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Paramour rights refers to a pre-Civil War Southern practice that gave white men the right to take black women, married or not, as concubines. The term "Paramour Rights" was first used by Zora Neale Hurston, to describe the practice of white men fathering children by black women whether they were married or not. The practice, she observed, began prior to the Civil War, and was reinforced afterwards by Jim Crowe legislation that prevented marriage between people of different races. Hurston first discovered the practice in her studies of the turpentine camps of North Florida in the 1930s, and believed that the death knell of Paramour Rights was sounded by the trial of Ruby McCollum, a black woman who murdered her white lover, Dr. C. Leroy Adams, in Live Oak, Florida in 1952. For the first time in history, a black woman, Ruby McCollum, testified to a white lover forcing sex upon her and demanding that she have his child. Further reading may be found in The Trial of Ruby McCollum, by C. Arthur Ellis, Jr.
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