Timeline

Through out the novel, Forbidden Fruit, DeRamus creates a Timeline of multiple events in the 19th century that helps readers to understand the problems interracial couples had. I only selected a few from the book because these seem to be the most interesting. Again I would have had a really difficult time obeying these rules because they took away people’s freedom. After reading this timeline how would you feel do you agree or disagree?

1851: In the January 1, 1851 issue of the Voice of the Fugitive, Henry Bibb talks about two letter writers in the Amherstburg Courier on December 7, one anonymous, one named Edwin Sarwill. The letter writers complain that blacks are inferior and ignorant and that if they are allowed to settle in Canada they will marry the whites and degrade both races.

1855: Celia, a Missouri slave, is hanged on December 21, 1855, after clubbing to death her widowed owner, Robert Newson, who she claimed had forced her to have sexual relations over a period of years. She had borne him two children, both of whom became his property. Although the second article of Section 29 of the Missouri statutes of 1845 forbids anyone “ to take any woman unlawfully against her will and by force, menace or duress, compel her to be defiled. “Judge William Hall refuses to instruct the jury that the enslaved woman is covered by the term “any woman”

1861: At least nine biracial couples live in Buxton, a black settlement near Chatham in Ontario, Canada. They include a white male and black female, seven black males and white females and one Native American and mulatto female.

1867: Bill Wyronosdick, a Crenshaw, Alabama, black man, pays a two-hundred-dollar fine and goes to jail for thirty days for living with a white female employee.

1870: The radical Mississippi legislature repeals the 1865 ban on racial intermarriage.

1880-1940: … A black man can be considered guilty of assault with intent to rape by showing up in a woman’s backyard, stilling next to her on a trolley or looking at her in the “wrong” way.