Marriage Beyond Black and White
An Interracial Family Portrait

When Barbara Wilson Tinker and Carlyle Douglas met, fell in love, and wed in the early 1940s, interracial marriage was outlawed in twenty-seven states and was widely denigrated in the rest. Their union broke one of the strongest taboos in American society, and for the rest of their lives Barbara and Carlyle endured, challenged, triumphed over, and at times succumbed to the devastating effects of intolerance and racism directed toward them and their children.

Marriage beyond Black and White: An Interracial Family Portrait tells the Douglas’s remarkable story from two perspectives—that of a mother and that of her son—and shares the lessons of the heart that ultimately transformed their own bitterness into a loving respect for all.

Part 1, written by Barbara Douglas—an educator, a writer, a mother of four, and a front-line advocate for multiracial and multiethnic families—covers the early years of her marriage to Carlyle, describing how the young family coped with the day-to-day realities of life in Chicago and Detroit. Part 2, written by son David Douglas, an educator and frequent speaker on improving race relations in America, provides an adult child’s perspective on the experience and brings the family chronicle up to the present. His contribution fulfills a promise made to his mother just before her death in 1995.