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Interracial Marriages
FAITH LAPIDUS: Our listener question this week comes from Nigeria. David Odoviano wants to know about the history of interracial marriages in the United States, especially those between blacks and whites.
Marriages between people of different races were extremely rare in early American history. The first one on record took place in the state of Virginia in sixteen fourteen. A white tobacco farmer named John Rolfe married the famous Indian Pocahontas.
Interracial marriages were illegal in many states. Miscegenation laws made it a crime for people of different races to marry. The state of Maryland passed the first miscegenation law in the early sixteen sixties.
Charles Robinson is with the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. He is vice provost for diversity, director of African-American studies and a history professor. He has done extensive studies on interracial relationships and miscegenation laws.
Professor Robinson says the Maryland law carried a severe punishment for white women who married black slaves.
CHARLES ROBINSON: "It punished them by making them servants to the master of the slave man for the length of that man's life."
FAITH LAPIDUS: Professor Robinson says it is not clear when the first marriage between a black person and a white person took place. But he says it appears to have been sometime in the sixteen sixties.
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2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25