Africana Studies

On a wintry evening on February 1, 1843, a group of Boston’s African American citizens gathered in the vestry of the
African Baptist Church nestled in the heart of Boston’s black community on the north slope of Beacon Hill. The measure they were there to discuss was a resolution to repeal the 1705 Massachusetts ban on interracial marriage.  Led largely by white abolitionists, the group cautiously endorsed a campaign to lift the ban. Their somewhat reluctant support for this campaign acknowledged the complexity that the issue of interracial
marriage posed to African American communities. In contrast, during the early twentieth century, black Bostonians attended mass meetings at which they vigorously campaigned against the resurgence of antimiscegenation laws led by the Boston branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and William Monroe Trotter’s National Equal Rights League (NERL). This change is indicative of both the evolution of thinking about the issue of interracial marriage
and the dilemma that it had frequently represented for black Bostonians and their leaders.
Laws against interracial marriage were a national concern. In
both 1913 and 1915 the U.S. House of Representatives passed laws to prohibit interracial marriage in Washington DC; however, each died in Senate subcommittees. In 1915 a Georgia Congressman introduced an inflammatory bill to amend the U.S. Constitution to prohibit interracial marriage. These efforts in the U.S. Congress to ban interracial marriage reflected widespread movements at the state level.
The 1913 bill (HR 5948) would have prohibited the “intermarriage of whites with negroes or Mongolians” in the District of Columbia and made intermarriage a felony with penalties up to $500 and/or two years in prison. The bill passed “in less than five minutes” with almost no debate, by a vote of 92–12. However, it was referred to a Senate committee
and never reported out before the session expired. In 1915 an even more draconian bill was introduced (HR 1710). It increased penalties for intermarriage to $5,000 and/or five years in prison. The bill was first debated on January 11 and passed in the House of Representatives by a vote of 238–60. However, it too was referred to a Senate committee and never reported out. African Americans and their allies throughout the nation closely followed the passage of both bills and organized strong
opposition, particularly to the 1915 bill. Most likely, their protests were key to the bill’s defeat in the Senate. As several authors have pointed out: Although a symbolic victory [the 1913 and 1915 passage by the U.S. House of Representatives], a federal antimiscegenation policy was not produced. The District of Columbia would continue to be a haven for interracial couples from the South who wished to marry. Indeed, Richard and Mildred Loving, the interracial couple who would be at
the center of the Loving v. Virginia (1967) Supreme Court case that struck down state-level anti-miscegenation laws, were married in the District of Columbia in 1958. Although the bill to ban interracial marriage in Washington, DC, was successfully defeated, by 1920 thirty states had anti-miscegenation
laws on their books. (The term “miscegenation” was coined in 1863 and was derived from the Latin word miscere, meaning “to mix.”) As late as 1967, when the Supreme Court declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional in the aptly named Loving v. Virginia decision, sixteen states still enforced them.
This article examines the political struggle over the issue of interracial marriage and the dilemma it posed for the Boston branch of the NAACP, as well as the national organization. The NAACP and its Boston chapter constituted the principal opposition to these efforts. The author examines the struggle to defeat similar bills that would have criminalized intermarriage in Massachusetts in 1913 and a second attempt in 1927.
The author, Zebulon Vance Miletsky, is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and History at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Boston's long Civil Rights Movement in the twentieth century, before the infamous busing crisis, has not received nearly as much attention as the school desegregation period that was ushered in by Federal court order in 1974. While the story of Boston's busing crisis is well known, my goal is to place that moment within the context of a longer freedom struggle in Boston and highlight the city's history of racial inequality and segregation. By looking at both the nineteenth-century origins of legal discrimination in Boston and the activism during the four decades before the 1970s, I reconstruct these humble but effective efforts in which activists focused mainly on issues of employment, housing, educational equality, and quality of life. The goal of this essay, then, is to contextualize the busing conversation and reconstruct the political context in which black Bostonians embarked on various campaigns to reclaim the legacy of freedom and equality established earlier, in the nineteenth century. In that sense, I argue that Boston was not simply a " southern space " ensconced in the North, but rather was the original template for segregation in the nation, as cited in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). 1 The issues engaged by Boston's freedom movement, from de facto school segregation to employment discrimination, challenge many prevailing popular assumptions about postwar black freedom struggles in other cities. This article aims to investigate the origins of that movement and what gave rise to the unique nature of civil rights organizing activities in Boston before Busing.

