Marriage Beyond Black and White

CONTENTS

Marriage beyond

Black and White

An Interracial Family Portrait

by David Douglas and Barbara Douglas

Wilmette, Illinois

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CONTENTS

Bahá’í Publishing, 415 Linden Avenue, Wilmette, IL 60091-2886 Copyright © 2002 by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States All rights reserved. Published 2002 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞ 05

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Douglas, David (David Almerin), 1949– Marriage beyond Black and white : an interracial family portrait / by David Douglas and Barbara Douglas. p. cm.

ISBN 1-931847-04-5 (softcover : alk. paper) 1. Douglas, Barbara, d. 1995. 2. Douglas, Carlyle. 3. Douglas, David (David Almerin), 1949– 4. Interracial marriage—United States—Case studies. 5. Racially mixed people—United States— Biography. 6. Bahais—United States—Biography. 7. United States— Race relations. I. Douglas, Barbara, d. 1995. II. Title.

HQ1031 .D68 2002 306.84’6—dc21 2002012478

Cover design by Suni D. Hannan

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CONTENTS

Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction 5

Part 1 / Barbara’s Story: Personae Non Gratae 1 The Last Flaming Ray 19 2 A Man of Integrity 29 3 Whither Thou Goest . . . 43 4 Poor Little Mongrel Baby 53 5 No Room at the Inn 67 6 Banished 77 7 Dusty Road to Peace 87 8 Among His People 97 9 Journey with No Return 109 10 No Negroes Allowed 117 11 Wind-Twisted Fir 123 12 Dark Clouds 133 13 Exodus 149

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CONTENTS Part 2 / David’s Story: Between Two Worlds 1 The Gardens 157 2 “You White, Ain’t You?” 171 3 A Different World 183 4 School Years 191 5 Family Life 197 6 Alone 207 7 Trouble in Paradise 219 8 Escape 229 9 Resurrection 243 10 The Next Generation 259 11 Love and Marriage 267 12 Grandmother’s Legacy 277 13 No Tomorrow 287 14 Moving On 299 15 Twilight 309 Afterthoughts 323 Index 347

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INTRODUCTION

MY PARENTS BROKE ONE OF the strongest taboos in our society and thereby became outcasts in their native land. This is their story. Their transgression began in 1942 when, against conventional wisdom, they violated the unwritten rule that said Whites socialize with Whites and Blacks socialize with Blacks. When they ³rst met, they felt an immediate attraction to each other. As they explored the nuances of each other’s character and personality, their attraction grew into a love so strong that it lasted a lifetime. It was a love forbidden in our society. It resulted in a marriage that was outlawed in many of our American states at the time and was regarded as anathema in the rest.

Despite this opposition, throughout some ³fty years of marriage their relationship retained the freshness of teenage puppy love, the romantic spark of newlyweds, and the intimacy of best friends. It was wonderful to watch them even in their seventies, holding hands and ·irting with each other while they laughed and joked like kids. They loved to play chess and Scrabble together and enjoyed an intensely passionate private relationship. My mother once con³ded in me, at a time when I was experiencing some di¹culties in my ³rst marriage, that they had made love every day of their marriage except when they were physically separated or ill. Each found in the other a con³dant and trusted companion with whom they shared their deepest concerns and feelings. While they had their share of typical marital problems, the deep love they held for each other endured for over ³fty years. As a couple they were physically attractive, charming, witty, and intellectually engaging. And yet because he was Black and she was White, they were ostracized.

When they got married, interracial marriage was illegal in twentyseven states of the union. In states such as Indiana police stopped and either harassed or arrested interracial couples. My parents dared not travel through the South because Black men were lynched for the slightest hint of association with White women. In the two Northern cities of Detroit and Chicago, where they spent most of their married life, they were not permitted to rent hotel or motel rooms except in red-light districts. Rac-

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INTRODUCTION ist thugs in Chicago verbally harassed them. In Woodstock, Illinois, one of the windows in their home was shattered by gun³re, their canary was killed, and their fellow townspeople eventually chased them from their home. In Detroit they were socially isolated for more than forty years.

