Court goes delusional over interracial affair

“A stunning example of the absurd and twisted logic of race-based legal judgments in the immediate aftermath of Reconstruction was exhibited in an 1877 divorce case, for which North Carolina Supreme Court justice William B. Rodman wrote the final decision.

“In granting a husband’s divorce from a wife accused of having an interracial affair, Judge Rodman stated as fact that if a white woman gave birth to a black man’s child, then all her future children, even those fathered by white men, would forever carry the ‘taint’ of African blood.

“Here was the ultimate indictment of interracial sexual intercourse: the permanent pollution of a white woman’s bloodstream, to the point where she could no longer produce a pure white child for her white husband.”

— From “The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies” by Victoria E. Bynum (2010)