In the tumultuous decades after the Civil War, as the southern white elite reclaimed power, racial mixing was the central concern of segregationists who strove to maintain racial purity. Segregation and race itself was based on the idea that interracial sex posed a biological threat to the white race. In this groundbreaking study, Charles Robinson examines how white southerners enforced anti-miscegenation laws. His findings challenge conventional wisdom, documenting a pattern of selective prosecution under which interracial domestic relationships were punished even more harshly than...
In the tumultuous decades after the Civil War, as the southern white elite reclaimed power, racial mixing was the central concern of segregationist...
