Progressive Fictions and the Sexing of Jim Crow

This paper focuses on a paradox: interracial marriage between black women and white men was a highly provocative rhetorical device in the context of debates over black emancipation and citizenship, but once legalized in the late 1860s, it rarely elicited significant public attention. While some couples took advantage of the change in the law to formalize their unions, many remained closeted. Indeed many white men continued to extort extramarital sex from the black women they now employed as free laborers.

To fill in the silences in this period, I turn to a cluster of late nineteenth century novels--many authored by white women from the Gulf South--that transformed the conventions of interracial literature.  Instead of concerning themselves with the familiar plight of the tragic enslaved mulatta, these female writers brought new urgency to the genre--and to the regulation of interracial sex in the Age of Jim Crow--by focusing on the threat she posed as a freedwoman to the purity of white womanhood and families.  By using these texts to flesh out the private dimensions of the “regulator movement” of the late 1880s, I underscore gradual shifts in public opinion that led the Louisiana legislature to reinstate the miscegenation ban in 1894.