this post was submitted on 13 May 2024
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Did you not read the end of the article you linked? His wife definitely had black roots, but it was a family secret.
Basically Vivian's great-great-grandmother was a black enslaved woman, and her descendents hid this fact to save themselves from Jim Crow laws.
It's possible she and Johnny knew but kept it quiet because they lived in the deep south in a time when it was scary to be in any way black. The 'one-drop rule' is still a thing for a lot of americans, after all. We know that Vivian wife was living in fear of the KKK whenever he went on tour. I would imagine he said whatever he had to say to keep her safe while he was away
Yes, but I was responding the original posts claim that Johnny Cash came out and said his wife was black, which was the exact opposite of what happened. His wife being 1/16 African helps the claim that she had maybe a darker complexion I guess, it's hard to tell with most photos of her being in black & white or potentially colorized. I'm also 1/16 Native American and I really wouldn't claim that I'm actually Native American based off of that (though maybe some scholarships exist that say otherwise).
Her being 1/2 Sicilian may have had a bigger impact on skin-tone, but maybe the African great-great-grandmother was a well-known secret in her family and they tried to hide it as much as possible, I don't know. It's probably more important to ask, "Did she consider herself to be black?" Everyone has their own definition of it, but I've not seen anything that says that she actually considered herself as black, but it's also possible she tried to hide it early on given the racial climate at the time. Is the "One-Drop Rule" still valid here?
The one drop rule is absolutely central to this conversation. Whether or not she was dark-skinned was not why she had threats from the KKK, it's the fact that her complexion and facial features suggest black ancestry that made her a target.
One sixteenth black was still legally black in many States, and Tennessee, where they lived, was the first place to codify this. You're not wrong that her Sicilian heritage could have given her this complexion, but if her Black heritage was proven, as small as 1/16th might be, it would have made their marriage illegal under miscegenation laws. So he had a vested interest in keeping it quiet for both their sakes. He's still progressive and brave for embarking on such a relationship, if indeed be did know of her heritage