Sounds like an urban legend to me. There’s no need to drink blood, she could just state that she’s 1/64th and nobody would have any cause to challenge it.
If we read the source document you referred to, the blood-drinking story dates to a similar story from the Revolutionary war:
The author concludes that this kind of blood-drinking may have been going on for a while. I think the better observation is that rules-lawyering stories have been a popular category of urban legend for quite a while.
In 1819, if you stated you had a fraction of Negro ancestry, who would challenge it? Why would they do that?
I’ve studied a lot of ancestry, and I can tell you that in 1819, few people had any documentary evidence of their heritage at all. A few people could prove they were related to one specific person. Except for royalty, nobody had docs to prove that they were not related to a certain real or imagined person.
However had she done so she would have been saying the same thing was true of various relatives putting *them *in a shedload of trouble with the law. For example she would be saying that one of her parents had 1/32 of Negro blood invalidating their marriage and making her any any siblings illegitimate with ramifications in fact for many family marriages, inheritance, status etc. She really couldn’t have gone there.
I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that if you’re a white woman determined to marry a black man in 1819, you’ve probably already thought out the social implications of that action and judged them unimportant or nonexistent. She clearly already doesn’t care what her parents or grandparents think about things.
People don’t drink blood to downgrade their social status. There are plenty other sanitary ways to achieve the same thing. Laws in the old South are replete with ways you can lose your whiteness, there are no ways that you can achieve whiteness.
Knoxville was a hot spot of anti-secession sentiment. That doesn’t always translate to anti-slavery (and later anti-Jim Crow) but those sentiments were likely stronger than elsewhere in the south.
Another big Klan state was Maine of all places. Very white, so they focused on oppressing Catholics instead.
When Bishop Joseph Ritter ordered the integration of Catholic schools in Indiana in 1938, the Klan picketed the cathedral. In 1946 Ritter was promoted to the bigger, more prestigious Archdiocese of St. Louis, and ordered desegregation of its schools and hospitals. When local Catholics protested, he threatened to excommunicate them.
I think the issue was not that she could have gotten away with it, but that she was taking an oath. She was swearing before God about something which was something that people took (and some still do) seriously and did not want to lie. The drinking blood trick allowed her to “truthfully” answer “yes” to the question of whether she had any Negro blood in her.
I put truthfully in quotes because I seriously doubt that God would appreciate this sort of rules lawyering, but what do I know?
Sputnik Monroe managed to desegregate pro wrestling in Memphis by making himself so popular with black fans that the promoters had no choice but to sell them floor seats.
This is where the Sears Catalog comes into the picture, allowing black customers to bypass the discriminatory and exploitative treatment they often got at the white-run local store.
That article seems pretty biased, so I’ll check other sources before I believe it. For example:
What? Sears declined because of civil rights laws? And again, Whhaaat? Blacks need Amazon because brick and mortar stores discriminate against them in 2020?
If so, then why did Sears decline after civil rights laws if blacks still need Amazon in 2020?
What does that even mean? That blacks couldn’t get things delivered by mail because the racist postmaster who owned the country store refused to give them items that they bought through mail to protect the monopoly of his country store, even though he refused to sell to them at the country store?
But, we could trust that the postmaster would give the package directly to the carrier instead?
There was the Southern Tenants Farmers Union (STFU, ha!) formed in 1934 was one of the few unions that admitted blacks into their ranks. In Little Rock, the few places that catered to the gay population didn’t mind serving both blacks and whites. However, most blacks and whites did not freely mix in those establishments.
Maybe they didn’t do their research. Do you really think that blacks shop on Amazon in 2020 because of the “No Coloreds Allowed” sign at Barnes and Noble? How does that deal with the post office work?
As commentators on the segregation-era South have frequently noted, individual whites could be what some critics call “paternalistically” kind to blacks even when the system as a whole oppressed them. I’d guess that a lot of whites didn’t consider it their sacred racial duty to make sure the “coloreds” were put down 24/7, and would bend or ignore the rules in private for blacks they were close to.