Their professional coworkers shunned them as soon as they discovered the interracial nature of their marriage.

While interracial marriages have always been part of the fabric of American society, they have nevertheless been rare. I am not talking about the sexual liaisons common between White slave owners and their Black slaves. Nor am I talking about the illicit unions between mixed couples neither willing nor able to become legally married. Legal marriages between Blacks and Whites have been forbidden and discouraged for most of our nation’s history. While increasingly common, interracial marriages of all kinds comprise only about 2.6 percent of all marriages in the United States, according to the year 2000 U.S. Census ³gures. Such marriages are still frowned upon by many Whites, Blacks, and other ethnic groups in this country. According to a survey reported by the Washington Post Online on 5 July 2001, 52 percent of interracial couples reported being mistreated because of their relationship. According to the same survey 46 percent of Whites considered it better to marry someone of their own race, while only 21 percent of Blacks considered it preferable to marry someone of their own race. Thirty-³ve percent of Whites reported that it would bother them if a member of their family were to marry someone of a di²erent race, and an additional 9 percent said they simply could not accept it. Only 9 percent of Blacks surveyed said they would be bothered if someone in their family were to marry a White person, with an additional 4 percent saying it would be unacceptable.

Because such marriages were extremely rare in the 1940s, my parents attracted attention wherever they went. When they were out in public as a couple, people stopped and stared at them, often with disapproving or hostile looks, sometimes worse. Our family attracted as much attention as a traveling menagerie while we engaged in ordinary activities such as shopping, visiting amusement parks or museums, or going to the movies or the public library. Although people seldom made comments, they turned their heads as they walked down the street or drove past us in their cars.

My parents taught us to respond to these situations with humor and a sense of personal pride. After such excursions, we laughed and joked about the events of the day in the safety and security of our home. Mom

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INTRODUCTION and Dad always let us know that the attention we received was not our problem. It was the problem of those who were ignorant and rude enough to stare. They taught us that there was one race: the human race. We learned that racial distinctions are arbitrary and illogical. Racial prejudice was born out of ignorance and greed and had been encouraged by corrupt plantation owners, politicians, and others in positions of power who stood to bene³t by perpetuating racism.

While my parents shielded us in our early years from their personal experiences with racial discrimination, they taught us about the heroic struggle of Blacks against the forces of racism in this country. We learned Black history from our parents in the ³fties, long before Black pride became popular in the African American community during the sixties and seventies. They consciously planned to help us take pride in our African, as well as our European, heritage.

My parents took pride not only in their heritage but in their marriage itself. They knew they were breaking the paradigm of ethnic isolation most Americans follow. They knew they were pioneers in establishing a new paradigm in race relations. They believed that if other Americans saw how well an interracial marriage could work, it would lessen the fear of—and the prejudice against—such marriages. They hoped that in some small way their marriage would help to bridge the gap between Blacks and Whites in this country. That was, in fact, part of my mother’s purpose in setting out to write this book.

Marriage beyond Black and White was started some ³fty years ago when my parents decided to share their story with a fascinated yet profoundly ignorant public. Together they drafted an outline of their proposed book and wrote the ³rst chapter—alternating voices—each giving his or her personal perspective. In that preliminary work, written in 1952 after nearly a decade of marriage, my father wrote that this book was a sincere attempt to place before the American public the problems which face us and others like us in the hope that we can dispel some of the myths surrounding interracial marriage and create some measure of understanding toward it. . . . We believed that society would, in time, take a marriage such as ours in stride. We did not know, but we believed.

About the same time, describing the purpose of the book, my mother wrote,

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INTRODUCTION We are not alone in our situation—interracial marriages are increasing in number. Perhaps such a book as we propose will help to bring about a greater understanding of and sympathy toward such marriages.

We hope so. Anyone who has ever found himself on the wrong side of a wall will know what the feeling is that Carlyle and I have sometimes.

