Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2020 November 11

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November 11

What would have happened to a white/black person who would have openly expressed support for miscegenation in the Jim Crow South but without actually personally engaging in this practice?

What would have happened to a white person who would have openly expressed support for miscegenation (interracial sex) in the Jim Crow South but without actually personally engaging in this practice? What about to a black person in an equivalent position? Futurist110 (talk) 01:55, 11 November 2020 (UTC)

There's a whole book "The Freedom-of-Thought-Struggle in the Old South" by Clement Eaton (final revised edition 1964) which describes the narrowing of tolerated opinions as time went on during the pre-Civil-War period. The "Jim Crow South" can cover a lot of time (as early as 1876 and as late as 1965) and space, during which there were various oscillations between slight relaxation and increased severity... AnonMoos (talk) 03:19, 11 November 2020 (UTC)

P.S. You might be interested in Richard Mentor Johnson -- he managed to just barely be elected vice president in 1836, despite having a Black common-law wife, because she was dead by 1836, and their union had taken place in a kind of frontier context. Tolerance of this would have been less in following years and/or in more settled areas. AnonMoos (talk) 03:36, 11 November 2020 (UTC)

TBF, though, he lived in the antebellum South as opposed to in the Jim Crow South. In the antebellum South, race mixing might have covertly been more socially tolerated--and of course lynching was much less tolerated in the antebellum South (in comparison to the Jim Crow South) because black slaves (90% of the Southern US's black population until the American Civil War) were perceived as being valuable property in the antebellum South. Futurist110 (talk) 04:31, 11 November 2020 (UTC)

Where are you getting your statistics from? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 12:42, 11 November 2020 (UTC)

From here--though it's worth noting that this figure was actually slightly below 90%. I was rounding up here. Futurist110 (talk) 17:48, 11 November 2020 (UTC)