Tony Pace

Tony Pace appears in the book not through a detailed personal biography but as one half of an interracial couple whose prosecution exposes the legal machinery of racial control. In the 1880s, he and Mary Cox, a white woman, fell in love in Alabama. Their relationship became a criminal case: both were arrested, convicted of violating the state’s racial integrity laws, and sentenced to two years in prison. The account places their story within a much longer effort to prevent intimate relationships across racial lines and preserve white supremacy.

Identity and Historical Context

The available account identifies Tony as an African American man and Mary as a white woman; it gives no further biographical detail about either of them. Their relationship is presented as a real intimacy made punishable by law, not as an abstract constitutional dispute. In the aftermath of slavery, racial hierarchy and segregation were maintained in part by restricting relationships such as theirs. The term anti-miscegenation, coined in the 1860s by supporters of slavery to stoke fears of interracial sex and marriage, gave a name to a politics that treated racial mixing as a threat.

That politics carried institutional force. Across much of the South, law enforcement officials regarded investigating and punishing Black men who had been intimate with white women as part of their duty. The account connects such restrictions to the wider construction of racial integrity laws: after Reconstruction collapsed and white supremacy returned, these laws helped reestablish racial subordination. They also supplied justifications for the forced sterilization of poor and minority women. Pace and Cox’s prosecution therefore belonged to a system that sought to regulate intimacy as a means of maintaining racial order.

Arrest, Conviction, and Appeal

A small minority of white professionals considered racial integrity laws unconstitutional. John Tompkins, a lawyer who held that view, agreed to represent Pace and Cox in their appeal. In 1882, the Alabama Supreme Court affirmed their convictions. Its reasoning cast interracial sex as especially dangerous because it might produce racial amalgamation, which the court described as a threat to social and governmental interests. The ruling translated white-supremacist fear into the language of public policy and used that language to sustain the couple’s punishment.

The United States Supreme Court then reviewed the decision and unanimously upheld Alabama’s restrictions as well as the prison terms imposed on Pace and Cox. Its reasoning invoked a separate-but-equal rationale, anticipating language associated with Plessy v. Ferguson two decades later. The appeal thus failed to remove the state’s power to punish the couple; instead, the nation’s highest court affirmed that power and gave the restrictions further constitutional legitimacy.

Legal Afterlife and Narrative Significance

The consequences extended beyond Pace and Cox. After the United States Supreme Court’s decision, more states adopted racial integrity laws barring Black people—and in some cases Native American and Asian American people—from marrying or having sex with white people. The restrictions were enforced aggressively in the South but 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. Pace’s case thus stands within a national pattern, rather than as an isolated Alabama prosecution.

The book uses that history to show how the policing of interracial relationships endured alongside other forms of racial control. The United States Supreme Court did not finally strike down anti-miscegenation statutes until Loving v. Virginia in 1967. Alabama’s constitution still prohibited marriage between a white person and a Black person in 1986, when Walter McMillian met Karen Kelly. Pace’s case reaches the later narrative not because the book supplies a continuing personal story for him, but because the laws used against him illuminate the long history behind the suspicion and danger attached to Walter and Karen’s relationship. His prosecution makes visible a legal order in which private intimacy could be treated as a public threat—and in which courts at both the state and federal levels helped preserve that order.