miscegenation

I want to research the sticky situation of mixed race children in America. I've done this in the past, with a focus on slavery times, but without a specific, coherent research strategy. (It was, in fact, the first upper-level research paper I authored!) Next time I aim to do it better.

The thing is that the existence of mixed race children in a racially stratified society is an affront to the power hierarchy of that society, and I'm curious to better learn how America has dealt with this problem.

I know from my previous research that antebellum America's solution -- assigning the status, slave or free, of a child based on that of its mother -- did not solve the problems that arose because of miscegenation.

What I'd like to research next is the legal status of mulatto bastards during Reconstruction and up to the Great Depression. I wonder what legal recourse did the mothers - black and white - have to seek financial support from the putative fathers? And in an era before genetic testing, what was the legal standard for proving paternity? How did this impact the lives of these children?