Tell the Court I Love My Wife: Race, Marriage, and Law--An American History - Hardcover

Peter Wallenstein

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312294743 ISBN 13: 9780312294748

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002

Synopsis

The first in-depth history of miscegenation law in the United States, this book illustrates in vivid detail how states, communities, and the courts have defined and regulated mixed-race marriage from the colonial period to the present. Combining a storyteller's detail with a historian's analysis, Peter Wallenstein brings the sagas of Richard and Mildred Loving and countless other interracial couples before them to light in this harrowing history of how individual states had the power to regulate one of the most private aspects of life: marriage.

About this title

About the Author

Peter Wallenstein is Associate Professor of History at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. He is the author of From Slave South to New South and Virginia Tech, Land Grant University, 1872-1997.

Reviews

Wallenstein uses the 1967 Loving case, in which a Virginia couple challenged laws against interracial marriage, as a pivot point for examining racial definitions and relations in the U.S. By its ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court finally outlawed so-called antimiscegenation laws and amended the patchwork of laws stating who was black or white and what constituted interracial marriage. Wallenstein compellingly traces the legal intersection between race and sex from the pre-Civil War focus on liaisons between black men and white women to later concerns about the inheritance implications of white former masters acknowledging their children born of slave women. He also examines the social intricacies affecting the evolution of the legal meaning of black. Because laws varied from state to state--and even within a state--couples such as the Lovings found themselves living in a legal limbo. But Wallenstein also appropriately explores the changes in social attitudes that saw racial definitions move from fluid to rigid and to the current state of increasing racial and ethnic diversity that defies easy definition. Vernon Ford
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Edition details

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0312294743
• ISBN 13: 9780312294748
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320