When the heart wants what the heart wants, there’s no stopping it, not even dear old dad.
From the beginning Leon Watson and Rosina Rodriquez faced discrimination, not only from society, but from their family as well. Despite it all, they lived to be among the oldest living interracial couples legally married in the United States.
“At some point, people just accepted it.”
When the couple first started dating in 1949, they were cautious about their surroundings.
On their first date they went to a movie theater. Rosina, a fair-skinned woman with roots in Mexico, entered the theater first. Leon, a Black man who served in the United States Marine Corps, waited several minutes before entering.
Neither wanted to cause an issue when Leon sat next to Rosina.
“We always did it,” Leon told The New York Times in 2017. “They looked at you like you were in a zoo. We just held our heads high and kept going.”
Later on if they knew they would encounter an issue at a certain place they would stay far away.
However Leon and Rosina ran into a problem when Rosina’s father learned Leon proposed to his daughter.
He tried his best to tell Rosina she was setting herself up for a difficult life by marrying a Black man, but Rosina didn’t want to hear it. She argued she had seen other married interracial couples living their best lives, so she knew it was possible.
Nothing would change her mind.
So in 1950, only a few short years after California legalized interracial marriage, Leon and Rosina wed.
Even though they were married and their union was officially recognized by the state of California – it would still be several more years until all 50 states recognized interracial marriage – they still endured both covert and overt acts of discriminations from others.
Several white families moved from the neighborhood when they purchased their first home together in Oakland, California, and Rosina feared retaliation at work if anyone found out who she had married.
“It was very unusual then, and I never told anyone that I was married to a black man,” she said. “I didn’t want to be rejected. I didn’t want to ruffle anybody’s feathers or anything.”