It’s hard to believe 50 years have passed since the Supreme Court legalized interracial marriage in the United States. That unanimous decision, handed down on June 12, 1967, is known as Loving v. Virginia.
Oyez has these details.
In 1958, two residents of Virginia, Mildred Jeter, a black woman, and Richard Loving, a white man, were married in the District of Columbia. The Lovings returned to Virginia shortly thereafter. The couple was then charged with violating the state's anti-miscegenation statute, which banned inter-racial marriages. The Lovings were found guilty and sentenced to a year in jail (the trial judge agreed to suspend the sentence if the Lovings would leave Virginia and not return for 25 years). [...]
In a unanimous decision, the Court held that distinctions drawn according to race were generally "odious to a free people" and were subject to "the most rigid scrutiny" under the Equal Protection Clause. The Virginia law, the Court found, had no legitimate purpose "independent of invidious racial discrimination." The Court rejected the state's argument that the statute was legitimate because it applied equally to both blacks and whites and found that racial classifications were not subject to a "rational purpose" test under the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court also held that the Virginia law violated the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. "Under our Constitution," wrote Chief Justice Earl Warren, "the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual, and cannot be infringed by the State."
The case is more complicated than has been commonly understood, since Mildred Jeter identified as Native American.
At approximately 2 a.m. on July 11, 1958, Sheriff R. Garnett Brooks and his deputies barged into the couple’s bedroom. “What are you doing in bed with this woman?” Brooks barked as he shined his flashlight on the startled couple. Mildred responded, “I’m his wife.” She pointed to the framed marriage license displayed on the dresser. The document read: “Richard Perry Loving, white, Mildred Delores Jeter, Indian.”
The impact of the decision has also affected contemporary struggles for marriage equality in the LGBT community. Data shows that since 1967, more marriages are taking place between people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds.
People in many communities across the United States will be celebrating “Loving Day” on or around June 12. I will be one of them.
When I think of my own family history, I know all too well the obstacles faced by my grandparents who could not be married legally where they were living. However, I look at my extended family now, and not only am I in an inter-ethnic marriage (my husband is Puerto Rican), but I have a black cousin married to a Korean-American, two white cousins who married Filipinas, and one who is married to an Indonesian. I have numerous friends who are in these “mixed marriages” or who are the children of mixed parents.
That these relationships are legal doesn’t mean that they are viewed as acceptable in certain quarters, even after Barack Obama, the most high-profile child of one such marriage, was elected to the highest office in the land. The increasingly vocal racial and ethnic animus whipped to a frenzy by the current occupant of the White House and other (mostly Republican) elected officials does not bode well for interracial harmony. But these attitudes predate Trump. In 2011, The Atlantic posted an article titled “Poll: 46 Percent of Mississippi GOP Want to Ban Interracial Marriage.”
So the liberal-leaning Public Policy Polling outfit posed a revealing question to Mississippi Republicans in their latest survey: "Do you think interracial marriage should be legal or illegal?"
Shockingly, 46 percent of the state's GOP voters replied "illegal." 14 percent bizarrely responded "not sure." That means about 60 percent of these Southern Republicans are hearkening back to a time--1958 to be exact--when the American mainstream overwhelmingly looked down on people with different shades of skin getting married.
As recently as 2009, Louisiana justice of the peace Keith Bardwell refused to marry a black-white couple. Peggy Pascoe, a professor of history and ethnic studies, wrote “Keith Bardwell: Wrong But Not Alone.”
Louisiana Justice of the Peace Keith Bardwell refuses to marry interracial couples. He’s been doing so for years, but it wasn’t until October 2009, when he refused to marry Beth Humphrey and Terence McKay, that his actions attracted attention.
Appalled by Bardwell’s practice of checking with every couple who comes before him to see if they are interracial, then insisting that interracial couples go to other justices of the peace for their wedding ceremonies, Humphrey and McKay, the ACLU, the NAACP, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, and Louisiana Senator Mary L. Landrieu have all called for Bardwell’s resignation.
Bardwell insists he hasn’t done anything wrong. “It is my right,” he said, “not to marry an interracial couple.” He doesn’t even understand why Humphrey and McKay were offended by his refusal. “I’m not a racist,” he insists. “I try to treat everyone equally.”
She concluded:
Yet it would be a mistake to assume that attitudes like Bardwell’s can be safely consigned to the past. A significant segment of several state populations still refuses to recognize that interracial marriage is a legal right. In 1999 and 2000, when South Carolina and Alabama finally got around to removing bans on interracial marriage from their state constitutions, the public vote was roughly 60 percent for removing the bans and 40 percent for leaving them in the state constitutions.
In other words, Keith Bardwell is entirely wrong, but he’s not entirely alone. Perhaps this helps explain why he’s gotten away with his outrageous behavior for so long. In the end, though, it only makes it all the more important that he be removed from public office. The disappointed bride, Beth Humphrey, said it best. “He doesn’t believe he’s being racist,” she said, “but it is racist.”
