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Jumping the Broom
This is not the first time in our history that Black men and women have been denied the ability to legally marry the person of our choice. Enslaved Africans were legally forbidden to marry. This discrimination was based on the racist argument that Black people were not fully human, and were thus incapable of expressing love or commitment.
In the defiant spirit of love, Black folk created ways to celebrate and bless their chosen unions. Many chose to continue the traditional African marriage custom of jumping the broom – a ritual symbolizing new life and commitment. Although they were not legally recognized, these traditional unions formed the foundations of strong families.
Same-sex couples already create strong, vibrant families. They live the lives of married couples, and are often blessed in their places of worship, creating commitment ceremonies and bonds of faith – just as the broom-jumpers of years past. But these families do not have access to the legal securities that accompany a marriage license. The ability to fulfill the dream we all have – to fall in love and marry – is not within reach of Black Californians who happen to be lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender.
“I see no problem with gay couples marrying. It’s a decision between two people – the government has no business interfering. I remember when it was against the law for blacks and whites to be married – and that wasn’t very long ago. The same people who are fighting gay marriage fought black and white marriage and fought school integration.” – Joycelyn Elders, Former Surgeon General (Tri-Valley Herald, 03/14/04)
The Evolution of Marriage in California.
Many people erroneously claim that marriage has always been “one way.” In fact, the government’s decisions about who has permission to marry have always changed with the times. The state of California has made great strides to remove discriminatory marriage restrictions with respect to religion, gender, and race.
Five months before it was admitted to the Union in the Compromise of 1850, California adopted its first anti-miscegenation statute. The statute declared all marriages between “white persons” and “negroes or mulattoes” to be “illegal and void.” In 1901, the California Legislature amended the State’s anti-miscegenation statutes to add “Mongolians” (a term commonly used at the time to include people of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean descent) to the list of groups barred from marrying whites and declared all such marriages “illegal and void.”
At California’s second state constitutional convention in 1879, future U.S. Senator John F. Miller declared, “Were the Chinese to amalgamate at all with [white] people, it would be the lowest, most vile and degraded of our race, and the result of the amalgamation would be a hybrid of the most despicable, a mongrel of the most detestable that has ever afflicted the earth.”
In 1933, the California legislature added “Malays” to the groups of minorities prohibited from marrying whites to ensure that marriages between whites and Filipino Americans would not be legal. Like Chinese and Filipino Americans, Japanese and Korean Americans were similarly barred from marrying whites in late 19th and early 20th-century California.
These laws remained in effect until 1948, when the California Supreme Court struck down California’s anti-miscegenation laws as unconstitutional in Perez v. Sharp. Despite the Court’s ruling, the California Legislature rejected an attempt to repeal the law the next year, and, although unenforceable, the law remained on the books for 11 more years, until the Legislature finally repealed it in 1959. It was not until 1967 that the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the remaining laws in sixteen states prohibiting interracial marriages in Loving v. Virginia.
Just as it was a pioneer in eliminating laws against interracial marriage in 1948, California is now helping to lead the way to extend marriage equality to same-sex couples, to put an end to a long history of discrimination.
Has Marriage Always Been One Man-One Woman?
The Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association, the world’s largest organization of anthropologists, the people who study culture, released the following statement in response to President Bush’s call for a federal constitutional amendment banning marriage for same-sex couples.
“The results of more than a century of anthropological research on households, kinship relationships, and families, across cultures and through time, provide no support whatsoever for the view that either civilization or viable social orders depend upon marriage as an exclusively heterosexual institution. Rather, anthropological research supports the conclusion that a vast array of family types, including families built upon same-sex partnerships, can contribute to stable and humane societies.”
Many people are unaware that from the 5th to the 14th centuries, the Roman Catholic Church conducted special ceremonies to bless same-sex unions that were almost identical for those to bless heterosexual unions. At the very least, these were spiritual, if not sexual, unions.
