over Racial Definition: Resolving Heredity with Common Understandings Chapter 5. Consolidating and Embedding White Supremacy: 1928---40 Politics and Society in Alabama during the Depression Politics and Race in the Late 1920s and 1930s Alabama's National Scandals: Scottsboro and Hugo Black Jesse Williams and the Continued Struggle over Racial Definition Legitimately Proving the Sexual Act and the Intention behind It: Jackson, Fields, and Murphy Bailey and Rogers and the Question of Parallel Outcomes Depression-Era Evidentiary Refinements and the Rationalization of Prejudice Chapter 6. White Power and Public Policy in Testamentary Disputes: 1914---44 Earlier Doctrine Regarding Interracial Transfers of Wealth Background Legal Principles Governing Challenges to Wills Allen v. Scruggs: Providing for the Children Mathews v. Stroud: The Primacy of the Testator's Intentions Dees v. Metts: Does Public Policy Prohibit Interracial Inheritance? What about Black Property Owners? Legitimation and White Male Control over Property Chapter 7. Portraying the Static State: 1941---54 Politics and the Hesitant New Progressivism War and Its Implications Early Stirrings of the Civil Rights Movement Framing Relationships and Avoiding Racialized Debate: Jordan, Brewer, and Gilbert The Necessity of Proving Intercourse: Griffith Agnew and the Court's Final Word on the Problem of Prejudice and Racial Definition Constitutional Challenges Arise Again: Jackson and Rogers The State Courts' Final Words on Miscegenation Chapter 8. Race and the Legacy of the Supremacist State The Demise of Criminal Sanctions against Interracial Intimacy Alabama's Final Repudiation of the Formal Ban on Interracial Marriage The Ban on Interracial Intimacy and the Construction of Race and Gender The Ban on Interracial Intimacy and the Process of State Building The Law and Its Agents Afterword: The Analogy between Bans on Interracial Marriage and Same-Sex Marriage--A Usable Past? What Work Can the Analogy Do? Bibliography Index \to come\