Pascoe is the author of the book What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America.
A long-awaited history that promises to dramatically change our understanding of race in America, What Comes Naturally traces the origins, spread, and demise of miscegenation laws in the United States--laws that banned interracial marriage and sex, most often between whites and members of other races. Peggy Pascoe demonstrates how these laws were enacted and applied not just in the South but throughout most of the country, in the West, the North, and the Midwest. Beginning in the Reconstruction era, when the term miscegenation first was coined, she traces the creation of a racial hierarchy that bolstered white supremacy and banned the marriage of Whites to Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, and American Indians as well as the marriage of Whites to Blacks. She ends not simply with the landmark 1967 case of Loving v. Virginia, in which the Supreme Court finally struck down miscegenation laws throughout the country, but looks at the implications of ideas of colorblindness that replaced them. What Comes Naturally is both accessible to the general reader and informative to the specialist, a rare feat for an original work of history based on archival research.
Reviewer Jacki Thompson Rand wrote in Frontiers- A Journal of Women's Studies:
In What Comes Naturally Peggy Pascoe interrogates the U.S. racial regime through a study of civil marriage and miscegenation law. Her admirable work traces the development of legislation and court decisions about mixed marriage between White settlers and African Americans, Latinos and Latinas, Asians, and American Indians. (1) Bans against mixed marriages, or miscegenation, between White men and women of color, Pascoe argues, served to protect White supremacy and heteronormative patriarchy. By maintaining boundaries between the races, and material consequences that favored men in land disputes and White relatives in estate disputes, for example, White men's economic and social positions were reinforced while women's positions were undermined. Pascoe includes American Indians in her study because their lands, unique relationship with the federal government, and kinship systems presented complications not found in other cases.
Deenesh Sohoni has examined the history of marriage barriers for Asian-Americans in “Unsuitable Suitors: Anti-Miscegenation Laws, Naturalization Laws, and the Construction of Asian Identities”
In 1861, Nevada became the first state to pass a law specifically barring marriages between whites and Asians. Over the course of the next century, until the 1967 Supreme Court decision Loving v. Virginia declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional, an additional 14 states came to ban marriages between whites and Asians (Pascoe 1996). The first states to pass anti-miscegenation statutes against Asians were located primarily in the West, but over the next hundred years states in the Midwest, South, and East also enacted such laws.The passage of state anti-miscegenation laws against Asian ethnic groups were both a response to increased immigration from Asia and a reflection of persistent concerns regarding racial purity and the nature of American citizenship.
Elise Lanier’s "Miscegenation": Making Race in America examines the way media helped shape American attitudes towards “race-mixing” and define racial social construction.
In the years between the Revolution and the Civil War, as the question of black political rights was debated more and more vociferously, descriptions and pictorial representations of whites coupling with blacks proliferated in the North. Novelists, short-story writers, poets, journalists, and political cartoonists imagined that political equality would be followed by widespread inter-racial sex and marriage. Legally possible yet socially unthinkable, this "amalgamation" of the races would manifest itself in the perverse union of "whites" with "blacks," the latter figured as ugly, animal-like, and foul-smelling. In Miscegenation, Elise Lemire reads these literary and visual depictions for what they can tell us about the connection between the racialization of desire and the social construction of race.
Previous studies of the prohibition of interracial sex and marriage in the U.S. have focused on either the slave South or the post-Reconstruction period. Looking instead to the North, and to such texts as the Federalist poetry about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, James Fenimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans, Edgar Allan Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue," and the 1863 pamphlet in which the word "miscegenation" was first used, Lemire examines the steps by which whiteness became a sexual category and same-race desire came to seem a biological imperative.
She writes:
In order for an imagined group of people to be deemed universally ugly, they had to be identifiable as a group with shared traits meant to elicit disgust. In all of the depictions of inter-racial couplings, “blacks” are depicted as having certain traits that easily distinguish them from “whites.” They are shown with unrealistically dark skin. Hair is imagined as so coarse that it can stand up in shapes that defy gravity. Noses and lips are portrayed as inordinately wide. Jaws jut out beyond all proportion. And the imagined foul smell of “blacks” is noted obsessively. Conversely, whites are portrayed with pale skin, flowing hair, thin noses and lips, and vertical profiles. “Race” thus referred to an imagined composite of skin color, hair color and texture,nose and lip thickness, what was called “facial angle,” and smell. It was these physical traits that readers were trained to isolate and read until they believed a “black” person looked as different from a “white” person as, say, a dog from a flower. And insofar as a person’s imagined race thus makes them ugly or beautiful in these depictions of inter-racial coupling, race was imagined even more specifically as a set of traits that are more or less sexually desirable.
