Pace v. Alabama was an 1882 case in which Alabama’s highest court affirmed the convictions of Tony Pace and Mary Cox for an interracial relationship, and the Supreme Court of the United States unanimously upheld the state’s restrictions. The case turned private intimacy into a matter of criminal law: its judgments treated interracial relationships not as equal claims to personal freedom, but as threats to a racial hierarchy the law was built to preserve.

Background: Intimacy and racial hierarchy

The case emerged from a long effort to control relationships across racial lines. After the Civil War, the dismantling of Reconstruction and the return of white supremacy brought racially restrictive laws that sought to reestablish African Americans’ subordination. Anti-miscegenation statutes prohibited interracial sex and marriage; the word miscegenation itself entered public use in the 1860s, coined by slavery’s supporters to stoke fear of racial mixing if slavery ended. In many Southern communities, officials treated the investigation and punishment of Black men intimate with white women as part of law enforcement’s duty.

These laws were not simply a prohibition on marriage. They helped maintain a system of racial separation and hierarchy, and racial-integrity laws were also used to justify the forced sterilization of poor and minority women. The legal anxiety around interracial relationships thus belonged to a broader political project: the regulation of bodies and families in order to preserve racial subordination.

The Alabama case and appeal

In the 1880s, Tony Pace and Mary Cox fell in love in Alabama. They were arrested, convicted of violating the state’s racial-integrity laws, and each sentenced to two years in prison. John Tompkins, one of a small minority of white professionals who considered those laws unconstitutional, agreed to represent them on appeal.

In 1882, the Alabama Supreme Court affirmed the convictions. Its reasoning cast interracial intimacy as a danger to society and government, arguing that relations between people of different races could lead to racial amalgamation and a degraded civilization. This was not a neutral application of a rule: the court’s language made the preservation of racial separation itself the justification for punishment. The state’s highest court thereby endorsed the premise that consensual intimacy across racial lines could be criminalized to defend a racial order.

The Supreme Court ruling and its reach

The Supreme Court of the United States unanimously upheld Alabama’s restrictions and the prison terms imposed on Pace and Cox. Its use of separate-but-equal reasoning foreshadowed Plessy v. Ferguson, decided two decades later. The decision helped legitimize the restrictions beyond Alabama: other states passed racial-integrity laws barring African Americans, and sometimes Native Americans and Asian Americans, from marrying or having sex with white people. Such laws were aggressively enforced in the South but also existed in the Midwest and West. Idaho, for example, prohibited interracial marriage and sex between white and Black people in 1921, although 99.8 percent of its population was non-Black.

The decision’s influence endured for generations, but it was not the final word. In 1967, the Supreme Court of the United States struck down anti-miscegenation statutes in Loving v. Virginia. Even after that landmark ruling, Alabama’s constitution still prohibited interracial marriage in 1986, when Walter McMillian met Karen Kelly. The persistence of that clause showed how a constitutional ruling could end a legal regime nationally without instantly erasing its local political and social legacy.

The case in the book’s broader history

The book places Pace v. Alabama within a continuing history in which formal legal rules and everyday institutions could reinforce racial hierarchy. In a later Alabama capital case, for instance, Black residents’ access to juries remained restricted through racially discriminatory peremptory strikes, despite earlier constitutional protections. Batson v. Kentucky, decided in 1986, offered a more direct way to challenge such strikes, but the account makes clear that a new legal remedy did not itself end exclusion. These developments were distinct from Pace v. Alabama, yet together they illustrate the distance between declaring equality and changing how power operates in courtrooms.

The case also clarifies why the book treats racial control over intimacy as more than a historical curiosity. The law once punished Tony Pace and Mary Cox for crossing a racial boundary that the state claimed it had to preserve; decades later, Alabama’s constitution still carried that prohibition even after the national legal barrier had fallen. Pace v. Alabama stands as an example of how racial hierarchy was made enforceable through law—and how its legacy could outlast the ruling that gave it national authority.