USA's Anti-Miscegenation Laws

[mcgillianaire]

Anti-miscegenation laws were laws that banned interracial marriage and sometimes interracial sex between whites and members of other races. In the Thirteen Colonies laws banning the intermarriage of whites and blacks were enacted as far back as the late 17th-century. Typically defining miscegenation as a felony, these laws prohibited the solemnization of weddings between persons of different races. All anti-miscegenation laws banned the marriage of whites and non-white groups, primarily blacks, but often also Native Americans and Asians. In many states, anti-miscegenation laws also criminalized cohabitation and sex between whites and non-whites. In addition, the state of Oklahoma in 1908 banned marriage "between a person of African descent" and "any person not of African descent", and Kentucky and Louisiana in 1932 banned marriage between Native Americans and African Americans. While anti-miscegenation laws are often regarded as a Southern phenomenon, many northern states had anti-miscegenation laws as well. Although anti-miscegenation amendments were proposed in United States Congress in 1871, 1912-1913 and 1928, a nation-wide law against racially mixed marriages was never enacted.

Until the 1950s, most states enforced anti-miscegenation laws. From 1913 to 1948, 30 out of the then 48 states did so. In 1967, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Loving v. Virginia that anti-miscegenation laws are unconstitutional. With this ruling, these laws were no longer in effect in the remaining 16 states that at the time still enforced them.

TRIVIA: When Barack Obama's parents got married in Hawaii in 1961, it was a felony in most of America!