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The term paramour rights refers to an outdated American practice of a white man taking a Black woman to whom he was not married as his concubine. The term "paramour rights" was first used by Zora Neale Hurston. The practice, she observed, began prior to the Civil War and was reinforced afterwards by Jim Crow laws that prohibited marriage between people of different races. Hurston first wrote about the practice in her anthropological studies of the turpentine camps of North Florida in the 1930s. She believed that the death knell of paramour rights was sounded by the trial of Ruby McCollum, a Black woman who murdered her white lover, Dr. C. Leroy Adams, in Live Oak, Florida, in 1952. McCollum's trial, which Hurston covered for the Pittsburgh Courier, may have been one of the first instances in American history in which a Black woman testified that a white man had forced sex upon her and demanded that she have his child.
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