Moving backward to the 19th century

I am waiting for my next set of books to come from the library so I looked up Forbidden Fruit on the web and found this summary. “Award-winning journalist Betty DeRamus has written about race riots, refugee camps and other news events around the world. But more recently she's been pursuing a different kind of story -- this one dating as far back as the 1600s and set against the backdrop of African American slavery.
Ms. DeRamus began writing Forbidden Fruit after meeting the descendants of an interracial couple who overcame huge obstacles to marry in the mid-1800s. That spurred her on to look for more love stories -- at family reunions, in court documents, census records, unpublished memoirs and old newspapers. Looking back at a time when marriages between slaves were not legally binding in the United States…and when masters could sell or move their slaves at will, she found accounts of people who risked everything to be together
Many stories in the book unfold along the “Underground Railroad,” the organized network that sheltered fugitive slaves during the decades before slavery was abolished in the 1860s. Other stories feature people who relied on more informal methods to stay together. Some couples walked across several states or waited decades to be reunited. One pair traveled in disguise from south to north, with bounty hunters in pursuit, then sailed to England. One young woman hid herself in a wooden chest and had herself shipped to the man she loved.
An 1806 Virginia law even led some people to renounce their freedom. "That was one of the surprises in my research," Betty DeRamus says. "The Virginia Assembly ruled that any newly-freed blacks would have to leave the state. And some of those newly-freed blacks petitioned the Virginia Assembly saying they would rather go back into slavery than be free without their families.”
Not all the stories in Forbidden Fruit end happily. But Betty DeRamus says most of the stories are about reunions, and she hopes they will provide a new way of looking at the history of slavery.

I decide to read this one first because it talks more about the 19th century and the struggles that interracial couples faced together and I thought that it would go well after reading Navigating Interracial Borders. I will be making compares to the world we live in today.