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

= 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)