CHAPTER ONE: MOCKINGBIRD PLAYERS
1 Thirteen of the state’s sixteen pulp and paper mills ... Conner Bailey, Peter Sinclair,
John Bliss, and Karni Perez, “Segmented Labor Markets in Alabama’s Pulp and Paper
Industry,” Rural Sociology 61 , no. 3 ( 1996 ): 475 – 96.
2 “The evil tendency of the crime”... Pace & Cox v. State, 69 Ala. 231 , 233 ( 1882 ).
3 The State of Idaho banned interracial marriage ... U.S. Census Office, Fourteenth Census
of Population (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1920 ).
4 It wasn’t until 1967 ... When the Virginia legislature passed the Racial Integrity Act in
1924 , authorizing the forced sterilization of black women thought to be defective or
dangerous and criminalizing marriage between a black person and white person, people in
Caroline County took these pronouncements very seriously. Decades later, when a young
white man, Richard Loving, fell in love with a black woman named Mildred Jeter, the
young couple decided to get married after learning that Mildred was pregnant. They went
to Washington, D.C., to “get legal,” knowing that it wouldn’t be possible in Virginia. They
tried to stay away but got homesick and returned to Caroline County after the wedding to
be near their families. Word about the marriage got out, and some weeks later the sheriff
and several armed deputies stormed into their home in the middle of the night to arrest
Richard and Mildred for miscegenation. Jailed and humiliated, they were forced to plead
guilty and were told that they should be grateful that their prison sentences would be
suspended as long as they agreed to leave the county and not return for “at least twenty-
five years.” They fled the state again but this time decided to fight the law in court with a
lawsuit filed with the assistance of the American Civil Liberties Union. In 1967 , after years
of defeats in lower courts, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down miscegenation laws,
declaring them unconstitutional.
5 “The legislature shall never pass any law”... Even though the restriction could not be
enforced under federal law, the state ban on interracial marriage in Alabama continued
into the twenty-first century. In 2000 , reformers finally had the votes to get the issue on
the statewide ballot, where a majority of voters chose to eliminate the ban, although 41
percent voted to keep it. A 2011 poll of Mississippi Republicans found that 46 percent
supported a legal ban on interracial marriage, 40 percent opposed such a ban, and 14
percent were undecided.
6 Nearly a dozen people had been lynched ... The names of the people lynched are as
follows: October 13 , 1892 : Burrell Jones, Moses Jones/Johnson, Jim Packard, and one
unknown (brother of Jim Packard). Tuskegee University, “Record of Lynchings in
Alabama from 1871 to 1920 ,” compiled for the Alabama Department of Archives and
History by the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, Alabama Dept. of Archives and
History Digital Collections, available at http://digital.archives.alabama.gov/cdm/
singleitem/collection/voices/id/ 2516 , accesssed September 18 , 2009 ; also, “Four Negroes
Lynched,” New York Times (October 14 , 1892 ); Stewart Tolnay, compiler, “NAACP
Lynching Records,” Historical American Lynching Data Collection Project, available at
http://people.uncw.edu/hinese/HAL/HAL% 20 Web% 20 Page.htm#Project% 20 HAL,
