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Carrie Chapman Catt: Suffrage and the Politics of Race

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By Crystal Brandenburgh

This summer marks the 100th anniversary of American women gaining the constitutional right to vote through the 19th Amendment. The upcoming centennial has sparked a flurry of new scholarship, including a reckoning over the often racist tactics of White suffragists, the exclusion of diverse voices from the suffrage movement, and the disfranchisement of Southern Black women, Native American women, and Asian immigrant women until later in the twentieth century. On my campus, this reckoning began 25 years ago and has not yet stopped. In 1995, Iowa State University renamed Old Botany Hall after Carrie Chapman Catt, a prominent suffrage leader and ISU alumna. Protests erupted because the demonstrators believed Catt had embraced racism in the suffrage movement. [1]

As an ISU History major, I decided to examine both Catt and the criticism, a decision that turned into a three-year investigation of Progressive Era race and gender politics. I found that criticism of Catt concentrated on two main charges: she used a racist argument to sway White Southerners to support suffrage, and she failed to stop the disfranchisement of Southern Black women after the ratification of the 19th Amendment. These charges, both containing a grain of truth, require context and nuance to be understood.

Carrie Chapman Catt was born on 9 January 1859 and grew up in a typical Iowa farm family. She graduated from Iowa Agricultural College, now ISU, in 1880. [2] After the death of her first husband, Catt became active in the Iowa suffrage movement. She quickly climbed the ranks through her talent for organizing. By the 1890s, she was one of Susan B. Anthony’s protégés and in 1900 she became Anthony’s successor as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. After five years of dedicated service, Catt resigned the presidency to care for her ill husband. [3] Catt was called back to the presidency in 1915, at a time of enormous stakes for the suffrage cause. [4]

In no region was suffrage more of an uncertainty than the South. White Southerners were consumed with a fear—inflamed by anti-suffragists—that woman suffrage would upset their racial hierarchy and end white supremacy. [5] Suffragists had to acknowledge this fear through a tactic known as the statistical argument which was first iterated by Henry Blackwell, famed suffragist and abolitionist, in his 1867 essay, “What the South Can Do.” He argued that White women so outnumbered African Americans in the South that white supremacy would be unaltered by the passage of woman suffrage. [6] It must be noted that, across the South, White people outnumbered African Americans, but this was not the case in Mississippi and South Carolina. [7] Additionally, this argument quickly became common practice among White suffrage leaders and it inherently perpetuated white supremacy. 

In her 1917 book, Woman Suffrage by Federal Constitutional Amendment, Catt listed seven objections commonly used by anti-suffragists. Then she refuted the objections one by one. To quell White Southerners’ fears, Catt repeated Blackwell’s statistical argument, writing, “White supremacy will be strengthened, not weakened, by woman suffrage….Woman suffrage in the South would so vastly increase the white vote that it would guarantee white supremacy if it otherwise stood in danger of overthrow.” [8] Catt then concluded, “Ridiculous as this list of objections may appear, each is supported earnestly by a considerable group, and collectively they furnish the basis of opposition to woman suffrage in and out of Congress.” [9] Thus even though she found the argument “ridiculous,” Catt had to address the racist fears of White Southerners, because their support was critical for woman suffrage to be enshrined in the Constitution. In fact, only three Southern states ratified the 19th Amendment: Texas, Arkansas, and Tennessee; and Tennessee, the last state to ratify, did so by a one-vote margin. [10] While the Blackwell argument was one of inherent racism, it was also the tool Catt used to tip the balance in the South in order to enfranchise half the nation. 

After Catt’s extraordinary constitutional victory, at which White Southern opponents of suffrage immediately began to chip away, she handed the reins over to the newly-formed League of Women Voters and turned her attention to the fight for world peace. Catt had suffered the horrors of World War I alongside her friends in the transatlantic suffrage network and felt called to ensure it would never happen again. Thus, she told the younger generation of women activists, 

“For thirty years and a little more, I have worked with you in the first lap of this struggle toward woman’s emancipation. I cannot lead or follow in the next lap. I do not wish to advise where I cannot follow. Younger and fresher women must do that work, and because I cannot advise and cannot follow, I only point to the fact that the battle is there, and that I hope you are not going to be such quitters as to stay on the outside and let all the reactionaries have their way on the inside.” [11]

For Catt, age 61, the battle was done. She expected the League, her brainchild, to carry on where she had left off. But, as we know, the LWV ultimately refused to combat White Southerners’ relentless, successful, and long-lasting campaign of disfranchisement of Black women.