The election of Barack Obama in 2008 as the 44th President of the United States, raised hopes for many that as a country we were entering a post-racial moment, that the twin legacies of oppression and slavery were overcome, not only in the United States, but the world. That same period, however, brought crises of authority caused by neo-liberalism, police violence, and mass incarceration that have consistently set back the very racial progress that Obama’s presidency seemed to inaugurate. Far from being post-racial, the Obama years were a period of constant racial crisis, the repercussions of which were felt daily since the killings of Eric Garner in New York and Michael Brown in Ferguson in the summer of 2014. It took the election of an African American to the nation’s highest office to uncover a level of racial hatred the likes of which we have not seen since the 1960s, requiring an analysis of the relationship between multiracialism and post-racialism, as well as how whiteness operates in the United States, to fully appreciate what has come to pass. The election of Donald Trump as President has been a clear rejection of the post-racial era ushered in by Obama. Much like our more recent experiment in racial democracy, there are parallels between what happened with the overthrow of Reconstruction, America’s startling experiment in biracial democracy after the Civil War and today. The historical roots of the “whitelash” that fueled Trump’s victory lie in a prior racial backlash to an unprecedented attempt to grant African Americans citizenship during the period of Reconstruction. Based on a book chapter-in-progress for a volume on the Black Intellectual Tradition in America, this presentation discusses how the 21st century could potentially mark a new low in American race relations—or a “new American dilemma”.

Before Busing will recover and reposition the “long history of the civil rights movement” in Boston, from the Antebellum period through the recent past, filling in a crucial gap in the current historiography of the black freedom movement.  While educational equality is a central theme running through the manuscript, the book will situate those efforts within a broader context of racial justice activism in the city that also targeted employment and housing discrimination, police brutality, access to public welfare benefits, social equality, cultural autonomy and more.  This research makes clear both the unique dynamics of African American activism in Boston, as well as the ways those protest politics fit within larger patterns of struggle across the urban North.  This new narrative will not only complicate the history of Boston, but also transform our understanding of racism in the U.S. beyond the Jim Crow South and the myriad ways black people and their allies have struggled against it.

CITY OF AMALGAMATION: RACE, MARRIAGE, CLASS AND COLOR IN BOSTON, 1890-1930 SEPTEMBER 2008 ZEBULON V. MILETSKY, B.A., BOSTON COLLEGE M.A., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor John H. Bracey, Jr. This dissertation examines the evolution of early race relations in Boston during a period which saw the extinguishing of the progressive abolitionist racial flame and the triumph of Jim Crow in Boston. I argue that this historical moment was a window in which Boston stood at a racial crossroads. The decision to follow the path of disfranchisement of African Americans and racial polarization paved the way for the race relations in Boston we know and recognize today. Documenting the high number of blacks and whites who married in Boston during these years in the face of virulent antimiscegenation efforts and the context of the intense political fight to keep interracial marriage legal, the dissertation explores the black respons...

Introduction: On July 16, 2008, the headline of a New York Times article trumpeted the proud accomplishment of the denouement of a longstanding era of discrimination in Massachusetts: "A 1913 Law Dies to Better Serve Gay Marriages."3 The so-called "1913 law" in question was the Uniform Marriage Act originally initiated by Massachusetts State Senator Harry Ney Stearns, a Harvard educated lawyer from Cambridge, on March 7, 1913. The law barred out-of-state residents from getting married in Massachusetts if their union was illegal in their home state. In 1913 interracial marriage was banned in thirty states.In 2006, Attorney General Thomas Reilly insisted that the original 1913 legislation had nothing to do with race. In his brief to the state supreme court, Reilly argued that by enforcing the law and using it to prohibit gay people who lived in other states from attempting to marry in Massachusetts, the Commonwealth was simply respecting other states that banned su...