In 1903, during a heated political campaign in Mississippi, United States Senator Money repeatedly made the assertion that in Massachusetts in the previous year, because there were no laws to separate the Negro and prevent intermarriage, 2,000 white women had married Negro men. I heard echoes of Senator Money’s statistics in several places in the South.

I have made a careful investigation of the facts in several northern cities, and I have been surprised to discover how little intermarriage there really is.

If intermarriage in the North were increasing largely, Boston, being the city where the least race prejudice exists and where the proportion of mulattoes is largest, would show it most plainly. As a matter of fact, in the year 1902, when according to Senator Money, 2,000 white women married coloured men, there were in Boston, which contains the great bulk of the Negro population of Massachusetts, just twenty-nine inter-racial marriages.

Although the Negro population of Boston has been steadily increasing, the number of marriages between the races, which remained about stationary from 1875 to 1890, has since 1900 been rapidly decreasing. Here are the exact figures as given by the registry department:

RACIAL INTERMARRIAGES IN BOSTON

Groom
Coloured
Bride
White		 Groom
White
Bride
Coloured		 Total
Mixed
Marriages
1900 32 3 35
1901 30 1 31
1902 25 4 29
1903 27 2 29
1904 27 1 28
1905 17 2 19

At Boston and in other Northern towns I made inquiries in regard to the actual specific instances of intermarriage.

There are two classes of cases, first, what may be called the intellectuals; highly educated mulattoes who marry educated white women. I have the history of a number of such intermarriages, but there is not space here to relate the really interesting life stories which have grown out of them. One of the best-known Negro professors in the country has a white wife. I saw the home where they live under almost ideal surroundings. A mulatto doctor of a Southern town married a white girl who was a graduate of Wellesley College; they had trouble in the South and have “gone over to white” and are now living in the North. They have two children. A Negro business man of Boston has a white wife; they celebrated recently the twenty-fifth anniversary of their marriage.

Photograph by Clinedinst
MRS. BOOKER T. WASHINGTONMRS. ROBERT H. TERRELL

TWO OF THE LEADING WOMEN OF THE NEGRO RACE