But we know where the wall is, and we know what there is on the other side that is worth getting.

Although my parents were committed to each other and believed there was nothing wrong with interracial marriage, the constant struggle to survive in a racist culture took its toll over the decades. My parents began their marriage with bright hopes, buoyant and full of optimism about their union. They dreamed of achieving success in their careers. They hoped that society would gradually learn to accept interracial marriages.

While their optimism concerning their own marriage proved to be well founded, over the years they became bitterly disillusioned by the degree of racism in America. My father elaborated on his career struggles: Now began two years of disillusionment. When I applied for positions ranging from clerical to minor executive in the business world, I was told that although my education and personality were well suited to such work my color made me unacceptable. Eventually I took a part-time clerical job with a research organization, but the pay was inadequate. This was followed by substitute teaching (two calls a week).

Then through the state civil service I received an appointment as a social worker, but I was unable to support six people on two hundred dollars a month. Once more I became a janitor. Full circle! Had the struggle for education been a waste of time and e²ort and hope?

At the age of thirty-two and after four years of college, the best-paying job my father could Âłnd was a janitorial position, which was no better than the jobs he had held before college.

My mother entered the marriage with deep feelings about the brotherhood of all humanity. Though she was White, she came to hate White people because of the contempt and hatred so many of them displayed toward her and her interracial family. She came to hate her own race even more as she delved into African American history and learned of the depth of the brutality and constant indignities that African Americans

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INTRODUCTION have faced throughout their history in this country. She was stunned and enraged by the torture, mutilation, and murder of Emmett Till.* She realized that the same fate might overtake her husband or her children.

Finally, the shock of her demotion from ³rst-class citizenship as the respected daughter of an established family in a university town to secondclass citizenship as the wife of a “Negro”—caused her to see the stark reality of racism more clearly than many Black people can. Typically, American Blacks can only dream of having the advantages that the majority of Whites hold as their birthright. She enjoyed those advantages for the ³rst three decades of her life and then lost them overnight. Only in her eighties, after decades of re·ection and healing, was she ³nally able again to accept White people as individuals.

For my father, the e²ect of the lifelong struggle with racism was less obvious but equally devastating. In the early years of his marriage, he dreamed of becoming a college professor. That dream was dashed when a perfectionist advisor rejected his proposal for a master’s thesis. Although my father was a brilliant man, he never believed in himself enough to overcome that obstacle and other similar obstacles. He was accepted at the University of Chicago but never completed his degree. He wrote beautiful poetry in the early years of his marriage, yet his pen was suddenly stilled and his poetic voice silenced forever well before he reached the age of thirty. He never explained why. I never knew he was capable of writing such exquisite poetry until after his death. It was then that my mother shared with the family a much-cherished collection of his poems that she had kept hidden away, like buried treasure, with other family heirlooms. Although his poetry clearly demonstrates his command of the written word, he never believed his work was special. My mother, a published author, often said he could write better than she could, but he was never convinced of the value or quality of his work.

My mother described him as a courageous man who proudly stood against society on the issue of interracial marriage. He was able to maintain that audacious stance well into their marriage. However, after decades of rejection by a world of cold, staring strangers, he no longer enjoyed going out in public with his family—the price was too high. For * Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old Black boy from Chicago, was savagely brutalized and murdered in Money, Mississippi, in the summer of 1955 simply for saying “Bye, baby” to a White woman.

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1 The Last Flaming Ray

PERHAPS AS WE GROW OLDER, all of us, at one time or another, undertake a bittersweet journey through the past, searching for the milestones, the secret impulses, the dimly remembered encounters that have shaped the course of our lives.

For more than ³ve decades I have been estranged from White America, so I ³nd it extraordinarily di¹cult and unexpectedly painful to think back to the time when middle-class White America was the only world I knew and the mores, values, and laws dictated by the Caucasian majority circumscribed my life. At that time, I was quite contented that it should be so. How could I have felt otherwise? Had I not been born into the greatest democracy the world had ever known? Did I not, with my classmates, learn the Declaration of Independence and thrill to the words of Patrick Henry, “Give me liberty, or give me death”?

