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Despite these signs of acceptance, intolerance persists. Some Blacks and Whites report that they have been mysteriously fired after employers discovered their marital status. And an interracial couple, according to the Center for Democratic Renewal, ned only go two miles outside Atlanta to be the victim of attack. Elmo Seay and his White wife, Susan, for example, fled from a suburban Atlanta subdivision after their home was vandalized and firebombed. Another interracial couple, Susan Hill, 29, and her Black husband, John, 36, got so frustrated with the ostracism and rejection by friends, family, landlords and employers that they left Bolivar, Tenn., temporarily and settled in Jackson, Tenn., until the commotion died down. “It was like I had committed a crime,” Susan Hill says. “Being from a small town, it just seems it is born and bred in some people that you don’t like Blacks, no matter what.”

Where Worlds Meet

Regina woke from her nap to a tapping sound. Rat-Tat-Tat…. Rat-Tat-Tat. She rubbed the sleep from her bleery eyes and headed toward her window. Outside was the her counterpoint, her relief. Michael was waiting for her with what looked like a backpack.

“What?” she said with what she hoped sounded like contempt.

“Look I’m sorry about today, the guys, the just don’t understand. They think its funny, like its a joke or something.”

“Michael you shrugged me off at lunch and then ditched me after school! Why would I go anywhere with you?”

“Regina I’m sorry, I’m trying to make up for it, I’m trying tomake it work.”

She paused for a moment. He seems sincere, I want to go with him, I miss him. I’ll go “Whats that for?” Regina asked.

“Stop being so nosy and get out here already, we have to hurry.”

“You’re ridiculous!” Regina said laughingly and climbed out the window.

The two of them climbed into the beat up old 1990 Landcruiser that Michael had gotten for his 16th birthday and pulled away from the house. They drove and drove until they reached the end. The place where they always went to get away. To everyone else it was a parking lot next to a small airport perched on a peninsula between two shipping channels. They parked the car where channel met. That one point where two different paths coming from different cities combined.

To them it was a launching point to a place without boundries, rules, guidelines, or pressures. A place where they could just be. There were sailboats and houseboats dotting the water. Across the channel the sulfur mines billowed that familiar odorous smoke into the blue and orange sky. As the sun continued to fall and the world began to gray, they would lay in the bed of the truck wrapped in a blanket and like the smoke, just drift away. They didn’t speak. They didn’t need to.

When You Marry

Pages taken out of a 1962 textbook supposedly used for health studies class.

Mclaughlin and Loving

The fight for civil rights and in turn the right to love was fought through the American legal system.  Two cases specifically helped reverse the legal barriers against inter-racial relationships. 

McLaughlin v. Florida was a case where the United States Supreme Court unanimously ruled that a cohabitation law in Florida was unconstitutional. The law had prohibited two people from living in the same home if one of them were black and the other person white. The nullification of this law led to the Pace v. Alabama ruling which had previously said that anti-miscegation laws were constitutional.  These two rulings led up to what is largely considered the landmark case on the legality of race-based marriager: Lovings V. Virgina. The Lovings case would declare the “Racial Integrity Act of 1924“, unconstitutional and put an end to all anti- miscegenation.