Interracial Laws

Note: Prezi contains dates that are significant in the timeline of breaking down unequal boundaries based on gender, sexuality, and race and ethnicity.

 

Although there have been many US laws that have been passed in the last fifty to sixty years and promote equality, many of these positive laws were brought into existence because there were anti-interracial/miscegenation laws that prevented marriages between certain races or nationalities. Anti-miscegenation laws were significant in influencing a low number of interracial marriages, especially in the early 20th century.

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Slavery has played a large role in colonial and post-colonial America. Prior to becoming an independent country, the colonies had anti-miscegenation laws in place for about a century. Slavery continued for another century after the US declared independence. Anti-miscegenation laws continued until the 1960s, spanning for a little over three hundred years. In Fryer’s “Guess Who’s Been Coming to Dinner? Trends in Interracial Marriage over the 20th Century,” he notes that US interracial marriages and intimate relationships have always been legal between whites and Native Americans, and whites and Hispanics, even if there were social stigmas against them (73). The earliest anti-miscegenation laws were created specifically against whites marrying blacks, and the eventual development of similar laws against those of Asian descent (Fryer 73). The first anti-miscegenation laws in the US colonies were established in the modern-day states Maryland and Virginia in the 1660s. Maryland’s law stated that “if a white woman married a black man she became a slave to her husband’s master,” while Virginia’s law exiled the white spouse from the colony within the first three months after marrying a black person; however this law changed its penalty in 1705 to half a year in jail (Fryer 73). The origins of these laws started a trend in the development of similar laws in other US regions.

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The development of anti-miscegenation laws shows how important of a role marriage played in the earlier eras of the US. These laws were put in place for economic reasons such as preventing freed slaves from gaining an inheritance, as well as to maintain a clear social boundary between those who were slaves and those who were free (Fryer 73). Thirty-six other states had established laws similar to those of Maryland and Virginia by the 1800s (Constable 181). By 1880 in California, these laws also were against whites not only marrying someone of black descent, but also of mixed black and white descent, and those of Asian descent (Constable 181). Marriage in the US was not seen as legally acceptable unless a white person was marrying someone that was white, Hispanic, or Native American.

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Particularly for different Asian nationalities, there were varied results concerning to what extent it was socially and legally acceptable for them to marry whites. In Constable’s book Romance on a Global Stage: Pen Pals, Virtual Ethnography, and Mail Order Marriages, she specifically discusses how these laws affected different Asian groups, and she found that as time progressed, these marriage laws impacted Filipinos the most, because their “mixed Malay-Polynesian, Spanish, and Chinese descent” did not perfectly fit into the established racial marriage laws, resulting in mixed social perceptions of Filipinos (181). “In the 1930s, lawsuits were filed by Filipino-white couples who had been refused marriage permits,” but soon enough, “California added the “Malay race” to the excluded category”; anti-miscegenation laws were not rescinded in California until 1948, and were not rescinded throughout the entire nation until 1967 (Constable 181). As the early 20th century progressed, it is clear that the laws became stricter to eliminate any exceptions or loopholes. An important reason for this was acknowledged by Constable, who states that “during the Great Depression of the late 1920s and 1930s, white resentment of Filipinos and other Asians intensified,” as job competition and other economic stresses took over (179). Multiple racial and ethnic groups experienced discrimination because they were seen as threats to native whites as competition for jobs, and the Great Depression certainly intensified this discrimination. Anti-miscegenation laws were a way of perpetuating a history of racial discrimination the US had already carried for over 200 years, as well as reflecting an attempt to protect economic advantages for whites in tough times.

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Along with the understanding of the nation’s racial marriage laws, there is also interesting evidence concerning the differences between the rates of interracial marriage between states over time. In Fryer’s analysis of interracial marriage trends in the 20th century, using data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series based on U.S. Census Data for 1880–2000, he separated the states not only by region, but also by another category: states that never had anti-miscegenation laws, states that chose to end those laws, and those that had to end those laws after the Supreme Court’s decision in Loving v. Virginia (81). These were the results he found:

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“Adjusting for relative numbers of blacks in the population in each of these three categories of states, over the course of the entire sample, intermarriage rates were higher for blacks in states that either did not have antimiscegenation laws or that voluntarily repealed such laws. Both men and women show a decrease in their intermarriage rates between 1880 and 1930 in “voluntary” and “never” states, while the rates for “forced” states are relatively constant throughout this period. Both time trends also show a brief spike for “voluntary” states and “never” states in 1940 followed by a gradual decline until 1960. All three categories sharply increase from 1960–2000. Throughout the sample, voluntary-repeal states have higher intermarriage rates than forced-to-repeal states, though the two follow each other rather closely” (Fryer 81-82).

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While there are various factors for why individuals marry, generally speaking, Fryer’s results suggest that a state’s relationship with some or no anti-miscegenation laws had a significant influence on how often interracial marriages occurred before they were legal throughout the entire nation. However, Fryer’s conclusion of these results, that “forced-to-repeal” states were not too far behind the number of interracial marriages in “voluntary-repeal” states shows that perhaps the perception of interracial marriages was not changed as much as expected from a “voluntary” decision, as citizens likely still carried the stigma of the anti-miscegenation laws with them afterward.

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Examining the different laws that limited or prohibited interracial marriages and the economic contexts of earlier US eras has helped add to an understanding of how marriage laws and discrimination differed depending on race, as well as how different states’ rates of interracial marriage were impacted during and after the laws were repealed. Once the laws against interracial marriage were rescinded, there has been an increase in interracial marriages. A better understanding of past US anti-miscegenation laws’ effect on interracial unions can bring more acknowledgment on the significance of racial equality laws.

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Works Cited

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Constable, Nicole. Romance on a Global Stage : Pen Pals, Virtual Ethnography,

and Mail Order Marriages, University of California Press, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unlv/detail.action?docID=224231.

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Fryer, Roland. Guess Who’s Been Coming to Dinner? Trends in Interracial Marriage

over the 20th Century. The Journal of Economic Perspectives, Volume 21, Issue 2, 2007. https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.library.unlv.edu/docview/212081123?OpenUrlRefId=info:xri/sid:primo&accountid=3611. Accessed 25 April 2020.