Yet their legacy is everywhere in the small Tidewater towns and family farms that make up Caroline County, where a soaring number of people identify themselves as multiracial.
In the 2010 Census, 3 percent of Caroline County’s 28,500 residents were counted as of two or more races. Most are younger than 20. The phenomenon is both old and new.
Historical records show multiracial children in the county going back to slave-holding Colonial times. Today, their increasing ranks are part of a national trend that is changing the way people think and talk about race.
Peggy Loving Fortune, the sole surviving child of Mildred and Richard Loving, said she is reminded of her parents and their legal battle by the many multiracial children at Caroline Middle School, where she is a teacher’s aide.
“Kids relate with each other a lot more than they used to,” said Fortune, who lives not far from the tiny church cemetery where her parents are buried. “It’s not just black and white. It’s Indian children and Spanish-speaking kids, too. They all get along fine. Race isn’t a barrier. They can marry who they want to.”
At a time when a biracial man is president, views on racial identity are evolving rapidly, not just in Caroline County but all over the country as well. In 2000, the first year the census offered the option of reporting more than one race, fewer than 7 million people nationwide said they were multiracial. A decade later, the number had swelled by at least a third, to more than 9 million, or 3 percent. In Virginia, once home to the capital of the Confederacy, the percentage now matches the national average.
The actual number is almost certainly much larger, because many multiracial people marked the single race with which they most identify. President Obama, for one, has said he reported himself as African American even though his mother was white.
Caroline County grew some over the past decade because of its proximity to Interstate 95 between Washington and Richmond, but its multiracial population exploded, more than doubling. Newcomers weren’t the only ones to register more than one race.
“The makeup of the community you see now is how it always has been,” said Linda Thomas, a past president of the Virginia NAACP and a Caroline County resident for a quarter-century. “The difference is, folks don’t have to be compartmentalized into being only Native American, only African American or all white. We now have the opportunity to self-identify, to embrace all of what we are, without having to fit into a box that we check. I think that makes us freer to talk about it, freer to embrace it and not feel like we’re losing anything in the process.”
Loading...
Comments