Ban on anti-miscegenation laws

The Ban on anti-miscegenation laws ended states’ authority to criminalize interracial marriage, but it did not immediately erase the racial hierarchy those laws had been built to defend. The book presents the ban as both a landmark constitutional change and a limited legal victory: the Supreme Court struck down the prohibitions in 1967, while Alabama kept its own ban on the books until voters removed it in 2000.

Origins and Purpose

After slavery, restrictions on intimacy between Black men and white women helped reinforce a racial order that had been designed to prevent relationships such as that between Walter McMillian and Karen Kelly. The term miscegenation entered use in the 1860s, when supporters of slavery promoted fears of interracial sex and marriage. After federal troops left Alabama in the 1870s, white supremacy and racial subordination rapidly returned; racially restrictive laws helped reestablish that hierarchy and strip African Americans of rights. The prohibitions did more than regulate marriage: in many Southern communities, law enforcement officials treated investigating and punishing Black men who had been intimate with white women as part of their duty.

Virginia’s 1924 Racial Integrity Act exemplified the reach of this legal order. It authorized forced sterilization of Black women considered defective or dangerous and criminalized marriage between a Black person and a white person. The book connects such laws to the broader project of reproducing racial hierarchy after slavery, including the coercive control of poor and minority women’s lives.

The Lovings’ Challenge

Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter, a young couple from Caroline County, Virginia, decided to marry after learning that Mildred was pregnant. Because marriage was illegal for them in Virginia, they went to Washington, D.C., to marry. Homesick, they returned to Caroline County to live near their families. Some weeks later, after word of the marriage reached local authorities, the sheriff and several armed deputies entered their home in the middle of the night and arrested them for miscegenation.

The Lovings pleaded guilty and were told their prison sentences would be suspended if they left the county and did not return for at least twenty-five years. They fled Virginia, then chose to contest the law with assistance from the American Civil Liberties Union. After years of defeats in lower courts, their case reached the Supreme Court of the United States. In 1967, the Court struck down miscegenation laws as unconstitutional, removing the legal basis for states to punish couples for interracial marriage.

Legal Change and Its Limits

The decision established a federal constitutional barrier to these marriage prohibitions, but state-level repeal could lag behind the change in enforceable law. Alabama’s ban continued into the twenty-first century even though federal law prevented its enforcement. In 2000, reformers secured a statewide vote to remove it. A majority voted for repeal, but 41 percent voted to keep the ban, revealing the persistence of support for the prohibition long after the Supreme Court had invalidated such laws.

That persistence also appeared in public opinion elsewhere. A 2011 poll of Mississippi Republicans found that 46 percent supported a legal ban on interracial marriage, 40 percent opposed one, and 14 percent were undecided. The figures do not describe a law in force; they show that constitutional invalidation and the disappearance of the beliefs behind a law are not the same event.

Continuing Social Consequences

The book places the ban’s history alongside the social suspicion that continued to surround interracial intimacy. When Walter received a subpoena to testify at a custody hearing involving Karen and her husband, he knew his association with her could bring serious trouble. He acknowledged being her friend, but the courtroom confrontation and the anger he encountered afterward changed how others regarded him: he was no longer seen principally as a hardworking pulpwood man, but as something more threatening. The episode shows how racialized fears of sex and marriage could shape a person’s standing even apart from a prosecution under an anti-miscegenation statute.

The prohibition’s significance therefore lies both in what the 1967 ruling made unconstitutional and in what it could not instantly undo. The laws had helped organize racial hierarchy through the regulation of intimate life; ending their legal force did not by itself dissolve the prejudices or public support that had sustained them.