Crossing Two Color Lines: Interracial Marriage and Residential Segregation in Chicago

• Author: Dorothy E. Roberts
• Position: George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology, Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights, Professor of Africana Studies, University of Pennsylvania. This article is based on the 37th Annual John E. Sullivan Lecture at Capital University Law School. I presented earlier drafts at workshops at the ...
• Pages: 1-32

CROSSING TWO COLOR LINES:

INTERRACIAL MARRIAGE AND RESIDENTIAL

SEGREGATION IN CHICAGO

DOROTHY E. ROBERTS∗

I.!INTRODUCTION

In the opening of Brush Back, th e latest novel by best-selling author

Sara Paretsky, V.I. Warshawski returns to Rainbow Beach, in the Chicago

neighborhood where she grew up.1 There she sees a couple of women in

deep conversation—one, an African-American with a short Afro; the other,

a gray-haired white woman.2 “A mixed-race du o would have been

assaulted in my childhood,” she remarks.3 In fact, Rainbow Beach was the

site where a white man killed a black teenager in July 1919 for crossing

Chicago’s infamous “color line” by swimming into white-only waters,

touching off one of the most deadly race riots in the nation’s history.4 As

Warshawski’s comment suggests, residential segregation in Chicago was

violently enforced and tightly linked to an unwritten rule against interracial

mixing.

This article explores the interplay of interracial marriage, residential

segregation, and racial inequality in Chicago in the decades building up to

the civil rights revolutio n of the 1960s. At the time, blacks in the South

lived under an oppressive Jim Crow regime of official racial separation,

including statutes that prohibited interracial marriage.5 Chicago had no

anti-miscegenation law, the Illinois ban having been repealed after the

Copyright © 2016, Dorothy E. Roberts.

* George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology, Raymond Pace and

Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights, Professor of Africana Studies,

University of Pennsylvania. This article is based on the 37th Annual John E. Sullivan

Lecture at Capital University Law School. I presented earlier drafts at workshops at the

Columbia Critical Race Theory Workshop, Penn Law School, Russell Sage Foundation,

Tulane School of Law, UC-San Diego Department of Sociology, University of Cincinnati

Department of Sociology, and University of Florida Levin College of Law, and am grateful

to the participants for their comments. I also thank Sarah Adeyinka-Skold, Sonita Moss,

Dawn Androphy, Jordan King, and Samantha Ramin for excellent research assistance and

the American Council of Learned Societies for fellowship support.

1 SARA PARETSKY, BRUSH BACK 15 (2015).

2 Id. at 16.

3 Id.

4 Ken Armstrong, The 1919 Race Riots, CHI. TRIB., http://www.chicagotribune.com/

news/nationworld/politics/chi-chicagodays-raceriots-story-story.html

[https://perma.cc/L3C7-APCH].

5 See infra note 27 and accompanying text.

2 CAPITAL UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW [45:1

Civil War.6 Yet, despite the absence of de jure segregation, residential

segregation dramatically affected the lives of interracial couples. Black-

white couples crossed two color lines that separated the races in terms of

both where they could live and whom they could marry.7

Residential segregation was essential to maintaining the racial order in

Chicago in a way that paralleled bans on interracial marriage in the South.

Separating blacks and whites geographically served as a powerful way to

maintain white supremacy and racial purity in Chicago despite the legality

of mixed race unions. Segregated neighborhoods both deterred interracial

relationships in the first place and penalized people who dared to breach

the taboo against them.8 Forcing blacks and whites to live apart constricted

their opportunities to get to know each other intimately. Once married,

residential segregation drastically limited where black-white couples could

find housing.9 The geographic and social boundaries imposed by

residential segregation also hampered the potential for the interracial

marriages that did occur to have an impact on the racial order in Chicago.

Some scholars have interpreted interracial marriage as a symbol and

means of overcoming racial hierarchies.10 But my findings on interracial

couples’ encounters with residential segregation demonstrate that the legal

ability to marry across race operates within, rather than transcends, the

racial order. Interracial u nions were governed by Chicago’s white

supremacist racial regime—the color line—enforced by residential

segregation.11 Thus, rather than challenging a separate type of

discrimination against mixed couples because of their “interraciality” or

advocating interracial marriage itself as a means of racial progress,

integration, and upward mobility, I focus on contesting institutionalized

racism—like the residential segregation th at subordinated all black people

in Chicago.

Part II provides background to my argument by discussing its

methodological and theoretical framework.12 I describe the archive of

interviews of black-white couples in Chicago I rely on for empirical

evidence of the relationship between residential segregation and interracial

marriage.13 I also describe the political ro le state statutes banning

6 See infra note 34 and accompanying text.

7 See infra notes 199–203 and accompanying text.

8 See infra notes 230–231 and accompanying text.

9 See infra note 197 and accompanying text.

10 See, e.g., RANDALL KENNEDY, INTERRACIAL INTIMACIES 37 (2003); RICHARD BANKS,

IS MARRIAGE FOR WHITE PEOPLE? 10 (2011).

11 See infra Section IV.B.

12 See infra Part II.

13 See infra Section II.A.

2017] CROSSING TWO COLOR LINES 3

interracial marriage p layed in maintaining white supremacy in the United

States.14 Part III gives an account of the history of residential segregation

in Chicago in the decades between 1930 and 1960 and highlights four key

means of enforcing the city’s color line during this period: white terror,

racially restrictive covenants, federal housing policy, and white flight.15

In Part IV, I connect the two color lines—residential segregation and

anti-miscegenation.16 I first describe the impact racially segregated

neighborhoods had on black-white couples in Chicago.17 I then turn to the

theoretical implications of the relationship between residential segregation

and interracial marriage.18 I argue that residential segregation and anti-

miscegenation were intertwined means of maintaining an unequal racial

order, challenging both sociological theories about immigrant assimilation

and upward mobility and legal theories about the significance of interracial

marriage for racial equality.19 Black-white couples in Chicago were bound

by the city’s residential color line; their mixed marriages were unable to

transcend it.20 Only addressing institutionalized racism, I conclude, will

lead to the radical transformation of personal relationships required for

Americans to relate to each other as equal human beings.21

II.!BACKGROUND

A.!My Archive and Book Project

This article is part of a book project that draws on an extraordinary

archive of in-depth interviews of approximately 500 interracial couples

conducted by Robert E .T. Roberts, a white anthropology professor at

Roosevelt University in downtown Chicago, over the course of five

decades.22 He began in 1937 as a 22-year-old master’s student at the

University of Chicago, recording the life histories of interracial couples

14 See infra Section II.B.

15 See infra Part III.

16 See infra Part IV.

17 See infra Section IV.A.

18 See infra Section IV.B.

19 See id.

20 See id.

21 See infra Part V.

22 Robert E.T. Roberts, 86, CHI. TRIB. (Jan. 23, 2002), http://

articles.chicagotribune.com/2002-01-23/news/0201230382_1_interracial-anthropology-mr-

roberts [https://perma.cc/4ECT-PQD8]; Robert Roberts Named to Roosevelt Faculty, CHI.

TRIB. 218 (Sept. 18, 1949), http://archives.chicagotribune.com/1949/09/18/page/218/article/

robert-roberts-named-to-roosevelt-faculty [https://perma.cc/ERR2-ZAHG].