{"id":57870,"date":"2023-05-10T10:55:32","date_gmt":"2023-05-10T17:55:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=57870"},"modified":"2023-05-10T10:55:32","modified_gmt":"2023-05-10T17:55:32","slug":"when-marriage-becomes-an-act-of-resistance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=57870","title":{"rendered":"When Marriage Becomes an \u2018Act of Resistance\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By<\/span>Pilar Marrero<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Margo Long’s decision to marry an African American man in 1965 became the foundation of what is today a sprawling multi-racial family with Jewish-Muslim-Latino-European and African-American roots.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Above: Margo Long (L), with her daughters Dayna and Rhonda, and her younger sister, Laurien Alexandre.<\/em><\/p>\n

When Margo Long, a white Jewish woman in her twenties, married John, an African American man, in 1965, interracial marriage was illegal in almost half of the United States.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat was two years before\u00a0Loving vs. The Commonwealth of Virginia<\/em>, the Supreme Court decision,\u201d she recalls, sitting in front of a glass of wine in her Pasadena home 57 years later. \u201cWe were stopped all the time by cops. \u2018Are you ok, mam?’\u201d they would ask. \u201cWhy wouldn\u2019t I be,\u201d she would say.<\/p>\n

Today, Long is a retired educator, 81 years old, and she takes great pride in her biracial and multicultural children and grandchildren.<\/p>\n

\u201cI couldn\u2019t be a prouder matriarch,\u201d she smiles.<\/p>\n

Back then, Margo\u2019s parents were just fine with her decision, but her grandfather, on her father\u2019s side, took them out of their will. \u201cYou can\u2019t let Margo do that,\u201d he told his son. \u201cI can\u2019t tell her what to do,\u201d he responded.<\/p>\n

That disagreement would eventually become a life-long estrangement between Margo\u2019s dad and his father. When hearing the news, her grandmother on her mom\u2019s side said that if she married John and had children, \u201cthey would be striped like zebras.\u201d<\/p>\n

Decades later, one of Margo\u2019s granddaughters, Nadia, 21, sees that marriage as \u201can act of resistance.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMy grandparents\u2019 act of resistance is admirable to me. I aspire to have their courage\u201d, said Nadia Ngom, who identifies as Jewish, Muslim, African American, African, and White. Nadia\u2019s mom Rhonda, a civil rights attorney and Margo\u2019s daughter, married a Muslim man from Senegal, Nadia\u2019s dad.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen my sister married John, my grandparents moved away, as far as they could get, to Florida,\u201d says Laurien Alexandre, Margo\u2019s youngest sister, now 70, who has been married to two Latinos. Her current husband, Henrik, is from Argentina, as was her first husband, Gerardo.<\/p>\n

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Margo with her sister, Laurien.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Margo with her grandchildren.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n

Margo and her three siblings, descendants of European Jews, grew up in California. From industrious, mostly conservative Jewish immigrants came, a few generations later, a family that Laurien describes as: \u201cBlack-white, Jewish-Muslim-Baptist.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI think there was a shift from that old European tradition to my parents believing in living one\u2019s life as you want, as long as you did it with principles,\u201d Laurien said. \u201cBut we often laugh because aside from my grandparents, we were also disowned \u2014 sort of \u2014 by my dad\u2019s sisters, my aunts. They thought my parents did a terrible job raising us.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt wasn\u2019t only that Margo married a Black man, my brother Gordon was a communist, and I was kicked out of school for protesting the war, for protesting the dress code and organizing a radical student union\u2026 there was such a divide,\u201d says Laurien, who is currently dean of Antioch University\u2019s Graduate School of Leadership and Change. She was a teenager in the 1960s, a time of rebellion for many young people.<\/p>\n

Margo and John divorced after 18 years of marriage, and he remained close to their daughters, Rhonda and Dayna. Still, Margo took it upon herself to offer her daughters any opportunity to know \u201cthat they were Black and to be raised with that consciousness.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI always liked to have things around that honored diversity and inclusion, not just for Black, but for everything,\u201d Margo adds. \u201cAlso, instead of going to Hawaii, we went to Jamaica. Instead of seeing the white Santa at the mall, we went to see the Black Santa at Laimert Park (then an African American area in Los Angeles).\u201d<\/p>\n

Now, her daughters have children as well. Rhonda married a Muslim man from Senegal and had a boy and a girl. Dayna, an emergency room doctor, is the mother of three boys. Their father is originally from Jamaica though he grew up in London.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy grandchildren are just gorgeous,\u201d she says, beaming.<\/p>\n

One tradition of this diverse family combines the Jewish celebration of Passover with a multicultural, multi-faith twist that is very much their own.<\/p>\n

\u201cPassover is a really historic call to action in our family, and it\u2019s a reflection and also moving forward,\u201d says Margo. \u201cAnd it\u2019s more political than it is religious and very inclusive.\u201d<\/p>\n

So instead of a celebration with a retelling of the story of the Exodus of Moses and the Israelites from Egypt, the family gathers and starts with a prayer from the Quran. Part of the readings are in Spanish, and the traditional Seder meal \u201cis very feminist,\u201d says Margo.<\/p>\n

Laurien, an atheist, says that her family was \u201cnever very religious.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are more cultural Jews; the last time we all went to synagogue together was when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated,\u201d said Laurien.<\/p>\n

The younger sister, who grew up in the 1960s and is separated from her older sister by 12 years, is defined by her husband Henrik as if \u201cKarl Marx met Janis Joplin, and they had a baby.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nowadays, she often wonders what her parents would think about the family and how they could keep up and accept all the different directions their rebellious kids went. Laurien still has a letter she wrote to her parents in college, complaining about the injustices she saw in the system.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wish I could sit down with my parents and ask them how they could process getting letters that said, essentially, \u2018Eff your capitalist patriarchy\u2019?\u201d she laughs. \u201cBut they stood up to their parents and let us be who we were.\u201d<\/p>\n

This article is part of the Love Across Colorlines series, a collaboration of 20+ ethnic media outlets looking at interracial marriage in California at a time of rising hate. Visit\u00a0Love Across Colorlines<\/a>\u00a0to see more in the series.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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ByPilar Marrero May 10, 2023 Margo...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-57870","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion","category-u-s-a"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57870","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=57870"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57870\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57871,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57870\/revisions\/57871"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=57870"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=57870"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=57870"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}