Color-Blind Love

By Tim Padgett and Frank Sikora/Tuscaloosa

To say Chip Edgeworth's father was unhappy about his son's marriage would be an understatement. Chip, who is white, says that when his dad learned he had fallen in love with a black co-worker named Yvette, the elder Edgeworth threw his son out of the house the family owned in Birmingham, Ala., and refused to speak to him. The reaction didn't surprise Chip. "I was raised so I couldn't stand the sight of black people," he confesses. "I was the biggest racist you ever saw." But then he met and fell in love with Yvette, a divorce with three children. "She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen," Chip recalls, "and she had a real intellectual spark to her." Yvette, for her part, was impressed by "what a remarkably generous person he was." After dating for a year, they got married in 1994.

Once a social taboo, love across the color line is becoming increasingly common. The number of interracial marriages in the U.S. has leaped almost 1,000% since 1967, when a landmark Supreme Court decision, Loving v. Virginia, voided state antimiscegenation laws that forbid unions between the races. Today there are more than 2 million interracial marriages, accounting for about 5% of all U.S. marriages, and almost half a million of them are between blacks and whites.

Yet even after the Loving decision, which required the state of Virginia to recognize the marriage between a white man and a black woman, Richard and Mildred Loving, the resistance to mixed nuptials in the South seemed to stay as firm as the reverence some there still have for the Confederate flag. It was only three years ago that Alabama became the last state to drop its (unenforceable) ban on mixed marriage, and it did so with just a 60%-to-40% vote by residents to make the change.

Of course, interracial intimacy has been a fact of life in the region since African slaves first arrived in the U.S.--and white slave owners like Thomas Jefferson began sneaking into the slave quarters at night. But what used to be branded clandestine lust has finally evolved into sanctioned love: black-white interracial marriages in Alabama have more than tripled, from 297 in 1990 to 1,000 in 2000, or about 2.5% of the married couples in the state. An additional 1% of Alabama marriages are unions also involving Asians, Latinos and Native Americans. "It's out of the bigots' hands," says Darryl Clark, a black mechanic in Birmingham who married a white woman 11 years ago. "It's gonna keep spreading."

Sociologists say the rise of an educated black middle class, the Sunbelt migration boom, "reverse migration" by blacks from the North and the fact that the U.S. military--most of whose bases are in the South--has become one of the country's most integrated institutions have increased opportunities for blacks and whites to interact as equals and develop romantic relationships. These factors combined to help join the Edgeworths. Yvette, 35, a claims auditor at the Social Security Administration in Birmingham, grew up on air bases in California and Germany before her family moved to Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Ala., in the 1980s, when she was a teenager. She and her first husband, who was white, had three children before divorcing in 1993. "In the military, everybody's pretty much one color these days," she says.

The lines, however, were more sharply drawn for Chip, 34, a machine operator who grew up in a largely segregated community in Birmingham. But spending time with Yvette and her family and friends opened his eyes. "I discovered the real world," he says. "They've got the same bills and problems I do." And although his father still won't talk to him, his mother accepted the marriage even before the couple's daughter Lauren, 7, was born. Still, there are awkward moments, even with the more welcoming in-laws. It's confusing "at Thanksgiving at my [maternal] grandparents' house, and my dad is the only white person there," says Chip's stepdaughter Ashley, 13. But, she adds, being part of a mixed-race family does have compensations: "I feel special because I can see the world through black and white eyes both."

Some experts believe marital integration will spawn broader social mixing between the races, giving more people that kind of dual vision. In Birmingham, say the Edgeworths, who live in a predominantly white, middle-class neighborhood, the once tacitly segregated public parks are slowly integrating as more mixed-raced families like theirs frequent them. "Multiracial living begets more multiracial living, period," says Randall Kennedy, a Harvard Law School professor and author of Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity and Adoption (Pantheon). That's especially true, he adds, now that mixed marriage in the South is being accepted at all social levels--and working-class couples like the one played by Billy Bob Thornton and Halle Berry in the 2001 movie Monster's Ball have become more common. "That's the most potent development," says University of Alabama family-studies professor Nick Stinnett, "because it means a far wider portion of society now has a personal stake in doing away with the racial barriers that still exist here."

Melanie Clark, a white Wal-Mart employee who married Darryl, the black mechanic, in 1992, had previously been married to a white man who she says repeatedly hit her. After divorcing him, she explains, she was wary of hooking up with another hard-drinking, abusive "good ole boy." But Melanie, 38, was attracted to Darryl, 36, who showed a gentle interest in her, taking her dancing and teaching her how to hunt deer. Others were less pleased about their getting together. Some of their black neighbors in the rural community of Branchville, Ala.--particularly the women--were so angry about the marriage that they picketed the couple's home and openly insulted Melanie, calling her "white trash." Darryl, who admits to having had a temper back then, struck back when someone fired into their home in 1996, and a gunfight erupted. Melanie's son Adam, then 13, was wounded.

The family, including Melanie's four children and Darryl's daughter from a previous marriage, moved to more tolerant Birmingham soon after the shooting. But as stressful as that incident was, Melanie says it hurt even more when Darryl once asked her not to drive him to a job interview because he feared that his prospective boss, who was white, might object to his mixed marriage. As a result, she admits, she prefers that her 16-year-old daughter from her first marriage not date black boys.

Young people, however, having grown up with the racially inclusive ethos of hip-hop and who are comfortable meeting potential mates via the racially neutral Internet, are even more color-blind than their elders when it comes to matters of the heart. According to a recent nationwide poll in USA Today, 60% of U.S. teens have dated outside their race. Ali Zeidan, 22, a white Indiana native and computer major at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, and Melody Twilley, 19, a black prelaw student, are among them. The couple became engaged this past Valentine's Day after meeting on the Internet last year. When they started living together, Melody's dad, a businessman in mostly black Wilcox County, "got mad and made me pay my share of the rent," says Melody. But then he got to know Ali. Now Melody says that instead of looking at her fiance as "a white boy out to steal our women," her father welcomes him as a son-in-law-to-be with whom he can talk Democratic politics. He has also resumed subsidizing their rent.

Most marriages are, at one time or another, a struggle. There is little research to determine if interracial couples are more prone to divorce. But a University of Houston study this year found that these mixed unions are 30% more likely to have elevated levels of stress. A good way to avoid that, says Melanie, "is to make sure at the start you're getting married for the right, solid reasons"--and not, she adds, to make a social statement. Melody and Ali say they have considered the challenges they face and insist their marriage isn't just youthful idealism. "The bigger challenge for us is that I'm Catholic and he's Muslim," says Melody. "So we've thought this through." --With reporting by Anne Berryman/Athens, Ga.; Jeanne DeQuine/Miami; and Constance Richards/Greenville, S.C.

With reporting by Anne Berryman/Athens, Ga.; Jeanne DeQuine/Miami; and Constance Richards/Greenville, S.C.