‘I Opened My Father’s Old Boxes and Found a Lost World’

“The Mixed Marriage Project: A Memoir of Love, Race, and Family” by Dorothy Roberts

c.2026, Atria / One Signal Publishers   $30.00 320 pages

The first thing you noticed was that smile.

It was so genuine, so appealing that you couldn’t help but smile back. You were drawn to that grin, that face, the whole package. When you fell in love, did you notice your beloved’s skin color? Maybe – but as in the new book, “The Mixed Marriage Project” by Dorothy Roberts, the heart doesn’t always care what the eyes see.

The pile of boxes had been kicked down the road for years.

Newly-landed in Philadelphia, Dorothy Roberts knew it was past time to deal with them. Her father, the creator of the boxes’ contents, was long gone, as was his wife. And so, steeling herself one afternoon, Roberts opened the first cardboard container.

She found paper – piles of fragile, yellowing, crisp-edged paper filled with words from an old-school typewriter. Each scrap represented her father’s life’s work.

In 1937, when he was a young man, Robert “Bob” Roberts began studying interracial marriage in the Chicago area, hoping to write a book. He knocked on doors, conducted interviews, and asked for referrals of similarly-paired friends. He met families and learned their stories in a project that his daughter believed was an “obsession” that sprang from his love of his wife, a Black Jamaican woman. The truth was, though, that his study had started long before Bob met Iris, long before they had three bi-racial daughters.

“Awestruck” by the volume of the work and the implications, Roberts kept reading.

She wasn’t surprised by the segregation most of the couples endured, but by the unique barriers they experienced. There were couples of all ages and “all walks of life,” each having crossed considerable “social boundaries.” Still, most had a community of support and many had memberships to clubs of like-minded people. 

Roberts was astounded by the backgrounds of the people in her father’s work, she says. She was pleased to see the friendships he cultivated through it. 

She was shocked and delighted to learn that her mother had also worked on the project…

Word to the wise: there are times when a books’ perceived subject can be a little misleading, even confusing. That goes doubly here.  

Though “The Mixed Marriage Project” contains a detailed overview of a lifetime of work, it’s just as much a memoir, which can be too much in two possible ways. Author Dorothy Roberts offers many personal stories and family history going back generations, mixed with thoughts on her father’s “project,” and the switching comes fast. So fast and frequent, in fact, that it can feel jarring in its unexpectedness.  Yes, you can subject-switch easy enough, but the overview seems repetitive and it sometimes bogs before you need to switch your mind back. Maintaining your attention can be challenging.

Still, as the child of a mixed-race marriage, Roberts has a lot to say and her thoughts are particularly meaningful in today’s world. Because of its bumps, this might be a hard book for you to read. In spite of them, “The Mixed Marriage Project” may make you smile.