I had learned nothing of the inequities and injustices that had corroded and continue to corrode our democracy. Both teachers and textbooks discreetly avoided discussing slavery or somehow made it seem an advantageous way of life for the poor African, who was presumably only one step removed from primitive man. As for the destruction of the American Indians and their way of life—well, they were savages and dangerous. Also, if this democracy of ours was to ·ourish, we must acquire their tribal lands by whatever means necessary in order to accommodate the expansion of our fast developing country. This was God’s will, America’s manifest destiny.

We knew how our White ancestors had fought for freedom in the Revolutionary War, but no one had ever told us about Crispus Attucks’s heroic role in the Boston Massacre or about the gallant Blacks who had fought at Bunker Hill. We learned with pride about the Civil War and about how bravely the Boys in Blue had fought to free the slaves, but no one had told us that Black soldiers—ex-slaves and freedmen—had fought side by side with those Northern White men. No one ever told us that Lincoln said it would have been impossible for the North to win without

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BARBARA’S STORY the help of the colored troops.* And, most shameful of all, our history teachers had never spoken of the legendary all-Black 369th Regiment, which had fought in World War I and each of whose members had received from France the Croix de Guerre.† We did not know that the heroes of American history George Washington and Thomas Je²erson had been slave owners. We had never heard of Frederick Douglass. Like my peers, I accepted without question the myths interwoven with facts that comprised our history books. So you see, from kindergarten through high school, in our predominantly White classrooms, we saluted the ·ag each morning, sang “America the Beautiful,” and sincerely believed that all was well with our world. This was the Promised Land.

How, then, did I get from there to where I am now?

I am seeking now for the events, the signposts if you like, which led me from that smug, comfortable way of life into a bewildering kind of no-man’s-land not unlike a dark and sinister bog. In that murky bog, one moves with utmost caution, wary of a fatal misstep, dogged by fear as tangible as the chill sweat in the palms of your hands or the nausea seething in your stomach. Yet all the time there was, and is, a bitter, selfdestructive rage growing in my heart against my countrymen who have permitted and even indulged in acts of violence and insidious repression against Blacks. These acts of violence and repression have the potential * Lincoln wrote in a letter dated August 1864 to John T. Mills, “The slightest knowledge of arithmetic will prove to any man that the rebel armies cannot be destroyed by Democratic strategy. It would sacri³ce all the white men of the North to do it. There are now in the service of the United States nearly 150,000 colored men, most of them under arms, defending and acquiring Union territory. . . . Abandon all posts now garrisoned by black men, take the 150,000 from our side and put them in the battle³eld or corn³eld against us and we would be compelled to abandon the war in three weeks.” J. A. Rogers indicates that “178,975 Negro soldiers fought in the Union Army between 1861–1865,” placing the total number of Black men aiding the Union Army at “perhaps twice that number” (100 Amazing facts about the Negro with complete proof, pp. 39, 14).

Henrietta Buckmaster explains, “The famous Fifty-fourth Massachusetts swung [into action] on its way in February, and the Fifty-³fth followed soon on its heels, some of those two hundred thousand Negro troops who were, by Lincoln’s testimony to turn the tide for the Union” (Let My People Go: The Story of the Underground Railroad and the Growth of the Abolitionist Movement [Harper & Brothers, 1941], p. 306).—D. D. † The Croix de Guerre is a French military decoration that was awarded to individuals and groups for feats of bravery in the course of the two World Wars.—D. D.

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1 The Last Flaming Ray to destroy our ancestors’ dream of a world where all men, women, and children would be free. But worst of all was the sickening sense of guilt— the realization that I, too, had stood by passively, whether because of inexcusable ignorance or inertia, and done nothing to make amends.

Though bewildered and frightened during those early years of my new life, I fought side by side with my husband, who, brave beyond belief, stood steadfast. Although knowing better than I the consequences of ·outing the rules of society, he, too, was determined not to let racism destroy what we both believed to be a viable marriage, even though he could very well have lost his life in the process. Melodramatic? Not at all.

