She was kicked out for dating a black man 70 years ago. Now look at them now. Last year, Jake and Mary Jacobs marked 70 years of marriage. It wasn’t easy to get to that point, though. In Britain in the 1940s, Mary, a white woman, and Jake, a black man, lived in the same city. Jake was one of the few black men there, though.Mary could have easily left, but she had fallen in love and would do anything to be with her lover, even though her father told her not to.
“My dad told me I would never come back to this house if I married Jake,”They met when Jake came to the United States from Trinidad during the war. Mary was taking typing and shorthand classes at the same technical college where he was training for the Air Force. At that time, Mary lived in Lancashire and Jake struck up a talk with her. Mary was impressed by how well Jake understood Shakespeare.
He and his friend asked Mary and her friend to join them for a picnic. But a woman riding by saw them and told Mary’s father because she thought it was horrible to see two English girls talking to black guys. After he was scared, Mary was not allowed to go see her dad again. When Jake went back to Trinidad, they wrote to each other. After a few years, Jake came back to the U.K. to find better-paying work.
Jake asked Mary to marry him out of the blue when she was 19. She said yes, but when she told her family, they threw her out. “I only had one small suitcase with me when I left.” In 1948, no family members came to our wedding at the register office. Mary said that even though her father was “horrified” that she was thinking about marrying a black guy, she didn’t know that other people felt the same way.
Living in Birmingham for the first few years of our marriage was hell. I cried every day and didn’t eat much. We had no money and no one would talk to us. We also couldn’t find a place to live because no one would rent to a black man. Mary said it was hard for them to do anything together because people would point at them as they walked down the street. Mary got pregnant, and she and her husband were excited that they were going to have a baby soon. But at 8 months, she gave birth to a stillborn child.
“It wasn’t because I was stressed, but it broke my heart, and we never had any more kids,” she said. When Mary got a job as a teacher and worked her way up to assistant principal of a British school and Jake got a job at the Post Office, things did get easier for them. They met new people, but Mary said she had to tell them that her husband was black before she introduced them to him.
“My dad died when I was 30, and even though we were back together, he never liked Jake,” she said. Jake, who is 89 years old, and Mary, who is 84 years old, live in Solihull, which is a town south of Birmingham. They just celebrated being married for 70 years. Jake says he doesn’t feel bad about anything, but he also says black teens today don’t know how hard life was for him in Britain in the 1940s.
“Every day they are abused”As soon as I got to the U.K., I was abused every day. A man on a bus once rubbed his hands together on my neck and said, “I wanted to see if the dirt would come off.” “Back then, you couldn’t work in an office because it wasn’t thought to be safe for a black man to be in an office with all the white girls.
“They are still deeply in love and don’t feel bad about being married, even though there have been problems, bias, and abuse. They’ve been married for over 70 years and are very happy together. I really admire how much these two love each other, and I hope they have a lifetime of happiness together.