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In the United States, anti-miscegenation laws existed from the colonial era through the 20th century, and they are bookended by two Virginia pieces of legislation: Virginia’s 1691 anti-miscegenation law, and Loving v. Virginia (1967).
In 1691, the colonial assembly of Virginia passed a law that was designed to prevent “that abominable mixture and spurious issue” of “negroes, mulattoes, and Indians intermarrying with English, or other white women.”<ref name="Virginia Laws of Servitude and Slavery"> (http://www.indiana.edu/~kdhist/H105-documents-web/week03/VAlaws1643.html).</ref> Any English or white woman who intermarried was banished from the colony. If she had a “bastard child by any negro or mulatto,” she had to pay fifteen pounds sterling to the church wardens of the parish within a month of giving birth. If she did not have fifteen pounds sterling, she was essentially indentured for five years until the debt had been paid.
Legislating interracial relationships suggested that they were illegitimate. Furthermore, legislating, for example, interracial fornication as a crime different from fornication, suggested that the interracial element made any crime more deviant. In North Carolina, where historian Kristen Fischer did her study of sexual slander cases, the most degrading insults against white women contained graphic descriptions of sex with black men or animals. In describing interracial sexual acts as especially perverse, slanderers implied that interracial sex transgressed a natural boundary. As a result, sexual slander cases in which race played a prominent role bolstered the racial hierarchy at the same time it reinforced sexual constraints on white women.