Some of the anti-miscegenation laws on the books were repealed over time, as this map illustrates:
U.S States, by the date of repeal of anti-miscegenation laws
No laws passed (grey) Repealed before 1887 (green) Repealed from 1948 to 1967 (yellow) Overturned on 12 June 1967 (red)
An examination of the summary of the laws on the books shows the categories of people prohibited from marrying whites: B=blacks, Native Americans, Asians, Filipinos, [East] Indians, Native Hawaiians, and “All non-whites”.
This note is interesting—and troubling:
In 1967, 17 Southern states (all the former slave states plus Oklahoma) still enforced laws prohibiting marriage between whites and non-whites. Maryland repealed its law in response to the start of the proceedings at the Supreme Court. After the ruling of the Supreme Court, the remaining laws were no longer enforceable. Nonetheless, it took South Carolina until 1998 and Alabama until 2000 to amend their states' constitutions to remove language prohibiting miscegenation. In the respective referendums, 62%of voters in South Carolina and 59% of voters in Alabama voted to make the amendments. In Alabama nearly 526,000 people voted against the amendment,including a majority of voters in some rural counties.
It’s unlikely that the mere fact of being in an “out” marriage will magically erase bigotry. There are sufficient examples of racist participants in unions that cross the social boundaries of race and ethnicity. And far too often the children of these pairings are faced with a society still guided by visual bias, despite the current discussions of biracial demographics.
Two filmmakers discuss and confront these issues in the documentary MIXED Values: Biraciality in Non-Post-Racial America.
We hope MIXED will offer a new lens into race and the lives of the first generation of mixed-race kids and families to be counted in the US Census, which has only been possible for 16 years. And the backdrop of today has turned out to be particularly meaningful: In an era in which biracial children are trying to understand both racism and white privilege, how do we explain the socio-political construction of race to a child who identifies as more than one? So, what have we—a brown woman and a white woman working together on a film about race—learned so far along the way, in places like New York and Texas and North Carolina and Maryland and Virginia, against the backdrop of Ferguson and #BlackLivesMatter and the historic Obama presidency?
We've learned that biracial people are pretty firm in their own ability to define themselves, and they can do without the societal pressures to be "just one thing" or to reject terms like "mixed." From one of a small handful of scholars who study biracial identity, Dr. Sarah Gaither, we learned that biracial people actually feel and express fewer racial stereotypes about all people than either black or white people. In our own very unscientific way, we think that's pretty fascinating for the future. As the United States population becomes more mixed over time, will we eliminate racism organically through racial evolution? It's a proposition we hadn't considered, but it matches the racial enlightenment that can emerge in mixed-race families.
What we've also learned, in an unexpected twist, is that endeavoring to understand biracial identity and confusion offers a kind of door-opener for people of different races to actually talk together about race, racism and racial justice more broadly. These conversations are by definition comprised not only of people of color discussing race and racism, but also white people who have experienced a new lens through their brown children. In other words, everyone is forced to confront his or her role in this set of questions. Many of our documentary subjects of all races have wondered aloud if the idea of racial mixing—with a particular focus on America's slavery legacy—is still so quietly or overtly offensive to some that it's more palatable to categorize Barack Obama and Misty Copeland and Alicia Keys as African-American, not mixed or biracial.
But what we've observed most consistently is how desperately America needs to share language and stories about race. White children and parents need language to discuss race, racial identity and racism just as much in their own homes so that the burden is not constantly on the shoulders of people of color—including biracial people—to endlessly point out micro-aggressions and questions of identity. We visited and filmed in a school in New York that created a mandatory racial affinity program, in which all children are required to talk about race and learn the language of race to help provide exactly this lens. But not all parents and families agree with this approach, including black parents, white parents and biracial families. There's no curriculum about race, which actually might be part of the challenge regarding this question concerning "having language" about racial identity that will empower more of us to talk openly. Language alone won't combat structural inequity and discrimination and stereotypes, of course, but it's a big step and apparently a major challenge revealed just from our own observations.
Caty Borum Chattoo and Leena Jayaswal had a another take on the topic in Mixed, Mulatto, Swirl: A Documentary Journey of Discovery, posted by frank on Vimeo.
Many of you have probably seen the film Loving. I appreciated Brian Tallerico’s review:
Jeff Nichols’ “Loving” is that rare mainstream film that provokes frustration and rage without resorting to monologues or melodrama. The two people at the center of this period drama aren’t prone to long speeches. They’re quiet, conservative, almost shy folk who ended up at the center of one of the most important Supreme Court cases of the ‘60s by virtue of falling in love, getting married and having children. Nichols’ approach is careful, reserved and deeply considerate of the human story he’s trying to tell.
Nobody knows when we are going to end the journey of fighting racism and white supremacy in the United States. But those people who are able to break the barriers among us and build bridges may help shorten the time on the road.
Join me in celebrating Loving Day (which should be every day), and share your stories.