Carrie Chapman Catt died on 9 March 1947. [12] She repeated a racist argument to convince Southern Whites in the last years of the campaign, and then left American suffrage work after her electoral triumph. Though her rhetoric on race was shaped by the high-stakes politics of the suffrage movement, the documentary evidence proves that she became braver about asserting her own, more enlightened views after resigning the NAWSA presidency. She investigated and exposed racist rumors of Black military misconduct in Germany in 1921, protested against a Washington, D.C. hotel’s segregation policies in 1925, suggested returning land to people of color worldwide, and fiercely advocated for the publication of African American suffrage leader Mary Church Terrell’s memoir. [13] ISU’s Catt Hall stands as a reminder that progress in this country has been uneven and exclusionary, but it is still progress. As Catt herself stated in 1917, in her ideal world every woman could exercise democracy’s most powerful tool: the vote. [14]

Crystal Brandenburgh is a senior History major with a minor in Political Science at Iowa State University. Crystal plans to attend graduate school in the fall, pursuing a PhD in History. Her research focuses on Progressive Era Women in Politics.

Notes

[1]  “Catt: Figure of Controversy,” Off Our Backs, Vol. 26, No. 10 (November 1996): 5; “Suffragette’s Racial Remark Haunts College,” New York Times, 5 May 1996, 30.

[2]  Jacqueline Van Voris, Carrie Chapman Catt: A Public Life (New York City: The Feminist Press, 1987), 4-5.

[3] Van Voris, Carrie Chapman Catt, 64-65, 72, 79-80.

[4] Noun, “1872-1920: Carrie Chapman Catt,” 312-313.

[5] Aileen S. Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890-1920 (New York City: Columbia University Press, 1965), 165-168.

[6]  Henry Blackwell, “What the South Can Do,” Leaflet, New York, 15 January 1867.

[7]  U.S. Census, 1870: The Statistics of the Population of the United States, Washington: Government Printing Office, 1872; Fourteenth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1920: Volume III, Population, Washington: Government Printing Office, 1922. 

[8]  Carrie Chapman Catt, Woman Suffrage by Federal Constitutional Amendment (New York City: National Woman Suffrage Publishing Co., 1917), 91, 93-94.

[9] Catt, Woman Suffrage by Federal Constitutional Amendment, 91, 93-94, 131.

[10] Louise R. Noun, Strong-Minded Women: The Emergence of the Woman-Suffrage Movement in Iowa (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1969), 321; Wheeler, New Women of the New South, 35; Elaine Weiss, The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote, (London: Penguin Books, 2018), 305-310.

[11]  Carrie Chapman Catt, “Political Parties and Women Voters (On the Inside),” 14 February 1920, in The Woman Citizen, Vol. 4, No. 32 (March 6, 1920), 947-948.

[12] Van Voris, Carrie Chapman Catt, 218.

[13]  Carrie Chapman Catt, “The Truth About the Black Troops on the Rhine,” Woman Citizen, Vol. V, No. 40, 5 March 1921, 1038; Carrie Chapman Catt, “Report of the First Conference on the Cause and Cure of War,” 18-24 January 1925, 151; Catt to Arrangements Committee, Nov. 11, 1924, Box 5, Josephine Schain Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College; Catt, “Report of the First Conference on the Cause and Cure of War,” 18-24 January 1925, 150; Carrie Chapman Catt to Mary Church Terrell, March 2, 1939, Correspondence, -1954; 1939, Jan.-Mar,  Mary Church Terrell Papers, Digital Collection, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress; Catt to Terrell, October 14, 1940, Mary Church Terrell Papers, Library of Congress; Catt to Terrell, October 30, 1940, Mary Church Terrell Papers, Library of Congress.[14]   Carrie Chapman Catt, “Votes for All,” The Crisis, November 1917, 19-21.

Black Lives Matter

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On Thursday, in response to the results of the presidential election, SLC raised this banner proclaiming “Black Lives Matter” on the front of the Performing Arts Center. Students, faculty, and staff gathered outside to bear witness, to listen, and to speak their response to the monumental decision to elect Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency.

