The brouhaha over actress Nicollette Sheridan, star of “Desperate Housewives,” seducing Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver Terrell Owens in the locker room prior to a recent Monday Night Football game is taking on a life of its own. This uneasiness over the commercial for one of ABC’s hottest shows extends beyond what is appropriate viewing on network television. It goes to the core of White supremacists’ greatest fear – a sexual union between a Black man and a White woman.

America has never had a problem with interracial liaisons as long as they were confined to White men and Black women. Thomas Jefferson and the late Sen. Senator Strom Thurmond, a longtime segregationist from South Carolina, are but two examples. And although Americans now show far more tolerance toward interracial romance, opposition to the idea dates back to the earliest days of this country.

A 1691 Virginia law provided: “Whatsoever white man or woman being free shall intermarry with a negro shall be committed to prison for six months without bail, pay 10 pounds to the use of the parish. Ministers marrying such persons shall pay 10,000 pounds of tobacco.”

Writing in his excellent book, “In the Matter of Color,” A. Leon Higginbotham Jr. noted that if a free Black man had sexual relations with a White woman in South Carolina during the Colonial period, he would automatically lose his freedom.

Gunnar Myrdal, in his landmark study, “American Dilemma,” published in 1944, wrote about the South’s “fixation on the purity of white womanhood.” He said, “The South has an obsession with sex which helps to make this region quite irrational in dealing with Negroes generally…”

The book, “100 Years of Lynchings,” a collection of newspaper articles edited by Ralph Ginzburg, carries numerous articles that illustrate that irrationality.

On April 10, 1912, the Montgomery Advertiser in Alabama carried a story from Shreveport, La. that stated, “Tom Miles, a negro, aged 29, was hanged to a tree here and his body filled with bullets early today. He had been tried in police court yesterday on a charge of writing insulting notes to a white girl, employed in a department store, but was acquitted for lack of proof.”

The Chicago Defender carried a story datelined Feb. 26, 1915 from Cedar Keys, Fla. that stated, “Young Reed, Negro, of Kissimee, was shot to death by a white mob at Wednesday noon after he had been seen kissing a white woman named Belle Mann with whom he had been keeping company for the past two years.”

On April 1, 1916, the Birmingham Voice published a story with a Cedar Bluff, Miss. dateline. It noted that Jeff Brown was lynched after he tried to board a moving freight train. The paper explained, “He started on the run to board the moving train. On the sidewalk was the daughter of a white farmer. Brown accidentally brushed against her and she screamed. A gang quickly formed and ran after him, jerking him off the moving train. He was beaten into insensibility and then hung to a tree. The sheriff has made no attempt to find out who the members of the mob were. Picture cards of the body are being sold on the streets at five cents apiece.”

In 1955, Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy, was murdered in Mississippi for allegedly whistling at a White woman. He was beaten, shot in the head and thrown into the Tallahatchie River. The two White defendants who later admitted killing Till were acquitted by an all-White jury.

Three years later, in Monroe, N.C., two Black boys – Fuzzy Simpson, age 7, and Hanover Thompson, age 9, were invited to join a group of five White children, including two girls. One of the girls remembered that she had played with Hanover when his mother worked as a maid in her family’s house. Overjoyed at being reunited with her old playmate, she kissed him on the cheek. According to Randall Kennedy, who recounts the incident in his book, “Interracial Intimacies,” when the girl innocently told her mother, the two boys were arrested and convicted of attempted rape. The Juvenile Court sentenced Fuzzy to 12 years in jail and Hanover to 14. Because of a public outcry, President Eisenhower persuaded the governor to intervene.

Generally, America has never been comfortable at the sight a Black male with a White female. So when Nicollette Sheridan shed her towel and jumped into the arms of Terrell Owens, she exposed much more than her body.