African American life in the U.S. is primarily depicted as a struggle devoid of romantic love rather than a radical act of living, liberation, and loving families. Under the tyranny of colonization, slavery, Jim Crow, and simple everyday life, how do we have time for love?

As a people who are rightly focused on freedom, I’ve been asked whether we have the capacity for love. Also, bombarded by the iconography of negative images and racial tropes on multimedia platforms as emasculating females, mammies, and welfare mothers as Black women and “super-predators,” pimps, and roving phalluses as Black males, the perception is Black people don’t engage in romance or love — we simply have sex. We make babies.

The 22-foot-tall sculpture The Embrace, in the Boston Common, symbolizes the strength of Black love. It symbolizes the love of a power couple and the hug Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King shared after Dr. King won the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize.

Two activities converged for me during COVID-19: When not officiating funerals, I read romance novels and took long walks along the Charles River, thinking about W. E. B. Du Bois as a romantic.

During my morning constitutional, I intentionally passed 20 Flagg Street, where sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois, the first African American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard University, resided from 1890 to 1893 while a doctoral student because the university’s segregation policy prohibited housing Blacks in the dorms. Since 1994, thanks to then Mayor Ken Reeves, the first gay and Black mayor of Cambridge, the house is part of the Cambridge African American Heritage Trail, and the Cambridge Historical Commission placed a marker on the front yard to commemorate Du Bois’s life.

During COVID, I happened upon a romantic novel by Du Bois titled “Dark Princess, A Romance Novel.” I was in disbelief. Du Bois said that of his body of works, “Dark Princess, A Romance Novel” was his favorite. Because the book was on sale on Amazon as a Kindle ebook for $2.99, I thought to myself, what did I have to lose? Moreover, the thought of Du Bois having written a romance novel didn’t fit the image of the man I learned about in college. He’s the man who gives us the concept of “double consciousness” in his 1903 seminal and autoethnographic text, “The Souls of Black Folk.”

“Dark Princess” was written in 1924 during the Harlem Renaissance. The novel was Du Bois’s effort to showcase Black love while illustrating his concept of the “problem of the color line” at home and abroad and the need for solidarity across races. While the book shows that Black and brown lives are globally and constantly challenged, it also highlights that we must find time for joy, love and celebration as radical acts of liberation.

African Americans have always had a tenuous relationship with the institution of marriage, a symbol of our love. Therefore, one can argue that the topic of marriage equality in the U.S. has always been a Black issue. But Black love has always existed despite obstacles to prevent it.

For example, marriages of enslaved African Americans were prohibited by both church and state in this country until the end of the Civil War in 1865 because they were viewed as property and not human beings. But we created our own rituals to signify and honor their nuptials — jumping over the broom.

Mildred Loving, the plaintiff in Loving v. Virginia (1967) who’s often overlooked in the pantheon of African American trailblazers celebrated in February during Black History Month, gained notoriety when the U.S. Supreme Court decided in her favor that anti-miscegenation laws are unconstitutional. Her crime was this country’s racial and gender obsession — interracial marriage. Married to a white man, Loving and her husband were indicted by a Virginia grand jury in October 1958 for violating the state’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which was the same year Du Bois’s novel appeared.

Also, Loving understood the interconnection of struggles and supported the same-sex marriage fight. Today, we are free to love and marry whom we want. Black LGBT+ couples carry on the tradition of the tenacity of Black love.

Since the beheading of St. Valentine in Rome in the year 270 A.D., marriage has been controlled by heads of the church and the state and not by the hearts of lovers. When Emperor Claudius II issued an edict abolishing marriage because married men hated to leave their families for battle, Valentine, known then as the “friend to lovers,” secretly joined them in holy matrimony. While awaiting his execution, Valentine fell in love with the jailer’s daughter, and in his farewell message to his lover, he wrote, “From your Valentine.”

Happy Valentine’s Day!

The Reverend Monroe is an ordained minister, religion columnist, and motivational speaker. As an African American feminist theologian, she speaks for an often invisible sector of society.