Did you attend this gathering? Do you have a response as an SLC alum? Help us put on record the history of our community here at SLC by sharing your experience. Thank you.

 

img_0185COMMENT POLICY: We at RE/VISIONIST aim to be a forum for dialogue, debate, and a genuine exchange of ideas. That said, we support the maintaining of a safer space for a discussion free of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and other oppressions. We do not tolerate comments that ascribe to any of the discriminatory language or ideas that fall under this umbrella.

Book Review: Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915-1940 (2001) By Mary Renda

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Book Review by Hank Broege

“The American Africa”

In the land of sloth and vice
Where they never heard of ice
Where the donkeys and women work all day
Where the land is full of ants
And the men don’t wear their pants
It is here the soldier sings his evening lay.
Underneath the boiling sun
Let them have their Benet gun
And return us to our beloved homes.[1]

This song, constructed and sung by U.S. Marines during their nineteen-year occupation of Haiti, bears a striking resemblance to The Royal Canadian Kilted Yaksmen Anthem, but unlike the Yaksmen described in the anthem, Haiti is real, yet seldom depicted as such, and thus more often depicted as an exotic African fantasy held within a predominantly white U.S. imagination. Due to the significance of Haiti’s Orientalization by U.S. discourse, I decided to title this book review of Taking Haiti after what the evangelical missionary Wilhelm Jordan described as an “American Africa.'”[2]
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Taking Haiti: Military Occupation & the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915-1940, by Mary Renda, is a colorful and engaging work of historical scholarship comprised of hundreds of sources that Renda uses to articulate the U.S. discourse of Haiti in journals, letters, pulp fiction novels, theatre, and tourism. She discusses the discourse coming from the U.S. government, especially the Wilson Administration, who commissioned the invasion of Haiti in 1915. Renda even discussed a few of the most prominent writers of the 20th century, including Eugene O’Neill, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston and how they depicted Haiti in their literature. However, the primary focus of analysis for Renda are the U.S. Marines, whom Renda sees as an essential vehicle for U.S. discourse on racism, exoticism, gender, sexuality, phycology, imperialism and most importantly, paternalism, which is used so frequently as a framework for examining political and social relations that it at times teeters on the brink of repetitiveness.

It’s difficult to quibble even in that regard, however, because the paternalist framework existed so firmly on several levels. Woodrow Wilson, as president of the U.S., viewed Haitians as rotten little boy in need of severe punishment.[3] Major general Smedley Butler, AKA “The Fighting Quaker,” who headed the Haitian gendarmerie, who he referred to as his “little chocolate soldiers.” Coincidentally, Butler had three little children of his own whom he viewed in a similar light to his “little fellows” on Haiti: Smedley Jr., Tom Dick, and a daughter nicknamed “Snooks.”[4] The Marines themselves of course viewed the Haitians as children, including Faustin Wirkus, who saw himself and other Marines as “trustees of a huge estate that belonged to minors.”[5]

Nevertheless, this would not prevent Marines from indiscriminately killing Haitians who they suspected of being Caco rebels, overseeing Haitians being literally worked to death on cotton plantations, and the rape and killing of nine prepubescent girls in one night.[6] Since they were white Marines in Haiti, any wrongdoing would be attributed to their circumstances and not to their actions, so they were all let off the hook. At worst, they would be sent back to a mental hospital in the U.S., like sergeant Ivan Virski was after his drunken shooting rampage. According to Renda, this behavior stemmed from exposure to a range of discourse on race, gender, and nation before they even landed on Haiti.

While some Marines were born in the U.S., some were immigrants, nor were all the Marines criminals. Nevertheless, nearly all of the Marines shared a sense of racial nationalism and superiority, which was yet another paternalist framework. Furthermore, the marines also had a shared ignorance for Haiti’s history; a history that up until the 1930s, thanks to the promotional work of black pride, black nationalist, and far left organizations, as well as literature published by Arna Bontemps and Langston Hughes, had been deliberately omitted by U.S., French, and other Western discourse.

