Miscegenation laws in the U.S.

State miscegenation laws were examples of explicit racial discrimination in US statutory law; they criminalized and penalized the unions of persons of differing racial heritages and denied legal legitimacy to mixed-race children born to such interracial couples.

Thirty-eight US states at one time had miscegenation laws in force; seven of those thirty-eight repealed their laws before 1900. All southern states (not including the District of Columbia) had miscegenation statutes. Many western states (including Arizona, California, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, and Wyoming), in addition to forbidding intermarriage between Black people and White people, also specifically prohibited unions between White people and American Indians or White individuals and Asian Americans. Penalties upon conviction varied from a maximum imprisonment of more than two years in most of the South and some other states (ten years in Florida, Indiana, Maryland, Mississippi, and North Carolina) to sentences ranging between a few months and two years in other states. Enforcement of the laws was random and irregular.

The key case in ending miscegenation laws was Loving v. Virginia (1967). At the time that the US Supreme Court heard the Loving case, sixteen states still had miscegenation laws in force. Virginia’s laws dealing with racial intermarriage were among the nation’s oldest. They stemmed from statutes formulated in the colonial period (1691) and had been strengthened by more stringent miscegenation legislation passed in the mid-1920s in which whiteness was very narrowly defined. The codes that became law in 1924 were aimed primarily at discriminating against people of mixed African American and White heritage and/or of American Indian background.

In the Loving case, Richard Perry Loving, who was White, had married Mildred Delores Jester, who was African American, in Washington, DC, in June 1958. The Lovings made their home between Fredericksburg and Richmond in Caroline County, Virginia. They were issued warrants of arrest in July 1958, and in January 1959, they were convicted before the Caroline County court of violating Virginia’s anti-miscegenation statute. Their minimum sentences (of one year imprisonment each) were suspended on agreement that they would leave the state. They moved to Washington, DC, until 1963, when they returned to their farm in Virginia and worked with attorneys Bernard Cohen and Philip Hirschkop of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), who placed their case under appeal. The miscegenation law and the Lovings’ convictions were upheld by the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals in March 1966, but in June 1967, the US Supreme Court overruled the appellate finding. The Supreme Court ruled that use of race as a basis for prohibiting marriage rights was unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection and due process provisions. The ruling nullified all remaining laws forbidding interracial marriage. Prior to the unanimous 1967 ruling, the US Supreme Court had taken a conservative approach to this civil rights issue. It had repeatedly avoided reviewing lower court convictions based on state anti-miscegenation laws (Jackson v. Alabama, 1954; Naim v. Naim, 1955; McLaughlin v. Florida, 1964).

Bibliography

Kennedy, Randall. Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption. New York: Vintage, 2004. Print.

Kenley, David L. "Antimiscegenation Laws." Asian American History and Culture: An Encyclopedia. Ed. Allan W. Austin and Huping Ling. Armonk: Routledge, 2014. 18–20. Print.

"Loving v. Virginia." Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School, 2020, www.law.cornell.edu/wex/loving_v_virginia_(1967). Accessed 7 Mar. 2025.

Maillard, Kevin Noble, and Rose Cuison Villazor. Loving vs. Virginia in a Post-Racial World: Rethinking Race, Sex, and Marriage. New York: Cambridge UP, 2012. Print.

Paulson, Sara. "Act to Prohibit the Intermarriage of Races, 1866." Oregon History Project. Oregon Historical Soc., 2006. Web. 30 Apr. 2015.

Provost, Nyla. "Mixing: A History of Anti-Miscegenation Laws in the United States." History in the Making, vol. 16, no. 7, 2023, scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1284&context=history-in-the-making. Accessed 4 Mar. 2025.