Alabama Supreme Court

The Alabama Supreme Court is presented as a state institution whose decisions helped give legal force to racial hierarchy. Its 1882 ruling against Tony Pace and Mary Cox affirmed prison sentences for an interracial couple and treated their relationship as a danger to society. The episode places the court within a longer history of laws and official practices designed to suppress intimacy across racial lines, a history that still shaped Alabama when Walter McMillian met Karen Kelly more than a century later.

The 1882 ruling against Pace and Cox

In the 1880s, Tony Pace, a Black man, and Mary Cox, a white woman, fell in love in Alabama. They were arrested and convicted under the state’s racial-integrity laws, and each received a two-year prison sentence. John Tompkins, a lawyer who considered those laws unconstitutional, represented them on appeal. In 1882, the Alabama Supreme Court reviewed their case and affirmed the convictions.

The court’s explanation made the racial logic of the decision explicit. It declared that interracial adultery or fornication had a greater “evil tendency” because it might produce “a mongrel population and a degraded civilization.” The language did more than condemn the couple: it represented the preservation of racial separation as a matter of public policy and the highest interests of society and government. In the book’s account, the ruling turned a relationship between two people into a justification for enforcing a wider racial order.

From a state decision to broader precedent

The case did not end with the Alabama Supreme Court. The Supreme Court of the United States reviewed the decision and unanimously upheld Alabama’s restrictions on interracial sex and marriage, affirming the prison terms imposed on Pace and Cox. Its reliance on “separate but equal” reasoning anticipated the doctrine associated with Plessy v. Ferguson two decades later. The episode therefore shows how a state court’s enforcement of racial-integrity laws could receive the approval of the nation’s highest court.

After that federal decision, more states adopted laws making interracial marriage or sex illegal. The restrictions were enforced especially aggressively in the South, but they were not confined to it: Idaho, whose population was 99.8 percent nonblack, prohibited interracial marriage and sex between white and Black people in 1921. The book links these statutes to the post-slavery effort to preserve racial hierarchy, and to a broader pattern in which the policing of Black men’s intimacy with white women was treated by officials as part of their duty.

The long afterlife of racial-integrity laws

The Supreme Court of the United States did not strike down anti-miscegenation statutes until Loving v. Virginia in 1967. Even that landmark ruling did not immediately erase their local political legacy. When Walter McMillian met Karen Kelly in 1986, Alabama’s constitution still prohibited interracial marriage. Their relationship unfolded against a history in which fears of interracial sex and marriage had helped undermine Reconstruction, sustain Jim Crow laws, and animate racial politics across generations.

That history changed how Walter was perceived after he was subpoenaed to testify in a custody dispute involving Karen. He acknowledged that he was her friend, but the courtroom questions and the hostility that followed altered his reputation: he was no longer seen simply as a hardworking pulpwood man. The account situates this change within the long reach of legal and social efforts to prevent relationships like theirs. The Alabama Supreme Court’s 1882 ruling is an early, concrete instance of that reach, connecting an individual prosecution to a system that continued to shape public life long after the decision itself.