"One People Socially and Physically": Black-White Marriage and the Politics of Amalgamation, 1920-1940

This paper explores black-white marriage societies and pro-intermarriage rhetoric in the 1920s and 1930s. While interracial couples in most northern regions did not face antimiscegenation laws, they still encountered boundless social and economic obstacles—including job loss, eviction, and ostracism from family. Such obstacles led to the development of interracial marriage societies like the Penguin Club, which promoted intermarriage and provided community for mixed-race families. Linked to these clubs were African American public intellectuals’ calls for “amalgamationism”—the widespread formation of black-white marriages as a strategy for toppling the nation’s racial divide. Though proponents of intermarriage sought to obliterate the nation’s racial boundaries, they nonetheless reinforced a restrictive vision of marriage, particularly in their decision to exclude childless, working-class, and non-churchgoing couples from their movement. In other words, amalgamationists solidified marriage’s role as an arbiter of citizenship and social status, drawing a firm line between those deemed worthy of its privileges and those whose sexualities rendered them unfit for state and social approval. Drawing from ethnographic accounts of early-twentieth century interracial marriages, writings by pro-amalgamation intellectuals, sociological studies of miscegenation, and news stories on intermarriage societies, this paper sheds new light on a familiar topic. While many historians have examined interracial marriage, scholarly work on amalgamationism is minimal. My investigation of racial intermarriage as a deliberate form of social activism brings new insight into the history of marriage, gender, and race in the United States, emphasizing the hazy line between marriage as an intimate practice and marriage as a political tool.