“How Much Can You Read about Interracial Love and Sex without Getting Sore?”: Readers’ Debate over Interracial Relationships in the Baltimore Afro-American

Here's the abstract:

Interracial marriage and relationships were illegal in much of the United States in the early twentieth century. The black press devoted a great deal of attention to this topic, often connecting it to African Americans’ encounters with racism and their struggle for civil rights. Part of this coverage in the national black weekly newspaper the Baltimore Afro-American included short and serial fictional stories on interracial romance. These stories, however, were often a contested medium among readers. Thus, a public debate occurred over the question of interracial romance stories and their place in the Baltimore Afro-American over the course of four months in 1934. This article examines this debate. Ultimately, interracial romance stories brought readers into conversation with each other and the Baltimore Afro-American to create a discourse that tied interracial romance to the African American battle for equality in the early twentieth century.

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the Afro-American and its readers created deeper meanings about interracial romantic fiction by linking it with ideological and political issues such as race pride, civil rights, and the role of the newspaper itself. Thus, readers' debates over intermarriage and interracial romance were also a deliberation over definitions of African American progress.

[...] A slight majority (55 percent) of readers indicated their support for interracial fiction, leaving close to 40 percent expressing their disapproval. A remaining 5 percent commented on the debate but offered no clear preference. (105)

[LV - I haven't been able to access Gallon's Pleasure in the News: African American Readership and Sexuality in the Black Press (University of Illinois Press, 2020) but I think it may rework and add to this material in Chapter 4, which is titled "The Question of Interracial Sexual Relationships and Intermarriage." Here's the abstract for that chapter:

This chapter details how the Black Press created a black sexual public sphere, which fostered lively discussions about the benefits and consequences of intermarriage for African American advancement. Viewed by African American newspapers and by many readers, as the most racially and sexually charged topic of the 1920s and 1930s, readers responded to coverage with a variety of positions that both countered and supported the views of black leaders. Chapter 4 uncovers an ongoing debate between readers on intermarriage and interracial sexuality, which, appeared in papers through much of the 1930s. The Black Press served as a space for discourse on interracial sexual relationships that was at once entertaining as well as deployed in the fight for civil rights.