Charles F. Robinson II
University of Arkansas Press

Why was marriage against the law? In the tumultuous decades after the Civil War, as the Southern white elite reclaimed power, "racial mixing" was the central concern of segregationists who strove to maintain "racial purity." Segregation was based on the idea that interracial sex posed a biological threat to the white race.

In this groundbreaking study, history professor Charles Robinson examines how white Southerners enforced anti-miscegenation laws. His findings challenge conventional wisdom, documenting a pattern of selective prosecution under which interracial domestic relations were punished even more harshly than transient sexual encounters.

Robinson shows that the real crime was to suggest that black and white individuals might be equals, a notion that undermined the legitimacy of the economic, political and social structure of the white male supremacy. Robinson examines legal cases from across the South, considering both criminal prosecutions brought by states and civil disputes over marital and family assets. "Dangerous Liaisons" vividly documents the regulation of intimacy and its fundamental role in the construction of race.

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