Anti-miscegenation laws
Laws banning interracial marriage were enforced in several US states until 1967, in Nazi Germany and in South Africa during the Apartheid era.
United States
In the United States, anti-miscegenation laws (also known as miscegenation laws) were passed by individual states to prohibit miscegenation, nowadays more commonly referred to as interracial marriage. Although an Anti-Miscegenation Amendment was proposed in United States Congress in 1912 and 1913, [1] a nation-wide law against racially mixed marriages was never enacted. From the 19th century into the 1950s, most US states enforced anti-miscegenation laws. From 1913 to 1948, 30 out of the then 48 states did so. In 1967, the United States Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Loving v. Virginia that anti-miscegenation laws are unconstitutional. With this ruling, these laws were no longer in effect in the remaining 16 states that at the time still enforced them.
The term miscegenation, a word invented by American journalists to discredit the Abolitionist movement by stirring up debate over the prospect of white-black intermarriage after the abolition of slavery, was first coined in 1863, during the American Civil War. Yet in British North America laws banning the intermarriage of whites and blacks were enacted as far back as the late seventeenth century. During the colonial era, Virginia (1691) was the first colony in British North America to pass a law forbidding free blacks and whites to intermarry. This was the first time in world history that a law was invented that restricted access to marriage partners solely on the basis of "race", not class or servitude. [2]
In the 18th, 19th, and early 20th century, many American states passed anti-miscegenation laws, which were often defended by invoking controversial interpretations of the Bible, particularly the story of Phinehas. Typically defining miscegenation as a felony, these laws prohibited the solemnization of weddings between persons of different races and prohibited the officiating of such ceremonies. Sometimes the individuals attempting to marry would not be held guilty of miscegenation itself, but felony charges of adultery or fornication would be brought against them instead.
While this aspect of the U.S. history is often discussed in the context of the South, many northern states had anti-miscegenation as well. In 1776, 7 out of the Thirteen Colonies that declared their independence enforced laws against interracial marriage. Some of these laws were repealed after independence. However, as the US expanded, similar laws were enacted by all the new slave states as well as many new free states such such as Illinois[1] and California[2]. A number of northern and western states repealed them during the nineteenth century. This, however, did little to halt anti-miscegenation sentiments in the rest of the country. Newly established western states continued to enact laws banning interracial marriage in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Between 1913 and 1948, 30 out of the then 48 states enforced anti-miscegenation laws. [3] Only Connecticut, New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, Vermont, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Alaska, Hawaii, and the federal District of Columbia never enacted them.
Anti-miscegenation laws repealed until 1887
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Anti-miscegenation laws repealed 1948-1967
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Anti-Miscegenation Laws and the US Constitution
The constitutionality of anti-miscegenation laws was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1883 case Pace v. Alabama. The Supreme Court ruled that the Alabama anti-miscegenation statute did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. According to the court, both races were treated equally, because whites and blacks were punished in equal measure for breaking the law against interracial marriage. This judgment was overturned in 1967 in the Loving v. Virginia case, where the Supreme Court declared anti-miscegenation laws a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment and therefore unconstitutional.
Proposed Anti-Miscegenation Amendments
In 1871, Andrew King was the first politician in Congress to proposed a Constitutional Amendment to make interracial marriage illegal nation-wide. King proposed this amendment because he feared that the Fourteenth Amendment, enacted in 1866 to give equal political rights to the emanicpated ex-slaves as part of the process of Reconstruction, would render laws against interracial marriage unconstitutional.
In 1912, and again in 1913, Representative Seaborn Roddenbery (Democrat of Georgia) again introduced a proposal in the United States House of Representatives to insert a prohibition of miscegenation into the US Constitution and thus create a nation-wide ban on interracial marriage. According of the proposed amendment, "Intermarriage between negros or persons of color and Caucasians... within the United States... is forever prohibited." Roddenbery's proposal was more severe because it aimed to defined the racial boundary between whites and "persons of color" by applying a one-drop rule. In his propsed amendment, anyone with "any trace of African or Negro" blood was banned from marrying a white spouse.
