Before It Was Legal: a black-white marriage, 1945-1987

Photograph from Nancy Poling’s personal collection.
  •  Out of courtesy to their descendants, the names of the Richmond couple have been changed.

Twenty-two years before Loving v. Virginia, Anna Harley, a white woman, and Daniel Winters, an African American man, sacrificed family, friends, and even country, to live together as husband and wife. In 1986, the Winters allowed me to interview them at their Mexico City home. It took me nearly 30 years to write Before It Was Legal: a black-white marriage (1945-1987). As the trust between us developed and they shared a part of their life they’d intended not to speak of, theirs became a more difficult narrative to put to paper. Looking back on their forty-two-year marriage—a tape recorder between them on their green sofa—they reflected on their relationship with startling honesty.*

On February 2, 1945, the Richmond, Indiana couple drove to Chicago, where they could legally marry. In Indiana “marriage between a white person and a person with one-eighth or more Negro blood” was a felony, punishable by a heavy fine, imprisonment, and the voiding of the marriage. Not until two years later, when Daniel’s mother, in Richmond, became ill, did the couple return to Indiana. During the eleven years they lived there, they were never prosecuted, but faced persecution.

Daniel was born in Richmond in 1908. The town he remembered was as segregated as most southern cities, with restaurants, beaches, and hotels off-limits to the city’s black population. When African American celebrities like Louis Armstrong, Joe Lewis, and Marian Anderson, visited the Indiana city they had to spend the night with a local widow, who rented out rooms.

A precocious child and an outstanding athlete, Daniel wasn’t bothered by the community’s discrimination until he was old enough to participate in team sports at school. A particularly painful memory included a frigid evening in which he had to change into his basketball uniform outside in the shadows of the YMCA building, because the association prohibited him from using its locker room. Although he took all of the advanced classes in high school, his white teachers never encouraged him to attend college. Yet in 1933, during the Great Depression, he graduated from Earlham College with a teaching degree in Spanish. While at the school, President William Cullen Dennis’s office chided Daniel for walking into town with groups of white women on his way home from classes. Daniel could not participate in Earlham’s social events that took place at the YMCA or Richmond hotels. After a long period of working menial jobs, he was able to teach Spanish in the federally-funded Works Progress Administration (WPA) program.

The Richmond Item, August 30, 1935, 11, accessed Newspapers.com.

Anna, born near Lima, Ohio, was seven when her mother died. Six years later her father took off to California without her. Abandoned, she went to live with her older sister, Violet, in Brookville, Ohio, near Dayton. She grew up independent and with an adventuresome spirit. Following her 1938 graduation from Manchester College, in Indiana, she became a social worker.

Daniel and Anna met in Richmond. The WPA office he worked out of was located in the same building as the Unemployment Relief Agency, which Anna supervised. A gregarious man, Daniel went downstairs to visit the young women who worked there. He and Anna began meeting at night in the privacy of her car, where they talked, kissed, and held each other. When Anna was transferred to northern Indiana and attended meetings in Indianapolis, Daniel rode there by bus. Indianapolis was large enough for them to appear in public and maintain anonymity. Yet people stared when they walked arm in arm along the sidewalk. Men sneered, “whore” in passing.

Only one of Anna’s friends, Inez, met Daniel before the marriage. Inez was quickly drawn to his charm and urbane demeanor, but she warned in letters that Anna should follow her head instead of her heart. A daughter of Anna’s sister, Violet, later said, “Mom practically had a nervous breakdown,” upon learning of the approaching marriage.

Daniel working at International Harvester, courtesy of Nancy Poling’s personal collection.

With World War II boosting production, International Harvester hired Daniel as a janitor at its Richmond plant- some company leaders were convinced that African Americans lacked the intelligence to operate machinery. The labor union, however, valued his education and elected him to leadership positions. During the McCarthy era, like other union activists, he was labeled a communist and intimidated by the FBI.

When Harvester closed its Richmond plant in 1957, no one in town would hire the “n— commie troublemaker.” By now the family included two school-age daughters. A move to Mexico offered Daniel the opportunity to practice the profession he’d been trained for and their daughters a chance to grow up free of racial prejudice.

But the move put new stressors on the couple’s relationship. Daniel, who taught English at a prestigious boys’ school, was soon saying he felt “as Mexican as chili verde.” Anna, a reserved, blond woman, felt at odds with the effusive culture whose language she never fully mastered. Daniel resented her not being outgoing; she resented his making little effort to help her adjust.

While personal in nature, Daniel’s and Anna’s story is also cultural. It speaks to the discriminatory attitudes resulting from the Ku Klux Klan’s influence during the 1920s and of McCarthyism in the 1950s. It is not the happily-ever-after story I anticipated, but an honest portrayal of the love and hurt any two people, not just a biracial couple, can encounter in an intimate relationship.

Learn more about the struggles Daniel and Anna faced as a biracial couple in Before It Was Legal: a black-white marriage (1945-1987), available wherever books are sold.

* Daniel died five months after the interview; Anna is also deceased.

Finding the “First” Indiana Basketball Games

For over 70 years, Hoosiers have told, re-told, printed, and re-printed a story about how basketball came to Indiana.  According to the tale, Rev. Nicholas McCay (nearly always incorrectly spelled as McKay) was a protegé of James Naismith at the YMCA training school in Springfield, Massachusetts.  McCay allegedly learned the new game of basketball from Naismith, and brought it with him to his first post at the Crawfordsville YMCA.*  It was there that the supposed “first” basketball game in Indiana happened on March 16, 1894 between teams from the Crawfordsville and Lafayette YMCAs.  Several contemporary newspapers reported on this game, including three of Crawfordsville’s four newspapers, and brief mentions appeared in Lafayette and Indianapolis papers.

