Intersections of Marriage and Race

Exploring the relationship between race and marriage has long been a challenge for historians of the twentieth-century United States, not least because sources have often been difficult to uncover. Yet three compelling new books, Anastasia C. Curwood's Stormy Weather, Elizabeth M. Smith-Pryor's Property Rites, and Fay Botham's Almighty God Created the Races, demonstrate not only the flaws in this excuse—sources, while not always readily apparent, can be found—but also that there is much to be learned about gender roles, racial politics, intimate relationships, religion, and the law by thinking about the intersection of race and marriage. Each of these works individually uses race and marriage to ask very different historiographical questions: What has been lost by the failure of historians, especially those who study marriage, to investigate the personal lives of African Americans? What can an infamous trial involving the breakdown of a possibly interracial marriage tell us about race in the early twentieth-century urban North? What role did religion play in efforts to uphold—and to overturn—bans on interracial marriage in the United States? As a whole, the books serve as an essential reminder that marriage is a lens through which to illuminate new insights about race, and vice versa.

Of the three books, Stormy Weather is most explicitly "a history of marriage." Curwood examines not only the expectations that "New Negroes" (members of the African American middle class and those who aspired to middle-class status) in the interwar period had for their unions, but also the difficulties that these men and women faced in defining their roles as [End Page 232-] husbands and wives in the context of ongoing racial discrimination and the unprecedented economic troubles of the Great Depression. In doing so, she seeks to correct two important deficiencies in the existing literature. First, Curwood argues that only by exploring the "inner lives of African Americans" can they emerge as "multifaceted historical actors" (12). Too often, in her point of view, the academic literature reduces complicated—and surely imperfect—black men and women to "units of race" (140). Second, Curwood calls historians to task for failing to recognize that race influenced white marriages as unquestionably as it did African American ones. In making these critiques, she persuasively contends that race should not be absent from the study of marriage, but neither should it be considered the sole defining factor in an individual's personal life and intimate choices.

While Curwood acknowledges the challenges in finding primary sources with which to study African American marriage—especially among non-elites—Stormy Weather benefits from her discovery and use of a novel source base: letters exchanged during the tumultuous courtship and marriage of her paternal grandparents, James and Sarah Thomas Curwood. The book is not merely a chronicle of their union, although it is easy to see how an attempt to understand their difficulties influenced Curwood's direction and analysis. Instead, Stormy Weather seeks to use their marriage as a window into the relationships of a generation of African American couples in first half of the twentieth century.

In the first half of Stormy Weather, Curwood broadly examines the development of new marriage and gender role ideals among self-styled New Negroes, using a variety of sources including films, magazines, academic studies, and the personal papers of well-known (novelist Jean Toomer) and less well-known (lawyer Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander) men and women. African Americans in the...