Interracial Couples: An American Primer of Miscegenation

“In 1967, only 3 percent of newlyweds were interracial couples. Today, 17 percent of newlyweds and 10 percent of all married couples differ from one another in race or ethnicity … By 1959, the overwhelming majority of white Americans then believed rejecting interracial marriage to be fundamental to the nation’s well-being. In 2017, in contrast, 91 percent of Americans believe interracial marriage to be a good or at least benign thing.”

– Current Events in Historical Perspective, Vol. 10, issue 12 - September 2017

Do these statistics amaze you? I assume young people today find the figures hard to believe given the common acceptance of interracial dating and mixed marriage. Listen, children and learn from history about the difficult struggle for equality. Love and race did not always mix.

For so long, miscegenation (reproduction by parents of different races, especially by white and non-white persons) was not only discouraged but also prohibited by law in America. Prohibited but surely not prevented … in fact, history records a very celebrated interracial union from the nation's inception.

The first recorded interracial marriage in American history took place between John Rolfe, English tobacco planter, and Pocahontas, daughter of the chief of the Powhatan Indian confederacy, in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1614. Jamestown higher-ups blessed the nuptials, even though they viewed Indians with contempt. In truth, they saw a big advantage in having a Native American princess (and, perhaps, any male offspring) on their side.

Any cause for celebration was more likely for economic reasons than for the intermixing of two cultures, as the Virginia Company sought to present Jamestown as a palatable place to live. The presentation of Pocahontas to the court of James I seems now like a testimony that Indians could be tamed, that they could be convinced to adapt the Europeans’ idea of civilization.

John Rolfe and Pocahontas

No such mixed marriage took place in 17th century Massachusetts and only two more cases were recorded in Virginia before the legislature outlawed the practice in 1691.

On the other side of interracial relationships are the numerous affairs between the Europeans (slave owners and servants alike) and slaves. Skin color seemed to not matter when the very human need for mating is involved. In colonial America, the first biracial Americans were the children of the white-black, white-Indian unions. By the time of the American Revolution, somewhere between 60,000 and 120,000 people of “mixed heritage” resided in the colonies.

Anti-miscegenation policies continued … and continued … and continued. The prejudice was firmly established and laws supporting anti-miscegenation existed until the Supreme Court decision of 1967 and even until 2000. That's right, 2000 – if you lived in the deep South state of Alabama.

The laws were both racist and sexist from the first colonial days. While nowhere near as common as interracial relations between white men and black or mulatto women – white women, typically immigrant indentured servants, had relations and sometimes married black and mulatto male slaves. When these relationships were discovered, usually through the woman becoming pregnant, the penalties for the woman were harsh.

A double standard existed. White men who had mulatto children were not ostracized or penalized by their society. It was a colonial case of “boys will be boys.” On the whole, the court records are silent to their fate. The onus for such transgressions, as they were seen, lay entirely with the white mothers.

The frequent abuse and lynching of black men for allegedly raping or desiring sexual relations with white women, as well as the widespread rape and sexual abuse of black women by white men, played an integral part in the socio-historical construction of race and the rules of race relations.

The Loving Decision – Not That Long Ago

Fifty years ago the landmark Supreme Court ruling in Loving v. Virginia established marriage as a fundamental right for interracial couples, but 72 percent of the public opposed the court’s decision at the time. Many decried it as judicial overreach and resisted its implementation for decades. Yes, even in 1967, interracial marriage was widely denounced in the United States of America.

Loving v. Virginia brought down interracial marriage bans in 16 states centered on the aptly named Richard and Mildred Loving. In 1958, the pair were arrested in the middle of the night in their Virginia home after marrying the month before in Washington, D.C. Pleading guilty to “cohabiting as man and wife, against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth,” they were offered one year imprisonment or a suspended sentence if they left their native state.

Historical Note – Nearby West Virginia and Kentucky and even Delaware were among the 16 states that banned whites from marrying blacks at the time. Ohio repealed its anti-miscegenation law in 1887. It was the last state to repeal its anti-miscegenation law before California did so in 1948.

Jessica Viñas-Nelson, historian, speaks of the Loving case ...

“The Lovings chose exile over prison and moved to D.C. but they missed their hometown. After being arrested again in 1963 while visiting relatives in Virginia, Mildred Loving wrote Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, who in turn referred her to the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU appealed the Lovings’ conviction, arguing interracial marriage bans contradicted the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause. Despite this line of argument, lower courts upheld the verdict because, as one jurist wrote, 'the fact that [Almighty God] separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”

“After multiple appeals, the case reached the Supreme Court, where Chief Justice Earl Warren’s opinion for the unanimous court declared marriage to be 'one of the ‘basic civil rights of man’…To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications…is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty.' Warren further ruled that interracial marriage bans were designed expressly 'to maintain White Supremacy.' The court’s decision not only struck down an 80-year precedent set in the case Pace v. Alabama (1883), but 300 years of legal code.”

