Black Excellence: Dorothy Roberts
https://www.npr.org/2026/02/10/nx-s1-5704334/dorothy-roberts-the-mixed-marriage-project
Almost a decade after her father’s death, legal scholar Dorothy Roberts still had 25 boxes of his research that she had yet to sort through. When she moved from Chicago to Philadelphia, she brought the boxes — and finally opened them.
Roberts’ father, Robert Roberts, was a white anthropologist who spent his career at Roosevelt University in Chicago. The boxes contained transcripts of nearly 500 interviews he had conducted with interracial couples across the city, including interviews with couples who were married in the late 1800s, all the way to couples who were married in the 1960s.
“They were absolutely fascinating,” Roberts says of the transcripts. “I learned so much about the racial caste system in Chicago, the Color Line, the Black Belt.”