While aboard their ships to Haiti, the only literature on Haiti the Marines could get their hands on was on voodoo, and how Haitians used that to poison their enemies. [7] They even tested what they had learned on the subject by making a Haitian drink an entire bucket of water, and then waited for him to die, which he did not.[8] Therefore, prior to the U.S. occupation of Haiti, the Marines did not read about the thirteen-year Haitian Revolution that concluded in 1804 with the expulsion of French colonialists, and the establishment of the second independent republic in the western hemisphere. They did not read about how American merchants supported the Haitian, which Thomas Jefferson approved of, but could not recognize the Republic of Haiti because of the institution of slavery in the Southern U.S., and the U.S. relationship with France. The Republic of Haiti would not be recognized until the U.S. Civil War was underway. They also did not read about the thousands African Americans who immigrated to Haiti in the 1920s to escape racism and enslavement. Lastly, they did not read about the enormous debt that the French saddled Haiti with for ‘stealing’ their colony, which Haiti could not seem to recover from, especially after the U.S. took control of Haiti’s national bank and its debt in 1910, and then invaded five years later, swiftly dismantling Haiti’s political system (which has yet to be restored), and installed a puppet political system to serve U.S. imperial and neocolonial interests.

 

[1] Mary Renda, Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001) 233.

[2] Ibid, 303.

[3] Ibid, 100.

[4] Ibid, 102.

[5] Ibid, 13.

[6] Ibid, 163.

[7] Ibid, 71.

[8] Ibid, 79.

Weekly Feminist Smorgasbord: Indigenous People’s Resistance Day

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http://www.racialicious.com/2011/10/11/decolonization-and-occupy-wall-street/

  • I did not celebrate “Columbus Day” on Monday; did you? Let’s leave it to Howard Zinn to say it straight:

To emphasize the heroism of Columbus and his successors as navigators and discoverers, and to de-emphasize their genocide, is not a technical necessity but an ideological choice. It serves- unwittingly-to justify what was done. My point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse, judge, condemn Columbus in absentia. It is too late for that; it would be a useless scholarly exercise in morality. But the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress (Hiroshima and Vietnam, to save Western civilization; Kronstadt and Hungary, to save socialism; nuclear proliferation, to save us all)-that is still with us. One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth. We have learned to give them exactly the same proportion of attention that teachers and writers often give them in the most respectable of classrooms and textbooks. This learned sense of moral proportion, coming from the apparent objectivity of the scholar, is accepted more easily than when it comes from politicians at press conferences. It is therefore more deadly.

All too often industries, sports teams and ignorant individuals legitimize racism under the guise of cultural “appreciation”. There is nothing honorable or historically appreciative in selling items such as the Navajo Print Fabric Wrapped Flask, Peace Treaty Feather Necklace, Staring at Stars Skull Native Headdress T-shirt or the Navajo Hipster Panty. These and the dozens of other tacky products you are currently selling referencing Native America make a mockery of our identity and unique cultures.

  • The Nobel Peace Prize of 2011 has been awarded to three amazing champions of women’s rights: Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Leymah Gbowee, both of Liberia; and Tawakkul Karman, of Yemen. Read about them and their work here.

Miscegenation: A Law Review

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Until the Supreme Court’s 1967 decision in Loving v. Virginia, interracial marriage was legally banned in a few states in this country.  Although we may look back and say to ourselves how can that be? That was so recent! the changes in legal thinking that made eradicating all miscegenation laws from the books were actually quite remarkable.  Rather, it was not so much that the legal arguments changed, it’s that the opinions of the Justices in charge of making the decisions changed, and luckily for the better. On the brink of the Court’s landmark Loving decision, two law professors wrote companion pieces of sorts, which were published in the Virginia Law Review.  Alfred Avins’ “Anti-Miscegenation Laws and the Fourteenth Amendment: The Original Intent” takes a strong stand in defense of banning marriage between the races, while Walter Wadlington’s “The Loving Case: Virginia’s Anti-Miscegenation Statute in Historical Perspective” argues that anti-miscegenation laws violate the Constitution and should be struck down.

An issue found in both articles is the lack of attention given to black female agency, in the sense of a black woman’s autonomy over her own fate, particularly as it comes to marital choices.  This is an aspect of analysis that is largely ignored by the authors, who choose instead to write about the laws from the perspective of the white male.  This may stem from a number of factors—including the professions of the authors (lawyers), the drafters of the laws (white men) and a general lack of case law brought to the courts by black women.  These constraints should not automatically yield an assumption that female agency may be ignored, however.   Unfortunately, the professors do not approach the issue of miscegenation law from the position to view it as an inability for a black woman to maintain a certain status in her life.  Rather, they approach it from the male dominated stance, which, while not necessarily lessening the importance of the analysis, does limit it in some respects. 