Roddenbery's proposed amendment was a racist reaction to African American heavyweight champion Jack Johnson's marriages to white women, first to Etta Duryea and then to Lucille Cameron. In 1908, Johnson had become the first black boxing world champion, having beaten Tommy Burns. After his victory, the search was on for a white boxer, a "Great White hope", to beat him. Those hopes were dashed in 1912, When Johnson beat former world champion Jim Jeffries. This victory ignited race riots all over America as frustrated whites attacked celebrating African Americans [Rust and Rust, 1985, p.147]. Johnson's marriages to and affairs with white women further infuriated white Americans. In his bill before the United States Congress, Roddenbery likened the marriage of Johnson and Cameron to the enslavement of white women, and warned of future violence that would ensue if interracial marriage was not made illegal nationwide:
"No brutality, no outrage, no degradation in all the years of Southern slavery, possessed such villainous character and such atrocious qualities as the prevision of the laws of Illinois, Massachusetts, and other states which allow the marriage of the negro, Jack Johnson, to a woman of Caucasian strain. ... Intermarriage between whites and blacks is repulsive and averse to every sentiment of pure American spirit. It is abhorrent and repugnant to the very principles of Saxon government. It is subversive of social peace. It is destructive of moral supremacy, and ultimately this slavery of white women to black beasts will bring this nation a conflict as fatal as ever reddened the soil of Virginia or crimsoned the mountain paths of Pennsylvania."
Spurred on by Roddenbery's introduction of the anti-miscegenation amendment, politicians in half of the 18 states lacking anti-miscegenation laws proposed their enactment. However, Wyoming was the only state lacking such a law that then actually enacted one. [citation needed] Also in 1913, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which had abolished its miscegenation law in 1843, enacted a measure that prevented couples who could not marry in their home state from marrying in Massachusetts.
In 1928, Senator Coleman Blease proposed an amendment that went beyond the previous ones because it required that Congress set a punishment for interracial couples attempting to get married and for people performing an interracial marriage.
The repeal of Anti-miscegenation laws, 1948-1967
The constitutionality of anti-miscegenation laws only began to be widely called into question after the Second World War. In 1948, the California Supreme Court in Perez v. Sharp ruled that the Californian anti-miscegenation statute violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution and was therefore unconstitutional. This made California the first state in the twentieth century to repeal its anti-miscegenation law.
In a number of states, state laws banning interracial marriage were repealed after Perez v. Sharp. But it would be nearly two decades more before these laws were struck down nationwide. In 1965, Virginia trial court Judge Leon Bazile sentenced to jail an interracial couple from Virginia who had married in Washington, D.C. for living as a married couple in Virginia, writing:
Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow,and red, and he placed them on separate continents. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.[3]
This decision was eventually overturned in 1967, 84 years after Pace v. Alabama, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Loving v. Virginia that:
Marriage is one of the 'basic civil rights of man,' fundamental to our very existence and survival.... To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not to marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.
In 1967, 17 Southern states (all the former slave states plus Oklahoma) still enforced laws prohibiting interracial marriage. Maryland repealed its law in response to the start of the proceedings at the Supreme Court. After the ruling of the Supreme Court, the remaining laws were no longer in effect. Nonetheless, it took South Carolina until 1998 and Alabama until 2000 to officially remove defunct anti-miscegenation laws from their law books. In the respective referendums, 62% of voters in South Carolina and 59% of voters in Alabama voted to remove these laws.[4]
South Africa
South Africa’s Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, passed in 1949 under Apartheid, forbade marriages between whites and non-whites. Non-whites were classified as Coloureds, Asians and Blacks. The next year, the Immorality Act was passed, which made it a criminal offense for a white person to have any sexual relations with a person of a different race. Both Acts were repealed in 1985.
Germany
In Germany, an anti-miscegenation law was enacted by the National Socialist government in September 1935 as part of the Nuremberg Laws. The Gesetz zum Schutze des deutschen Blutes und der deutschen Ehre (Protection of German Blood and German Honor Act) forbade marriage and extra-marital sexual relations between persons of Jewish origin and persons of “German or related blood”. Such intercourse was marked as Rassenschande (lit. race-disgrace) and could be punished by imprisonment (usually followed by the deportation to a concentration camp) and even by death. The laws were discarded in September 1945.
Footnotes
"Jack Johnson and White Women: The National Impact", Al-Tony Gilmore, Journal of Negro History (Vol. 58, No. 1, 18-38, Jan., 1973).
See also
- Miscegenation
- Jim Crow laws
- Nuremberg laws
- 1913 law
- Racial Integrity Act of 1924
- Pace v. Alabama
- Loving v. Virginia
- One drop rule
- Hypodescent
External links
Anti-miscegenation laws overturned on 12 June 1967 by Loving v. Virginia
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- ^ Steiner, Mark. http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jala/16.2/steiner.html “The Lawyer as Peacemaker: Law and Community in Abraham Lincoln’s Slander Cases”] enacted such laws<The History Cooperative
- ^ enacted similar anti-miscegenation laws.“Chinese Laborers in the West”Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program
- ^ Tucker, Neely (June 13, 2006). “Loving Day Recalls a Time When the Union of a Man And a Woman Was Banned”. Washington Post.