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Footnotes 1361
people—espei:ially from the ranks of dark superior Negroes, while the light male can
also marry ‘‘upward’’ by seeking a white wife, from whom h€ does not expect economic
advantage anyway. It may also be that the white woman has more sexual attraction for
the Negro male than the white man has for the Negro female, since sex contact between
the former pair is more forbidden, even in prostitution. In socio-economic status, the
Negro male who intermarries is high, while the white male, the white female, and the
Negro female are low. The white females, by marrying into the lower caste, go upwarrl
in class, but the white male usually cannot get such an advantage because the better
class Negro female finds it to her advantage to marry the darker Negro of high socio-
economic status. Whites who intermarry are not predominantly foreign-born as is some-
times thought. Among white males who marry Negroes, there are about as many native-
born of native parentage as there are foreign-born, relative to their respective population.
Among white females who marry Negroes in Boston and New York State (outside of
New York City) the relative proportion of native-born of native parentage is actually
higher than that of foreign-born. Among both males and females, the native-born of
foreign parentage have the least amount of intermarriage, which fact perhaps reflects the
general ambitiousness of this element of the population. Finally, it should be mentioned
that those who intermarry tend, to an unusual extent, to be marrying for a second or
third time. Over *30 per cent of Wirth’s sample of Negro and white brides were pre-
viously married. The proportion was almost as high for Negro grooms though much
smaller for white grooms.
It is possible to get trends in intermarriage for Boston only. In that city, between 1900
and 1904, 13.6 per cent of all marriages involving Negroes w^ere interracial. (Alfred
Holt Stone, Studies in the Atnerican Race Problem [1908J, p. 62.) Between 1914 and
1918, this percentage had dropped to 5.2, and between 1919 and 1923 to 3.1. In
1934-1938, it had risen slightly to 3.7. (Wirth and Goldhamer, of, cit,^ Table IV,
manuscript page 41.) Needless to say, Boston is not typical of the entire United States,
and it experienced accretions to its Negro population since 1900.
Holmes cites a study by HoflFman which indicates that intermarriage was declining
already in the last few decades of the nineteenth century in four Northern states. (S. J..
Holmes, The Negroes Struggle for Survival [1937], p. 174.)
® According to W. J. Cash {The Mind of the South [1941 ], p. 3I3)> when the red
light districts of Southern cities were suppressed, prostitution took to hotels, where
Negro beDboys took on the economic and sexual functions of pimps. There are also
isolated cases recorded of more permanent relations between Negro men and white
women. (See, for example, Walter White, Rofe and Faggot [1929], pp. 71 IF., and
Allison Davis, Burleigh B. Gardner, and Mary R. Gardner, Deef South [i94i]> pp-
33
-
37-)
®The toleration in the South is abetted by prohibiting Negro men from protecting
their women against the white man’s advances. In the city studied by Allison Davis and
John Dollard {Children of’ Bondage [1940], pp. 245-246), a Negro minister who
protested in his pulpit against interracial liaisons was warned by a group of white busi-
nessmen.
^ John Dollard, Class and Caste in a Southern Town (i937)j pp- 141-142; Hortense
Powdermaker, After Freedom (i939)> pp. 181 flf.
® For an excellent description of the scope and rigorousness of this etiquette, see
Doyle, Of, cit. This book interprets the etiquette as a means of accommodating what
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