Alfred Avins, “Anti-Miscegenation Laws and the Fourteenth Amendment: The Original Intent”

One of the best parts about being a student of history is stumbling across that one document that really makes the reader stop, sometimes gape, and really say “huh.” [The one piece that unlocks not only the writer’s personal beliefs, but also the sentiments of the era.]  That, for this reader, was Professor Alfred Avins’ “Anti-Miscegenation Laws and the Fourteenth Amendment: The Original Intent,” which was published in the Virginia Law Review in 1966.[1]  Not only does the article offer incredible insights, albeit one-sided, into the Congressional debates over miscegenation law during Reconstruction and the ratification of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution—but it also serves as an invaluable insight into the legal world during the 1960s at a time when conservatives were doing everything they could to preserve the racism that was so prevalent in the South. This racism was ultimately eliminated, at least as far as marriage was concerned, only one year later with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Loving v. Virginia.[2]  In many respects, the article serves as both a primary and secondary source, making it a true gem among the scholarship about miscegenation law.

The article itself was written and published while Loving v. Virginia was making its way up to the Supreme Court.  On July 29, 1966 lawyers for the Loving’s had submitted an appeal to the Supreme Court asking for the Court’s intervention on a Constitutional question.  Professor Avins’ article was published in the November 1966 issue of the Virginia Law Review, and the state of Virginia filed its response briefs with the Supreme Court on November 18, 1966.  The Court announced that it would hear the case on December 12, 1966 and oral arguments were scheduled for April 10, 1967.  Given these factual circumstances, it is no wonder that Professor Avins, a law professor at Memphis State University, used such strong language in the opening paragraph as “it requires no special perspicacity to see that anti-miscegenation laws are in jeopardy.”[3]  Right from the start Avins makes it clear that the article, published in the very state whose anti-miscegenation law was coming under attack, was a vehement defense of the states’ right “to draw distinctions between the races.”[4]  Despite the fact that it is nearly impossible for Avins to have researched and written the entire article in the amount of time it took for the Lovings’ case to get from the Circuit Court of Appeals to the Supreme Court, it is clear that there was enough discussion surrounding the Lovings’ case that Avins article, while not necessarily a direct attack on the Lovings’ case, was in many ways a response to the potential change in the legal and political environments.

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967) was groundbreaking for its representation of interracial marriage

Avins’ main argument is that the Fourteenth Amendment was never meant to cover marriage between the races.  After chiding the Supreme Court for overstepping its boundaries and noting that the Court should not have the final say on the scope of a Constitutional provision, he turns to the intent of the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment, arguing that “once the original understanding and intent of the framers is ascertained” any further questions about the scope of the Amendment should be laid to rest.[5] Avins looks to transcripts from the Congressional debates over the Reconstruction amendments in order to reach his conclusion about the true scope of the Fourteenth Amendment.  He also notes that “present day attacks on these laws involved no new constitutional principle, and it cannot be said that they involve any questions to which the framers did not in fact address themselves in 1866.”[6]  If that’s not a blatant criticism of the Lovings’ case and potential threats to miscegenation law, what is?

In order to make his case, Avins uses block quotes from many of the Senators and Congressmen who were debating just how many rights to extend to the newly freed slaves after the conclusion of the Civil War.  These quotations themselves are invaluable, particularly as they pertain to female agency, to the study of U.S. miscegenation law as a whole.  Avins argues that miscegenation was only even considered because it was a rhetorical tool used to try to stir up trouble around the proposed extensions of rights to the African-Americans in the 1860s.  One of the arguments against the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection was the fear among Democrats that enfranchising black men would lead to more interracial marriages.[7] Along that same line, the Congressmen argued that the Fourteenth Amendment would not touch state miscegenation laws because “the white person [is] equally denied the right to marry the negro.”[8]  This logic is precisely what the state of Virginia relied on, and the Court rejected, in the arguments in Loving; Avins’ intention is clear: don’t rock the boat.

