Talk:Paramour rights
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[edit] From Reparations for Slavery
Here's a whole bunch of stuff from the Reparations for Slavery article that wasn't appropriate for that article, but should probably be merged into this article and wikified. MisterPhyrePhox 21:57, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
During the 1930s, Zora Neale Hurston, the famous African-American anthropologist and writer of the Harlem Renaissance, studied a practice in the Segregationist South she referred to as Paramour Rights, picking up a term she encountered in the timber camps of north Florida ranging from Jacksonville through Pensacola. This unwritten law of the pre-Civil War South referred to the right of a white man to take a black woman as his concubine and force her to have his children whether she was married or not.
While not surprising during slavery, this practice continued well past the end of the Civil War, and became institutionalized in the Segregationist South, buttressed by Jim Crow legislation making miscegenation illegal, thereby removing any rights of a woman of African descent from suing her forced paramour for paternity-related issues of child support.
Regardless of the color of her skin, a woman was considered a “Negress” if she could be proven to have even a single drop of African blood coursing through her veins, so one of the first lines of defense for rape was for the man to look for evidence – however spurious – that the woman had a distant ancestor who was black. The continuing practice of paramour rights resulted in mixed-race offspring with no claim to a father, nor to the financial support a father would normally be expected to give to his family.
Aside from the freedom from responsibility that black women afforded the white men who practiced this form of continuing enslavement, the practice of Paramour Rights served to "keep coloreds in their place,”".[citation needed] by institutionalizing legal rape of black women and psychologically castrating black men. This form of sexual domination is the oldest known form of subjugation of conquered races throughout the history of mankind.
In 1952, the trial of Ruby McCollum, a wealthy African-American wife who murdered her white, physician and senator-elect lover, created the first forum for a “Negress” to witness in her own defense regarding her abuse by a white man who forced her to bear his children.
Noting that this explosive trial was a first in American history, Zora Neale Hurston, reporting for The Pittsburgh Courier, drew a parallel between Ruby and her countless black paramour equivalents in the Segregationist South who were victimized by white males seeking to gain power and control by subjugating black females.
In The Trial of Ruby McCollum, the relationship between Ruby McCollum and Leroy Adams, her abusive lover, is examined from the standpoint of how this case contributed to the death of Paramour Rights in this country.
