| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Romance and Rights: The Politics of Interracial Intimacy, 1945–1954. By Alex Lubin. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. xxi, 183 pp. $45.00, ISBN 1-57806-705-7.)

I was dubious about reviewing another book on interracial intimacy after the flood of works published over the past few years, but Alex Lubin has explored the politics of interracial intimacy in several new ways. Focusing on the period between the end of World War II and the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision in 1954, Lubin examines the debate about whether cross-racial relationships were private matters of individual choice or belonged in the public realm of civil rights. More than another rehashing of laws prohibiting miscegenation, Lubin's book examines how popular culture, the black press, and the changing social landscape of the postwar era redefined interracial intimacy. The argument that marriage was a matter of personal choice contained interracial relationships to the private sphere, limiting both their political import and the possibility of federal intervention. Defining marriage as a matter of rights, by contrast, allowed activists to claim that confining relationships to the realm of the private enshrined white privilege, especially the ability of white men to exploit black women sexually.

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