Looking at the combination of current events and historical analysis, Avins’ article becomes much more than merely a descriptive assessment of the Fourteenth Amendment.  It becomes an insight into a world that was on the brink of change and one law professor’s last minute attempt to maintain the status quo.

Walter Wadlington, “The Loving Case: Virginia’s Anti-Miscegenation Statute in Historical Perspective” 

From the opining lines of Professor Walter Wadlington’s 1966 article “The Loving Case: Virginia’s Anti-Miscegenation Statute in Historical Perspective” it is clear where Wadlington stands on the pending miscegenation issue.[9]  He calls Virginia a state “which regularly recalls with glowing sentiment the story of how one of her early white sons married an Indian princess” and notes that it is “with symbolic irony” that the state’s highest court reaffirmed Virginia’s commitment to strict legal codes against racial intermarriage.[10]  In what can only be considered the companion piece to Professor Alvin Avins’ “Anti-Miscegenation Laws and the Fourteenth Amendment: The Original Intent”, Wadlington examines the historical background of the law that was at issue in Loving, namely the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, as well as the ideologies that contributed to the changes in the law.

Wadlington starts his analysis as far back as he possibly could in Virginia law, looking at statutory law from what he calls the colonial period, noting that the first statutory ban on interracial marriage was probably recorded in 1691.[11]  He notes that the punishment for being found guilty of sleeping with a slave was banishment from the colony, but he does not push the idea further ideologically.  He does not include an analysis of why banishment was the favored punishment or even why there was a punishment at all. He does not mention that, as Barbara Fields would note, the act of sleeping with a slave essentially rendered the white partner a slave as well, thus blurring the line between slave and free, and between the races.  Perhaps as a law professor that never occurred to Wadlington.  It may also have to do with the fact that at the time of the article’s publication many still believed race to be immutable.

Wadlington’s historical journey continues through the “present” miscegenation statute, which was enacted in 1924 with very little fanfare.  He does spend a great deal of time contemplating what he calls “the Pocahontas Exception” to the bar on interracial marriage and relationships.  He points out that there was an actual exception to the 1924 Racial Integrity Act, which permitted marriages between white people and those who were “no other mixture of blood than white and American Indian.”[12]  He posits that this exception was meant to protect the descendents of Pocahontas and John Rolfe and leaves it at that.  What he does not do is make a connection between the somewhat privileged and troublesome position that the Native Americans have occupied in much of American law and race politics.  He sees no connection between this exception and the section of the Dred Scott case in which Chief Justice Taney directly addresses the issue of whether or not Native Americans are analogous to African Americans.  In Dred Scott Native Americans are held to not be citizens of the United States, but for different reasons than the African Americans, based on logic that essentially stems from class rather than race.  The same could be argued of this exception to the Racial Integrity Act, that where the act seeks to protect race, it is contradictory and really seeking to protect a privileged class.

After all the historical legwork, Wadlington finally gets to a discussion of the Loving case, which had been scheduled for oral arguments at the time of this article’s publication.  Not only does Wadlington put forth the arguments that would support overturning the miscegenation bans, he also debunks the pro-miscegenation statute arguments, most of which were set forth by Professor Adkins in the same issue of the journal.  In fact, he actually cites Avins’ article in his own footnotes.  If ever there was an illustration of the conversational nature of academia, it is with the two articles.  It almost seems that Wadlington is speaking directly to Avins with a tone one would reserve for a child who declares her intention to dig a hole in the back yard all the way to China.

This is most clear in the brief but elegant conclusion, in which Wadlington states that while “it is possible that the original miscegenation bans served a legitimate purpose at a time when Negroes were essentially an alien part of the community…neither can we justifiably perpetuate those laws under the changed circumstances of our world.”[13]  He clearly seeks to lay to rest the originalist argument that the framers of the 14th Amendment could not have meant for it to apply to interracial marriage and to further the belief in a breathing and adaptable Constitution.  He closes with a powerful call to the Judiciary, with what is perhaps the best line in the essay: “…the Supreme Court should not make it clear that bans on interracial marriage have no place in a nation dedicated to the equality of man.”[14]

{Loving photo courtesy of harpyness.com}
{Pocahontas photo courtesy of williamsburgprivatetours.com}

[1] Alfred Avins, “Anti-Miscegenation Law and the Fourteenth Amendment: The Original Intent”, Virginia Law Review, Vol. 52, No. 7, (Nov 1966), pp. 1224 – 1255

[2] Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967)

[3] Avins, 1224.

