Paramour Rights and Reparations Issues

Zora Neale Hurston, the famous African-American anthropologist and writer of the Harlem Renaissance, studied a practice in the Segregationist South she referred to as “Paramour Rights,” picking up a term she encountered in the timber camps of north Florida ranging from Jacksonville through Pensacola. This unwritten law of the pre-Civil War South referred to the right of a white man to take a black woman as his concubine and force her to have his children whether she was married or not.

Regardless of the color of her skin, a woman was considered a “Negress” if she could be proven to have even a single drop of African blood coursing through her veins, so one of the first lines of defense for rape was for the man to look for evidence – however spurious – that the woman had a distant ancestor who was black.

The continuing abuse of black women by white men resulted in mixed-race offspring with no claim to a father, nor to the financial support a father would normally be expected to give to his family. A real bargain for the white man. A real tragedy for his paramour and her child.

Aside from the freedom from responsibility that black women afforded the white men who practiced this form of continuing enslavement, the practice of Paramour Rights served to “keep the Nigger in their place,” by institutionalizing legal rape of black women and psychologically castrating black men through penis entitlement. This form of sexual domination is the oldest known form of subjugation of conquered races throughout the history of mankind.

In 1952, the trial of Ruby McCollum, a wealthy African-American wife who murdered her white, physician and senator-elect lover, created the first forum for a “Negress” to witness in her own defense regarding her abuse by a white man who forced her to bear his children.

Noting that this explosive trial was a first in American history, Zora Neale Hurston, reporting for The Pittsburgh Courier, drew a parallel between Ruby and her countless black paramour equivalents in the Segregationist South who were victimized by white males seeking to gain power and control by subjugating black females.

In my recent book, The Trial of Ruby McCollum: the true-crime story that shook the foundations of the Segregationist South, the relationship between Ruby McCollum and Leroy Adams, her abusive lover, is examined from the standpoint of how this case contributed to the death of Paramour Rights in this country.