Written by Manali Jama Dating back to the seventeenth and early eighteenth century an increase in the number of interracial marriages resulted in the passing of anti- miscegenation laws which prohibited marriage between blacks and whites. The first anti-miscegenation law passed was in the colony of Maryland in 1664, additional colonies quickly followed suit. In the years following the Civil War, there was an increase in racial tensions. These marriages were prohibited: the penalties included the enslavement, exile or imprisonment of the white perpetrators. These laws grew and evolved over the years, there were even attempts made to modify the Constitution to ban interracial marriage in all states. In the law, if any white person were to be convicted they would have to face time in a penitentiary or be sentenced to hard labor for two or more than seven years. The law also prohibited individuals from performing interracial marriage ceremonies, declaring these acts as misdemeanors which was punishable by a one-thousand dollar fine. Also if a black man, free or slave, raped or attempted to rape a white woman, he was legally subject to the death penalty. The issue that people had with interracial marriages was that these two groups of people were not seen as equal. White supremacy ideas at the time believed that if a black and white person were to have a child together that the white race would slowly become inferior. According to PBS, “The law stated that a person with seven white great-grandparents would be defined as black as long as the eighth great-grandparent was a ‘Negro’.“ Bans on miscegenation were made in order to limit white men’s ability to threaten whiteness by producing with their black partners children who could potentially pass for white. It took three hundred years for this law to be overturned. In 1967, Richard Loving, a white man, and Mildred Jeter, a Black woman, were married in the District of Columbia. When they returned home to Virginia, they were arrested and convicted of violating the state’s anti-miscegenation law. They each faced a year in jail and their case went to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court found in favor of the Loving's in the famous trial Loving v. Virginia. They ruled that prohibiting interracial marriage on state and local levels was unconstitutional; this meant that marriages between the races were legal in the country for the first time since 1664. Sources: http://www.pbs.org/black-culture/explore/interracial-marriage-relationships/#.WoSa2UxFyUl http://restorefairness.org/wp-content/uploads/replace_Anti-Miscegenation.jpg
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AuthorSirena Backham Archives
March 2018
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