[4] Avins, 1224.

[5] Avins, 1225.

[6] Avins, 1226.

[7] Avins, 1230.

[8] Avins, 1232.

[9] Walter Wadlington, “The Loving Case: Virginia’s Anti-Miscegenation Statute in Historical Perspective”, Virginia Law Review, Vol. 52, No. 7 (Nov 1966), pp. 1189 – 1123

[10] Wadlington, 1189.

[11] Wadlington, 1191.

[12] Wadlington, 1202.

[13] Wadlington, 1222.

[14] Wadlington, 1223.

Linkety Links: Rape in Prisons, White Privilege and Feminists, Hotels, Pervs, and More!!

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Its been awhile, friends and readers!! I’ve been bouncing around, adjusting to a summer job and detoxing my brain from school. But I haven’t stopped reading!! Here are some of the pieces that have caught my eye as of late. Happy perusing! <3

Why that Harvard/Tufts Study Isn’t Breaking News
Racialicious: “Another week, another head-scratching study result. Or so you’d think, right? The study, conducted by researchers at Tufts and Harvard Universities, concluded that white people think the prejudices blacks faced during the Civil Rights era are literally in the past. But it’s not all rosy, apparently, for the majority of the 209 white people (alongside 208 blacks) surveyed….But, setting aside questions regarding the size of the survey group and the focus on white/black relations in an increasingly diverse country, one has to wonder: is this really a surprise?”

Hotel’s and Their Pervs Revisited
Mother Jones: “Let’s revisit the issue of pervs in hotel rooms. Why not, after all? It started with a New York Times op-ed by Jacob Tomsky, in which he told us that housekeepers are flashed or otherwise sexually accosted by male guests ‘more often than you’d think.’ My off-the-cuff reaction was to suggest azero-tolerance policy for this kind of thing: ‘Do it once and you’re thrown out and blacklisted forever. What’s the justification for extending even the slightest forbearance toward this kind of behavior?’…So why don’t the big hotel chains have policies like this?”

White Privilege Diary Series #1: White Feminist Privilege in Organizations
Daily Kos: “Anyone who has done anti-racist work for more than a few years has run up against this problem:  most racists are happy being racists, and simply don’t want to change.  But at the same time they want to be protected from accusations of racism, and resent anyone who makes them “feel bad” about it.  White feminists are no different from other white people in that regard, as feminists of color well know.  A few are truly committed to diversity and anti-racist action, but the majority of us are not, and get angry and nasty when we’re driven out of our comfort zone. In my estimation, however, a racist feminist is no feminist at all.”

Exposing the Prevalence of Rape in the U.S. Prison System
Bilerico Project: “So, the fact is, our country is globally recognized as having some of the nastiest prisons and jails in the world – owing in part to the rampant sexual violence that prevails, even in juvenile detention. Steve Mason comments on this. This sexual violence is often directed against inmates who are known to be, or simply suspected of being, LGBT. But it can also be turned, like a flamethrower, against any individual or group, for any reason whatever. Violence – not law – is what runs our prisons and jails, and often the penal authorities themselves participate in it.”

Coming Out: Audio, Photos, Stories of Gay Teens – Interactive Feature
New York Times: “Bullying and suicides of gay and lesbian teenagers are in the headlines, the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy has been repealed, and the debate over same-sex marriage continues to divide the country. Against this backdrop, many L.G.B.T. youth wonder how accepting society will be.”

2,500 Years After Buddha, Tibetan Buddhists Acknowledge Women
The Huffington Post: “Buddhist women are celebrating a landmark victory: In April, the renowned Institute for Buddhist Dialectical Studies (IBD) in Dharamsala, India, conferred the degree of “Geshe” — the Tibetan equivalent of Ph.D. — to Venerable Kelsang Wangmo, a German nun…[I]t may come as a surprise to many that despite its peaceful and somewhat progressive image in the West, the Tibetan Buddhist tradition does not know full ordination for women. For complex historical and patriarchal reasons, the lineage did not migrate when Buddhism spread from India to Tibet, thus outclassing the Tibetan Buddhist nuns as inferior.”