Humanities desk
< November 10	<< Oct \| November \| Dec >>	November 12 >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Humanities Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is a transcluded archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

November 11[edit]

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?[edit]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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

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)[reply]