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woman (Lubie Griffith), and a black man (Hosea Agnew). Several of the cases revealed the
persisting beliefs about appropriate roles for men and women of different races; in some cases
these stereotypes helped the defendants. For instance, Jordan and Brewer were able to evade
their convictions by tapping into the alternative frame of white male master and subordinated
black domestic worker. Myra Gilbert, while unable to convince the courts that the crime of rape
had been committed by a white man against a black woman, was at least able to use a narrative
of forced intercourse to undermine the requirement of acquiescence to continued sexual relations
for grounding a conviction for miscegenation. Jackson and Rogers could not pursue Brewer’s
path successfully, despite apparent attempts to do so at trial; perhaps such arguments were more
effective when advanced by the dominant partner. And Lubie Griffith’s defiance of the norms
for white feminine behavior helped to persuade the appellate court that she had indeed crossed
the racial boundary, despite the lack of evidence of intercourse.
Struggles over miscegenation, as other scholars (particularly Victoria Bynum and Ariela
Gross) have suggested, played a significant role in defining race and gender, as the courts
considered the actions of the defendants as measured against the state’s image of appropriate
relations between blacks and whites and between men and women. Because miscegenation was
a crime of violating boundaries, considering it legally implicated the meaning of the boundary
itself as well as the discrete categories of masculinity and femininity and whiteness and
blackness that the courts sought to present as hermetically sealed. The multiple and evolving
meanings of race over time shifted from an understanding of race as an immutable biological
category to race as a political and social category that was fixed through performance,
appearance, and custom.
These understandings of race played out in the context of increasingly rigid conceptions
of masculinity and femininity. The recreation of the antebellum era as one of sheltered white
femininity, potent and honorable white masculinity, clownish but potentially dangerous black
masculinity, and hypersexualized black femininity provided a standard against which the actions
and appearances of real defendants were measured. Unruly behavior was understood as such in
gendered terms, and the permissible range of behavior varied according to one’s race and gender.
Wherever the lines were drawn, their crossing had to be addressed, whether the violation was by
a white man keeping rather than having intercourse irregularly and casually with a black woman
or by a black man whose social interactions with a white woman implied more than extreme
Convention