Mama’s ninety-fifth birthday party in 2005 made news in her hometown. The Indianapolis Star covered her nearly sixty-five years of crossing racial barriers with a front-page story:
LOVE DIVIDED, REUNITED
Woman who gave up family to marry a black man
rejoices in reconnecting with sister she left behind
The article sidebar cited the 2000 US Census report that one in fifteen marriages were then interracial (counting all mixtures, not just black and white), up 65 percent from the prior decade.
Response to the article, the reporter told me, was mixed. There were people who connected to the loving family who looked beyond race, but there were also those still against race mixing who complained about running such a story. The response was a true snapshot of where the country stands—this change in America is happening, though it is still unacceptable to some.
Since my parents threw out the norms and laws to marry in 1943, mixed-race marriage in 2015 was estimated to be at least one of every ten marriages, and according to a PEW Research study, two-thirds of Americans say it “would be fine” with them if a family member married someone of another race.
Now the pace of interracial growth is accelerating. That means this group will get bigger faster. The Census reported that multiracial people grew three times as fast as single-race people between their last two counts. As that trend continues, as new statistics project, mixed-race people will become a notable slice of the American pie when the nation becomes “minority white” in 2045, according to a Brookings Institution study.
If the currently estimated seventeen million mixed-race people were added to seven million so-called white Americans who would be classified as Negroes under the one-drop rule, that would make twenty-five million Americans. So, keep your calculators out. The 2020 Census is predicted to show another significant increase in this growing demographic.
The Loving train is running throughout our country. It’s no longer the steam engine my mother fled Indiana on twenty-four years before the Supreme Court overturned antimiscegenation, but a much faster transport heading toward a browner America.