The Complicated History of Interracial Love

When my father died, I inherited hundreds of transcripts from interviews he conducted with interracial couples in Chicago. He began his project in 1937, as a 21-year-old graduate student, and continued it into the 1980s, documenting the lives of couples who crossed the city’s rigid color line over the course of a century.

As I immersed myself in these stories, I was unsettled by a question that kept resurfacing: What, exactly, is the impact of interracial dating?

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The couples my father spoke with in the 1930s built lives together under daily scrutiny, employment discrimination, police harassment, and exclusion from white neighborhoods. And yet, inside some homes—and even inside the interracial spaces they created as refuge—anti-Blackness endured. Crossing the color line did not always mean challenging the hierarchy behind it.

A striking example was a social organization I had never heard of: the Manasseh Club.

In the 1890s, interracial couples in Chicago formed the Manasseh Club, named after the biblical son of a Jewish and Egyptian couple. The club met regularly, held dances, and provided burial insurance and cemetery plots. Rumors of it first drew my young father through South Side “colored” neighborhoods, searching for mixed-race couples. Former members described the club as a haven. 

But the more my father asked questions, the more a pattern emerged. The couples admitted were overwhelmingly white women married to Black men.

Black women married to white men were almost entirely excluded. Several people my father interviewed could recall seeing only three or four such couples admitted in the club’s entire history.

When my father pressed a white woman who was married to a Black man on the absence, she responded with brutal candor: “Most of the Manasseh women don’t want to have anything to do with colored women.” She went further, offering her explanation for why white men rarely married Black women: “The morals of colored women have been looser,” she claimed. “They don’t have to marry them.”

Another white woman who belonged to the Manasseh Club argued that Black women “don’t like intermarriage.” “And yet they will have all sorts of white men,” she sneered. As if her disparagement of colored women weren’t enough, she went on to cast white women as the greater sufferers.

“Who are the slaves of the South?” she asked dramatically, then answered: “A white woman and a colored man.”

A Black doctor married to a white woman expressed a similar sentiment: “If colored women would say to the white men of the South, ‘You can’t have me until you put a ring on my finger,’ the southern white man would be the first to favor intermarriage.”

Reading these exchanges, I found myself wondering what Black husbands felt when they stepped into interracial spaces where Black women were unwelcome. What did it mean to build a refuge by reproducing the very stereotypes and hierarchies that make refuge necessary? For members of the Manasseh Club, the gender of the spouses mattered nearly as much as their race. Marriages between white women and Black men were revered; marriages between Black women and white men were looked down on. 

If the Manasseh Club shows how anti-Blackness shaped who belonged, my father’s interviews also show how it shaped what parents wanted for their children. 

In one early interview, a Black father cooed over his baby’s light skin and reddish hair, calling the boy his “Little Dutchman.” “He’s even lighter than his mother,” he told my father proudly. Other parents expressed disappointment or dread when babies appeared too dark. For instance, a white wife to a Black man refused to consider the children of mixed couples as colored. “I always call those girls Manasseh,” she told my father. 

Another white woman my father spoke with rejected the Manasseh Club because she was repelled by members’ fixation on light skin. They acted as though “their children were a little better than the full-colored child,” she said—teaching their children to believe “a colored person can’t get anywhere.”

The irony is that these parents tried to lift their biracial children up by teaching them to see colored children as beneath them. Instead, it backfired. Over the years, my father heard how their confidence was shattered the moment the outside world reminded them that, in its eyes, they were colored, too.

One white mother complained that mixed children felt the sting of discrimination more sharply. She recalled how it pained her to reveal to her children that they were colored. “People said things to them, and finally we had to tell them,” she said. “And it was a terrible shock.”

In these conversations, interracial intimacy did not automatically deconstruct racism. Sometimes it reinforced racist perceptions of whiteness from one generation to the next. My father learned that some people had married because of their partner’s color, not despite it. Some Black spouses seemed to hope that marrying a white person might lighten their children, perhaps even allow them to pass as white. Some white spouses, in turn, sought partners with light skin, hoping their children would turn out lighter than their spouse. 

By the time I was born, the language surrounding interracial dating and marriage had changed. The couples my father interviewed in the 1960s no longer demeaned “colored” women or spoke openly about passing. But America’s racial assumptions about who belongs together, whose bodies are legible as family, hadn’t disappeared.

When I was a child, my sister and I once waited in an ophthalmologist’s office in downtown Chicago after an eye exam. Our mother checked us in and left. Later, my father arrived to pick us up. He told the receptionist he was there for his two daughters. 

“Your daughters haven’t been here,” she said. 

Then my sister and I stepped into the reception area.

It simply hadn’t crossed her mind that the daughters of the white man standing in front of her could be Black.

My father’s 1930s interviews tell stories of couples who defied Chicago’s seemingly impermeable color line. But the archive offers a warning worth carrying into conversations about interracial love: crossing a boundary isn’t the same as dismantling what built it. 

Love can cross a line. Erasing it requires justice—and that takes work.