Louisville Police Chief Determined To End Interracial Marriage In His City

 

In the Jim Crow South and frankly many Northern cities it was not rare for authorities to declare a person’s relationship illegal, and even go so far as to redefine who a person was.

At the end of July 1916 in the city of Louisville, Kentucky Police Chief H. Watson Lindsey determined that interracial marriage was of great concern to his department. “We will spare to effort to abate this practice in Louisville and Jefferson County,” Lindsey told the Courier-Journal after the arrests of three African Americans.

The three were Harry Jenkins, his alleged lover Alice Schmaker and an adolescent boy George Eaton. After being discovered together in the same house Jenkins and Schmaker were arrested for disorderly conduct. The problem was that Schmaker identified as Negro but the police chief, one of his patrol officers, and a corporeal felt certain that she was white and ordered her to give a blood sample.

Eaton was arrested for larceny when he tried to get money for a bicycle he allegedly stole. When arrested the young man was found to have photographs of three young white women. When questioned he stated that he didn’t know the girls but Lindsey ordered his chief investigator Corporal Sullivan to discover who the girls were.

The three arrests thereafter didn’t make any other news. What happened to the three who were arrested is unknown and lost in history.

What these arrests did do was increase the wild concern most citizens of Kentucky had regarding interracial relationships. The Courier-Journal and the other newspaper of the city the Messenger-Inquirer ran several editorials restating the moral panic of the residents and stories on how the level of Negro blood was determined. 

While interracial marriage had been outlawed in Kentucky since statehood in 1792, for whatever reason in the summer of 1916 Southern states became focused on making sure no miscegenation would occur. In July over 20 arrests were made in both Kentucky and Tennesee. In North Carolina, the crime could lead to at least two years in prison. 

It wasn’t until the Supreme Court's decision in Loving v. Virginia in 1967 that these relationships became legal under the force of law, still, Kentucky did not overturn its law until 1974.

Sources:

https://sharetngov.tnsosfiles.com/tsla/exhibits/blackhistory/pdfs/Miscegenation%20laws.pdf

https://calendar.eji.org/racial-injustice/jul/28