Unlawful Intimacy: The Criminalization of Interracial Relationships in Progressive-Era Chicago

Abstract

This article shows how Progressive-Era state actors in Chicago employed open-ended, low-level criminal charges directed at regulating the moral health of the community to criminalize interracial relationships—even though interracial marriage had been legal in Illinois since 1870. Capacious legal definitions of offenses like vagrancy, disorderly conduct, adultery, and fornication allowed police officers and judges to delineate moral and immoral relationships along racial lines. Using newspaper articles, writing from contemporary social reformers, and court reports, this article reconstructs the treatment of interracial couples in the Chicago legal system to show how discretion in criminal law can reinforce racial hierarchy. I offer three historical arguments: first, that individual arrests and prosecutions of interracial couples labeled lawful, interracial relationships as a form of unlawful “vice,” second, that large-scale raids on spaces for interracial socialization reinforced the criminality of interracial intimacy in a segregated city, and third, that singling out interracial couples allowed the state to exercise control through intrusive forms of punishment like probation and institutionalization.