Tangled Fortunes

A “brilliantly researched and surprising” (Hendrik Hartog, Princeton University) history of Southern segregationists’ long war against interracial relationships, and the century-long fight to restore the freedom to love, marry, and inherit Interracial marriage was already illegal in some American colonies as early as the 1690s. But long before the Supreme Court declared that interracial couples had the right to marry in 1967, these families were far from rare. It took decades of hard work by Southern lawmakers and judges to create the illusion that they were, as Tangled Fortunes reveals in this new history of the rise and fall of the domestic color line. In Tangled Fortunes, historian Kathryn Schumaker narrates how the prohibition of interracial marriage became a priority in segregated states like Mississippi. To prevent white wealth falling into Black hands, state and local authorities papered over the reality of interracial relationships, steered inheritances away from those who did not pass as white, and hardened the lines of racist exclusion. But they could neither erase the longer history of interracial relationships nor suppress the inheritance claims of biracial descendants dating back to the era of slavery. Tangled Fortunes sheds new light on the ways that interracial families overcame racist laws, uncovered closely kept Southern secrets, and battled to reclaim Black wealth—a fight that continues to this day.