In those days, Black men had been killed for so much as smiling at a White woman.

I look back upon those long ago days of my childhood and adolescence with overwhelming gratitude for the great good fortune that allowed me to be born to a mother and father who, it seems to me, typi³ed the very best America has to o²er. They believed in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, and in their own quiet, gentle way, they lived what they believed without self-righteousness or ostentation. As parents, they were equally remarkable—particularly since they came to parenthood in the early years of the twentieth century, when Victorian methods of child rearing were still approved.

The prevailing philosophy of the day toward parenting was typi³ed by the adage “Spare the rod and spoil the child.” Yet I was never physically punished, never spanked, never shaken or slapped. Disciplined, certainly, for my parents were no pushovers. One must abide by the house rules or lose privileges. Fortunately, they were not only kind and just but extraordinarily understanding and good-humored.

I was born and raised in the Midwestern university town of Ann Arbor, Michigan, where as an only child I was sheltered, if not indulged, and enjoyed the usual quota of birthday parties and Christmas trees.* My mother, Ethel Louise Tinker, was the daughter of a doctor and a schoolteacher. She had not gone to college, but because her brothers and sisters were professors, doctors, or professionals of one sort or another, she straddled the social line between “town and gown.” Although she hobnobbed with professors and their wives, she never put on airs or acted superior to the “townies.” My father, Almerin David Tinker, quiet and * Barbara’s younger sister, Ruth, died of peritonitis at the age of three.—D. D.

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BARBARA’S STORY unassuming, was well liked by faculty and townspeople. He, too, had been unable to go to college because a lack of money had forced him into his father’s haberdashery business. Despite the pressures of his business and the demands of his young family, he continued his research in ornithology until he achieved recognition as an authority in the ³eld.* My mother was active in the university church and organized a club for students. Her closest friends were faculty wives, a snobbish group of unenlightened conservatives to whom my mother’s liberalism was anathema and a constant source of irritation. Nevertheless, her personality and charm won their loyalty and a²ection.

Although my parents were far from well-to-do, it was a foregone conclusion that I would attend the university, since the professional family members had ordained that I become a teacher. With the help of these relatives and an income of sorts derived from babysitting, waiting on tables, and helping in the children’s ward of the university hospital, I managed eventually to gain a degree. My ³rst radically independent decision was to get a degree in oriental civilization rather than teaching† My second was to go to China.‡ My third was to marry Carlyle Douglas. I regret none of these decisions. * Barbara’s father, A. D. Tinker, wrote a monograph entitled “The Birds of School Girl’s Glen Region. Ann Arbor, Michigan: A Study in Local Ornithology,” which was published in the Michigan Geological and Biological Survey. The State Geologist R. C. Allen included this study in the survey as a model to both students and teachers, saying that the work was “an illustration to teachers and students of the results to be obtained in an intensive study of a small area.”—D. D. † Barbara received a bachelor of arts degree in English from the University of Michigan in February 1933; she received a master of arts degree in oriental civilization from the University of Michigan in June 1934.—D. D. ‡ Barbara left for China on October 2, 1936. According to letters she wrote, she arrived in Shanghai on October 20, after a short visit to Japan. Her purpose was to study oriental textiles. Her ³rst few months were spent in the home of Y. S. Chi, a former provincial governor. During her stay in China she was arrested because she was suspected of spying for the Russians. On another occasion she was accused of having a stolen passport. Her three-year stay in China provided opportunities for her to spend time in Shanghai, Beijing, and Chengdu to study Chinese textiles. She returned to the United States early in 1939 and wrote an account of her journey, which she submitted to the University of Michigan’s annual Hopwood essay competition. Her entry, titled “The Height of a Mountain,” earned her the top award of $1,500. According to a local newspaper article, judges described her work as “an amazing picture of the common people of China as they are touched or left untouched by the war.” The judges also

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