How America and the Courts have Treated Interracial Marraiges

Shortly before the 2008 Presidential election, a journalist described Barack Obama’s childhood growing up in a multiracial family in Hawaii “as apple pie American as any other background.”

But Christine Olaniyi's powerful personal story is a stark reminder that multiracial families are not, in fact, typically viewed as "apple pie American."

For most of this country’s history, dating back to the earliest days of colonial settlement, interracial marriages and multiracial families were viewed by most Americans as a dangerous threat to the social order.

Both public policy and social custom were brought to bear to prevent the formation of multiracial families, or—if they existed—to ensure that they lacked legal legitimacy. Only 50 years ago, popular opinion, social custom, and often the law, held that mixed-race families were unnatural and illegitimate and the formation of mixed-race families should be prevented whenever possible. Indeed, exactly 50 years ago, in 1959, a Virginia judge told Mildred and Richard Loving (who would eventually successfully challenge his ruling in the Supreme Court) that their marriage and mixed-race family violated God’s plan for humanity. He wrote in his decision: “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”

And Virginia was not alone. In 1961, 21 other states also prohibited interracial marriage. Sixteen of those states still had such laws when the Supreme Court finally ruled in 1967 that it was unconstitutional for states to prohibit interracial marriage. But these laws barring intermarriage were not the only ways in which the courts could discourage or punish interracial marriage.

As Christine Olaniyi's case suggests, child custody hearings have been another arena where this nation's traditional disapproval for interracial relationships between blacks and whites has been influential. Indeed, courts have sometimes used child custody dispositions as a way to punish white women who have crossed the color line in marriage.

In researching my book, RACE MIXING: BLACK-WHITE MARRIAGE IN POSTWAR AMERICA, I found numerous cases where race played a major role in determining child custody placements. Most of the cases I uncovered involved white women who lost custody of white children from a previous marriage when they became involved with black men. Just one example: in 1961, a white woman from Michigan divorced her white husband and was granted full custody of their two-year-old daughter. But when she married a black man the next year, the white father sued for a change in custody on the grounds that his daughter would be forever stigmatized if forced to live with her black stepfather. Although this father presented no evidence that his daughter had suffered by living in a multiracial home, the court sided with him and removed the child from her mother’s custody. This case was not unique. Between 1945 and 1985, approximately 25 child custody disputes were heard at the state appeals court level after local trial courts denied white women who had married black men custody of their white children from previous marriages. In many of these cases, courts went against what was the very dominant belief that children should be raised by their mothers and instead ordered a change in custody.

It wasn't until 1984 that the Supreme Court ruled that courts could not remove white children from a white mother's custody simply because the white mother married a black man. Even in that case, the Supreme Court did not forbid family courts from considering race when they made custody rulings; it only ruled that family courts could not base custody decisions on hypothetical claims of the potential damage supposedly caused by growing up in a multiracial home.

Olaniyi's case is somewhat different from those described above, because it involves a custody decision after the break-up of an interracial marriage. I found a few cases that presented the same circumstances as Christine Olaniyi's, where a black father sued for custody of his biracial children after an interracial marriage broke up. In most of the examples I found, the white mother was eventually able to regain custody of her children. But like Olaniyi, these mothers had to fight for custody in courts that sometimes openly argued that physical characteristics should determine placement or that white women could not raise healthy biracial children.

Olaniyi's custody case deserves hearing by a judge who does not start with the assumption that multiracial families are deviant or that everyone in a family needs to look the same way. Such thinking is outdated and pernicious.

Renee Romano
Associate Professor of History
Oberlin College