Confederate "Heritage" Month 2022, April 4: Ugly historical echoes in the history of US segregation laws

The editors of the journal Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History back in 2015 did a special issue featuring a forum on “The Ukrainian Crisis and History” (16:1 Winter 2015). The editors’ introduction opens with a reflection on how people look to history to understand the crises of the present:

Most historians are probably drawn to their craft not only by an innate curiosity for “tales of bygone years,” but also because they intuitively sense that the past is always with us. Ordinary people are drawn to history for the same reason. Just as prior events and processes objectively shape the world in which we live, so too people look to the past to make sense of the present and to find inspiration for forging their future. In times of crisis, recourse to the past may prove especially compelling, as it generates a narrative structure in which people may situate, and thus interpret, otherwise bewildering events.

As I mentioned in the April 1 post in this series, the Ukraine crisis gives us a current reminder about how history and perceptions of history play a role in contemporary politics.

There are no exact parallels to current events in history. This may be a surprise to foreign policy commentators who endlessly invoke the Munich Analogy whenever war is in the news.

But just as individuals need to learn from the own experiences and adapt those lessons to current situations, nations and national leaders do the same. Some better than others.

Historians have documented how the infamous Nazi race laws were in significant part modeled on racial segregation laws in the United States, especially in the former Confederate states. The Nazis, of course, took their racism and racialized anti-Semitism to a level of horror the American segregations never achieved.

But, as Stetson Kennedy's1946 book Southern Exposure shows, the kinship of US race laws and the Nazi race laws were there to see. Kennedy argued:

lt has been generally supposed that Nazi Germany sank lower than any other nation in giving official sanction to the Myth of the Master Race, but in reality the myth enjoys its greatest legal status in the United States of America. While the Nazis adopted all manner of legal restrictions against the economic, political, and civil rights of Jews (more or less rigorous than the South's restrictions on Negroes), they did not go so far as to prohibit intermarriage between Nordic Germ ans and Jews. On the other hand, thirty states of the United States ( including all Southern states) have statutes which provide that "All marriages between white persons and persons of Negro dcscent are forever prohibited and shall be void always." As an added precaution, Arkansas proceeds to state that concubinage between whites and Negroes is likewise verboten. Florida, displaying a nice regard for the double standard, provides a $ 1,000 fine and three months' imprisonment for any white woman who has sexual intercourse with a Negro man, but makes no reference to such relations between white men and Negro women.

These statutes are embellished with many a frill and enforcement provision. Mississippi and Virginia provide that no whites and Negroes who intermarry outside the state can return. Georgia and Virginia require that marriage licenses state the persons' race and the race of their ancestors. North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia make it a misdemeanor for anyone to issue a marriage license to a white-Negro couple; penalties range from fines of not less than $500 to imprisonment up to ten years.

To keep a double check on interracial marriage, Arkansas and Mississippi require that the persons' race be specified on bills of divorce. Georgia provides that the parents of children whose birth certificate shows mixed blood be prosecuted; officers failing to prosecute may be impeached. Maryland says that any white woman who has a child by a Negro or mulatto shall be punished. In Georgia, to accuse a white woman of having had sexual intercourse with a Negro is slander per se. [my emphasis in bold]

It would be nice to think that a least this particular type of racial bigotry and callous cruelty is dead and buried forever in the United States. But there are still people who take inspiration from that ugly part of the history of US white supremacist racial laws.

Philip Hirschkop is the attorney that represented Mildred and Richard Loving in the case of Loving v. Virginia in which the Supreme Court ruled in 1967 that laws banning interracial marriage were unconstitutional. He is now warning that trends in US law are at least in part turning against the legal logic of Loving: 54 Years After Loving: Is Interracial Marriage a SCOTUS Issue Again? Bloomberg Law 01/04/2022.