Mary Cox

Mary Cox was a white woman who fell in love with Tony Pace, an African American man, in Alabama in the 1880s. Their relationship brought both of them under the state’s racial-integrity laws: they were arrested, convicted, and sentenced to two years in prison. The courts upheld those punishments, making Cox’s case an example of how the law turned interracial intimacy into a crime and reinforced a racial hierarchy.

Identity and Case

Cox appears in the account through her relationship with Pace and the prosecution that followed it. A few years before lynching became a standard response to interracial romance, she and Pace were arrested for violating Alabama’s restrictions. The account identifies them as having fallen in love; it does not provide further biographical details about Cox or describe the circumstances of their arrest.

Both were convicted and received the same sentence: two years in prison. Their prosecution treated the relationship itself as an offense against the state’s racial order, rather than as a private bond between two people.

Appeal and Judicial Rulings

A lawyer agreed to represent Cox and Pace on appeal, challenging the constitutionality of the racial-integrity laws. In 1882, the Alabama Supreme Court affirmed their convictions. Its reasoning cast interracial intimacy as a threat to society and government, invoking the fear that relationships between people of different races would produce a mixed-race population and a degraded civilization.

The Supreme Court of the United States then reviewed the decision and unanimously upheld Alabama’s restrictions on interracial sex and marriage, along with the prison terms imposed on Cox and Pace. The Court used “separate but equal” language, giving constitutional approval to a law that punished the couple for their relationship.

Historical Significance

Cox’s case formed part of a broader legal system that sought to preserve racial hierarchy by forbidding intimacy across racial lines. After Reconstruction collapsed and white supremacy returned in Alabama, restrictive laws helped reestablish the subordination of African Americans. Across the South, prohibitions on interracial sex and marriage became a particular preoccupation, and officials treated their enforcement as a legitimate part of law enforcement.

The ruling in Cox and Pace’s case helped encourage other states to enact similar restrictions. Such laws also appeared in the Midwest and West, not only in the South; Idaho, for example, prohibited interracial marriage and sex between white and black people in 1921, despite a population that was 99.8 percent nonblack. The Supreme Court did not finally strike down anti-miscegenation statutes until 1967, in Loving v. Virginia. Cox’s punishment thus stands within a long history in which the state used criminal law to police interracial relationships.