“Unlawful Intimacy”: Mixed-Race Families, Miscegenation Law, and the Legal Culture of Progressive Era Mississippi

Abstract

This article examines the enforcement of anti-miscegenation law in Progressive Era Mississippi by focusing on a series of unlawful cohabitation prosecutions of interracial couples in Natchez. It situates efforts to police and punish mixed-race families within the broader legal culture of Jim Crow, as politicians, judges, and district attorneys sought stricter enforcement of morals laws, including those barring interracial cohabitation. This article argues that the historic prerogative of white men to choose their sexual and domestic partners undermined the illegality of interracial marriage. Lynching deterred Black men from cohabiting with white women, but prosecutions for “unlawful cohabitation” did not effectively punish white men and Black women who formed lasting partnerships. This article relies on extensive research in local court records that reveal that prosecutions of white men and Black women often resulted in fines and, in many cases, had little effect on these mixed-race families. In Natchez and elsewhere, eugenic ideologies of “white racial purity” were no match for a patriarchal legal culture that gave white men leeway to ignore the law when it suited them, even amid outward denunciations of miscegenation. In Mississippi, many white men did not view relationships between white men and Black women as a clear threat to white supremacy, creating space for some interracial families to survive into the twentieth century.