BANS ON INTERRACIAL MARRIAGE

In the earliest days of the American colonies, enslaved Black people and white indentured servants worked together and intermarried. But as slavery developed into a lifelong status tied to race, wealthy landowners built a legal and social racial hierarchy to secure and justify the system of slavery, and to prevent poor white people from joining with enslaved Black people in revolution. One key step in establishing Black people as legally inferior and separate from white people was to legally ban interracial marriage between Black and white people. The first “anti-miscegenation” laws, like one passed in Virginia in 1691, pre-dated the Revolutionary War and persisted until struck down by the Supreme Court in 1967.

Northern and Southern states alike passed anti-miscegenation laws during the colonial era and the first decades of the United States’s existence. By the start of the Civil War in 1861, 28 states had interracial marriage bans and seven more states passed bans during the war. Regional differences became more pronounced after the war’s end.

Most Northern states repealed their bans by 1887, but Mississippi, South Carolina, Louisiana, Alabama, and West Virginia passed their first anti- miscegenation laws after the Civil War, and Georgia, North Carolina, Maryland, Missouri, Kentucky, Florida, Arkansas, Tennessee, Texas, and Delaware amended existing laws to strengthen restrictions and authorize prison sentences as punishment. Western states also broadened bans to include marriage between white people and growing communities of Asian immigrant laborers.

Notably, interracial marriage bans did not proscribe or punish the widespread rape of Black women and other women of color by white men during or after slavery. Loving interracial couples were prosecuted and imprisoned throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, and hints of progress were fleeting. In 1948, California courts struck down the state’s interracial marriage ban, but that same year in Ellisville, Mississippi, Davis Knight was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison for marrying a white woman after a trial court determined his great-grandmother had been “a known Negro.”

As civil rights activism grew, segregationists intensified opposition to interracial marriage. “If you have integration, first you have kids going to school together,” said Mayor Orville Hubbard of Dearborn, Michigan, in the 1960s. “[T]hen next thing you know, they’re grab-assing around, then they’re getting married and having half-breed kids. Then you wind up with a mongrel race. And from what I know of history, that’s the end of civilization.”

In 1958, a Black woman named Mildred Jeter and a white man named Richard Loving married in Washington, DC. When they returned to their Virginia home, they were arrested and ordered to leave the state or face imprisonment. The Lovings complied, but challenged their convictions in court. In 1967, the Supreme Court struck down anti-miscegenation laws as “measures designed to maintain white supremacy” and declared marriage a fundamental right for interracial couples.

Despite the legal victory, 72 percent of Americans opposed the decision, and many states resisted the ruling for decades. South Carolina and Alabama retained their bans until 1998 and 2000, long after they were unenforceable, and even then, 38 and 40 percent of voters opposed repealing these laws.

To establish Black people as legally inferior and separate from white people, interracial marriage was banned.