Crawfordsville Daily Journal, March 17, 1894. Click the image to view a PDF of the entire article.
Crawfordsville Daily Journal, March 17, 1894, reported on the game. Click the image to view a PDF of the entire article.

There is ample evidence that a Crawfordsville-Lafayette game took place.  However, was this game really the “first”?  Superlatives (“oldest,” “first,” “last”) are always challenging to historically verify.  In 2007, I came across the first shred of evidence to suggest that Crawfordsville’s claim was not undisputed.  The evidence was an article in a November 17, 1894 issue of the Crawfordsville Review, which is shown here.

Crawfordsville Review, November 17, 1894
Crawfordsville Review, November 17, 1894. Click on the image to view a larger picture.

Notice the second sentence: “Basket ball was introduced into the State by the Indianapolis association through its physical director.”  It seemed odd that a Crawfordsville paper would carry this article; especially if Crawfordsville citizens in 1894 believed that they introduced the sport to the state nine months earlier.

Further research was necessary.  Could this statement about Indianapolis basketball be confirmed with contemporary sources?  At the time of this article’s discovery in 2007, very few historic Indiana newspapers were digitized.  An effort to find corroborative evidence of basketball played in Indianapolis before the Crawfordsville game in March 1894 would have required many, many hours of microfilm research, probably over several weeks (if not months), to search several major Indianapolis dailies (NewsJournalSentinel, and Sun) from 1892-1894.  The time required to conduct the search forced me to delay pursuing the research.

In 2013, IUPUI’s Center for Digital Scholarship digitized and uploaded a large run of the Indianapolis News.  Here at last was an easy way to search for evidence to confirm what the Crawfordsville Review published in 1894.  After entering the search terms, I received numerous results, which I then sorted by date.  Then low-and-behold, there in black and white, tucked between an illustration of an acrobatic hound, and accounts of meetings of the State Board of Health and the Haughville Republicans, was the earliest mention of basketball being played in Indianapolis.  The News published this article on March 30, 1893, which was almost an entire year before the Crawfordsville-Lafayette game occurred.

Picture3
Indianapolis News, March 30, 1893. The acrobatic hounds garnered more attention than the first mention of basketball played in Indy.

The News gave greater attention to the new game in the April 1, 1893 issue (p. 7).  They devoted an entire two columns to the sport.  The reporter noted that basketball “has taken hold here and is awakening interest and promises to become the all-around game for general fun in the future.”  The article credited Indianapolis YMCA physical director, William A. McCulloch, with introducing the game at the Indianapolis branch a few months prior.  McCulloch organized a four team league at the Indianapolis Y.  However, could the 1894 newspaper claim that “Basket ball was introduced into the State by the Indianapolis association” be taken at face value for being accurate regarding “firsts”?

A few months after IUPUI uploaded the News, the Evansville Vanderburgh Public Library digitized millions of pages of Evansville newspapers through the commercial firm NewsBank.  Researchers can use the resource on site at EVPL.  I had also come across mentions of Evansville playing basketball earlier than the Crawfordsville-Lafayette game, so I thought this would be a prime opportunity to check this out.  The search results did not disappoint.

Based upon the newspapers currently digitized, Evansville was one of the earliest adopters of basketball.  The Evansville Journal and the Evansville Courier both reported on contests as early as November 1892, which was less than a year after Naismith invented the game.  Evansville also hosted an inter-city Indiana basketball game several months before the Crawfordsville-Lafayette game.  In January 1894, the Evansville YMCA squad defeated a team from the Terre Haute YMCA.

It is important to remember that YMCA leaders in Indiana first learned about basketball through the Triangle, the YMCA’s national newsletter. Naismith published an article introducing the game in January 1892, and he later credited this article, and the correspondence that resulted from it, with spreading the game across the nation.  By September 1892, the YMCA publication Physical Education advertised a “descriptive pamphlet” on the “new and popular game” available via mail for ten cents. Theoretically, by that time, any of Indiana’s twenty-seven YMCAs could have read Naismith’s original article or acquired the pamphlet, and subsequently implemented the game.  

In this context, identifying the “first” game then becomes a somewhat subjective matter, because the sport did not enter Indiana and spread from any single locus.  Rather, it originated and developed around the state simultaneously and often independently at multiple YMCAs at roughly the same time.  Also, what is the criteria for declaring a “first”“First” YMCA gym class instruction of basketball? “First” practice? “First” scrimmage? “First” exhibition? “First” YMCA intramural league game? “First” intercity or inter-institutional game?  The possibilities of what would constitute a “first” seem endless!

After searching digitized Indiana newspapers in several content management systems, I assembled the following timeline of the earliest-known basketball games, practices, and exhibitions in Indiana (Note: Because Indiana newspapers continue to be digitized, it is likely this timeline will need subsequent revision.  In particular, Richmond, Lafayette, Elkhart, South Bend, and Terre Haute newspapers for the early 1890s have not been digitized as of March 2015.  Those cities’ newspapers might yield early accounts of the game as well):

timeline part 1

Timeline part 2

timelines part 3

If you are interested in reading more about this research, see the 2015 Thornbrough Award-winning article: S. Chandler Lighty, “James Naismith Didn’t Sleep Here: A Re-examination of Indiana Basketball’s Origins,” Indiana Magazine of History, Vol. 110, No. 4 (December 2014), pp. 307-323.  You can possibly find a print copy at your local library’s local history room, otherwise you can order a copy, or download a copy from JSTOR.

*Research confirms that Naismith and McCay were not contemporaries at the YMCA training school.  McCay graduated from the school a full academic year before Naismith arrived.  See Fifth Catalogue of the School for Christian Workers (Springfield, Mass., 1890), Springfield
College Digital Collections, http://cdm16122.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/ collection/p15370coll1/id/146.