Anti-Miscegenation Amendment
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U.S. Representative Seaborn Roddenberry (Democrat of Georgia) introduced a proposed Constitutional Amendment to ban interracial marriage into the United States House of Representatives in 1911. According to the wording of the proposed amendment, "Intermarriage between negros or persons of color and Caucasians... within the United States... is forever prohibited." In his bill before the United States Congress, Roddenberry stated that:
"Intermarriage between whites and blacks is repulsive and averse to every sentiment of pure American spirit. It is abhorrent and repugnant. It is subversive to social peace. It is destructive of moral supremacy, and ultimately this slavery to black beasts will bring this nation to a fatal conflict"
The bill widely is seen as a racist reaction to the marriage of African American heavyweight champion Jack Johnson's marriage to Lucille Cameron, a Caucasian woman, which occurred that year. Johnson had won the world's heavyweight title from Tommy Burns in December 1908.[citation needed] Racial animosity ran so deep that even a socialist like Jack London began thumping the tub for a "Great White Hope" that would take the title away from the black Johnson, who was crudely caricatured as a subhuman "ape" in cartoons and sports coverage, and return it to where it belonged, with the "superior" white race. Those hopes were dashed in 1910, when Johnson thrashed former heavyweight champion Jim Jeffries in the ring.
The severe beating meted out to Jeffries was compounded by Johnson's taunting the former champ in the ring, then taking pride in his victory. Many whites felt humiliated by Jeffries loss and were incensed by Johnson's pride, which they saw as an inferior colored man lording it over whites. Johnson's victory over Jeffries ignited race riots all over America as a result of this event. [Rust and Rust, 1985, p.147]
Unlike the dramatization of Johnson's fistic reign in Howard Sackler's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1967 play The Great White Hope, in which the fictional and idealized Jack Jefferson was involved with one Caucasian woman, Johnson was not shy about his affection for white women or reticent about his own prowess in- and outside of the ring. In her dismissive review of the 1970 film of The Great White Hope, New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael asked rhetorically why the filmmakers had not shown Johnson as he truly was and was perceived by many Americans from press photos: A proud black man, with his arms around two blonde women, rather than as the middle-class, clean-cut, proto-C.O.R.E. member pining over one mousy brunette in the film. Kael was upset that almost 60 years after Johnson's tragedy transpired, Sackler and the filmmakers were still trying to mollify white America's sensibilities by not showing him as a ballsy black man-of-action who was catnip to white women, someone more akin to footballer-cum-movie star Jim Brown than the character played by James Earl Jones.
In the second decade of the 20th century, in which African Americans enjoyed few civil rights and many more of whom suffered from legal peonage) -- a time in which lynching was an accepted extralegal means of social coercion in the Southeastern United States as well as other regions -- many whites considered Jack Johnson a serious threat to the entrenched racial order, i.e., segregation, both de jure in the South and de facto in other regions. After Johnson married Cameron, two ministers in the South recommended that Johnson be lynched. [Gilmore, 1975, pp. 107, 108] Sixty African Americans were lynched in the year 1911.[1]
Influenced by Roddenberry's introduction of the anti-miscegenation amendment, similar bills were introduced and enacted. By 1913, half of the twenty states lacking anti-miscegenation marriage laws had enacted such laws.[citation needed] Also in 1913, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which had abolished its miscegenation law in 1843, enacted a measure that prevents couples who could not marry in their home state from marrying in Massachusetts.
