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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.

Nevertheless, interracial relations occurred—sometimes of free will, and in many cases in the absence of it. Ironically, Thomas Jefferson, in his Notes on the State of Virginia wrote: “amalgamation with the other colour produces a degradation to which no lover of his country, no lover of excellence in the human character, can innocently consent.” This statement is ironic, because historical evidence suggests that Jefferson fathered several children with his slave, Sally Hemmings.

While laws against intermarriage in the East and South reflected the black-white binary, states in the west developed much more complicated and exclusive laws against intermarriage—representative of the uniquely diverse societies they were encountering.

Instead, the court ruled that there was no violation. Rather, the punishment was relative to the crime. Interracial fornication was a different, and more severe, crime than fornication; furthermore, it was not a violation of equal protection since the white party and the black party were both penalized equally.

Individual states were able to mobilize the Pace ruling in order to defend their anti-miscegenation laws through the first half of the 20th century. It was not until the California case Perez v. Sharp (1948) did individual states recognize their anti-miscegenation laws were at risk.

Even though the U.S. Supreme Court declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional, some states were slow to drop them, and some counties even refused to grant marriage licenses to interracial couples. It took approximately a decade for the implications of the Loving case to make their way through the United States. For all intents and purposes, it wasn’t until 2000 that Alabama actually removed its anti-miscegenation law from its books.

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[[Category:Wikis]]

[[Category:U.S. History]] [[Category:Race and Ethnicity]]

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