After they were married they decided to set up home in an all-white neighbourhood, but it was Patricia who actually had to transact the purchase of the house, as the couple knew the owners would never sell to a black man. THE CAREY’S DENIED But this was just one facet of Patricia and Alfred Carey’s struggles. Instead she had to pretend that she was single. For years after her daughter’s marriage, her mother’s feelings of shame were such that she kept their union a secret from the rest of the family, and Patricia was banned from bringing her black husband home for family gatherings. In Patricia Hickey’s case, she was disowned by her mother for her relationship with Alfred Roy Carey. Barely five years earlier in Mississippi, 14-year-old African American Emmett Till was brutally murdered after an alleged flirtation with a 21-year-old white woman, Carolyn Bryant. PATRICIA HICKEY & ALFRED ROY CAREY RUN THE RISK Interracial couplings were frowned upon within 1960s America, and many of those who dared to love across the race divide faced rejection, victimisation and sometimes violence. “I was in love with him, and I felt it was the right thing to do,” she recalled on The Oprah Winfrey Show. It was a decision that would have far reaching consequences for her and her family. IT WAS 1960, and Patricia Hickey - opera singer, vocal coach and soon-to-be-mother of music star Mariah Carey - was about to marry an African American named Alfred Roy Carey, an aeronautical engineer of Venezuelan ancestry.
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