She was thrown out 70 years ago for loving a black man – now look at them today
She was thrown out 70 years ago for loving a black man – now look at them today
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Published on December 26, 2023
Last year, Jake and Mary Jacobs celebrated their 70th anniversary of a happy marriage, but getting there wasn’t easy.
Mary, a White woman, and Jake, a Black man, resided in the same city in 1940s Britain, although Jake was one of the few black men there.
It would have been easy for Mary to leave, but despite her father’s commands to the contrary, she had fallen in love and would do anything to be with her lover.
“When I told my father I was going to marry Jake he said, ‘If you marry that man you will never set foot in this house again.’”
At the same technical college where Mary was taking typing and shorthand classes and he was undergoing Air Force training, the pair had met when Jake immigrated from Trinidad during the war.
Jake struck up a conversation with Mary, who was then a resident of Lancashire, and she was impressed by his comprehension of Shakespeare.
He and his companion invited Mary and her friend to join them for a picnic, but a woman cycling by saw them and reported Mary to her father because she was horrified to see two English
girls conversing with black guys. Mary was not allowed to visit her father again after
