“White Negroes” in Segregated Mississippi: Miscegenation, Racial Identity, and the Law |
“White Negroes” in Segregated Mississippi: Miscegenation, Racial Identity, and the Law
The Journal of Southern History
Volume 64, Number 2 (May, 1998)
pages 247-276
Victoria E. Bynum, Emeritus Professor of History
Texas State University, San Marcos
Not until David L. Cohn returned to his native Mississippi after an absence of two decades did he understand the complexities of the racial system in which he, a white man, had been reared during the first decades of the twentieth century. “I began to discover that this apparently simple society was highly complex,” he wrote in the 1948 foreword to his memoir of Delta life. “It was marked by strange paradoxes and hopelessly irreconcilable contradictions. It possessed elaborate behavior codes written, unwritten, and unwritable.”
In the same year that Cohn’s words were published, Davis Knight, a twenty-three-year-old Mississippi man, collided with this system of paradoxes, contradictions, and codes. On June 21, 1948, the Jones County Circuit Court in Ellisville indicted Knight, who claimed to be—and certainly looked—white, for the crime of miscegenation. Two years earlier, on April 18, 1946, he had married Junie Lee Spradley, a white woman. The state claimed that, even though Knight appeared to be white, he was in fact black…
Tags: Davis Knight, Journal of Southern History, Junie Lee Spradley, Mississippi, Piney Woods, The Journal of Southern History, Victoria Bynum, Victoria E. Bynum