Vinas-Nelson reports …

“If Asians and Hispanics are removed from intermarriage figures, intermarriage rates still remain extremely low. White opposition to a close relative marrying a black person has decreased dramatically, but still constitutes 14 percent of white views in 2017.”

Today Loving is as an example of racial transcendence and prejudice squashed. The Loving ruling can be celebrated as a wonderful achievement. It not only led to the end of interracial marriage bans in 16 states, but more recently aided the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized marriage for same-sex couples.

What Race?

Theories of physical anthropology will suggest that every human being has some African ancestry, yet since colonial times miscegenation had been banned in America. These laws were an American invention. There was no ban on interracial marriage in England at the time.

By the late 1800s, 38 states had anti-miscegenation statutes. As late as 1924 these laws were on the books in 29 states. Anti-miscegenation laws varied greatly in the way they defined whom one could and could not marry.

In a legal brief filed in Loving v. Virginia, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (the NAACP) commented on the inconsistencies in these laws:

“In Mississippi, Mongolian-White marriages are illegal and void, while in North Carolina they are permitted. . . . In Arkansas, a Negro is defined as any person who has in his or her veins 'any Negro blood whatever'; in Florida, one ceases to be a Negro when he has less than 'one-eighth of African or Negro blood,' and in Oklahoma, anyone not of the 'African descent' is miraculously transmuted into a member of the white race.”

Historical Note – The unbelievable labeling of mixed race people throughout history is maddening. The following terms were formerly used to represent “degrees of blackness” ...

Mulatto - A person of mixed race who is half white and half black. Based on the Spanish word mulo meaning "mule," and implying that the person is sterile like a mule. (Another familiar misconception concerned the concept of “hybrid vigor,” the idea that breeding across difference, as with dogs, creates a stronger, and more attractive breed.)

Quadroon or Quarteron - A person with one white parent and one mulatto parent. Such a person would be 3/4 white and 1/4 black.

Octoroon or Metif - A person who has one white parent and one quadroon parent. Such a person would be 7/8 white and 1/8 black.

Meamelouc or Mamelouque - See sextaroon. sextaroon - Also called a meamelouc or mamelouque. A person who is 1/16 black. The parents would be a full-blooded white and an octoroon.

Demi-Meamelouc - A person who is 1/32 black. The parents would be a full-blooded white and a sextaroon.

Sangmelee - A person who is 1/64 black. The parents would be a full-blooded white and a demi-meamelouc.

Griffe – A person whose parents are a full-blooded black and a mulatto. Such a person would be 3/4 black and 1/4 white. The term is also used to describe the offspring of a mulatto and an American Indian, or any person of mixed Negro and American Indian blood.

Marabou - A person who is 5/8 black. The parents would be a full-blooded black and a quadroon.

Sacatra - A person who is 7/8 black. The parents would be a full-blooded black and a griffe.

A Brief History of Interracial Bans

The following overview was compiled largely from Tom Head's “Interracial Marriage Laws History & Timeline.” Head is a historian with a Ph.D. in Religion/Society who has authored more than 25 nonfiction books.

In 1664, Maryland passed the first British colonial law banning marriage between whites and slaves -- a law that, among other things, ordered the enslavement of white women who had married black men:

"[F]orasmuch as diverse freeborn English women forgetful of their free condition and to the disgrace of our Nation do intermarry with Negro slaves by which also diverse suits may arise touching the [children] of such women and a great damage doth befall the Masters of such Negroes for prevention whereof for deterring such freeborn women from such shameful matches,

"Be it further enacted by the authority advice and consent aforesaid that whatsoever freeborn woman shall intermarry with any slave from and after the last day of this present Assembly shall serve the master of such slave during the life of her husband, and that the [children] of such freeborn women so married shall be slaves as their fathers were. And be it further enacted that all the [children] of English or other freeborn women that have already married Negroes shall serve the masters of their parents til they be thirty years of age and no longer."

This left unaddressed two important questions:

1. This law drew no distinction between slaves and free blacks, and
2. This law didn't say what happens to white men who marry black women, rather than vice versa.

The next law answered these questions. In 1691, the Commonwealth of Virginia banned all interracial marriages, threatening to exile whites who marry people of color. In the 17th century, exile usually functioned as a death sentence:

"For prevention of that abominable mixture and spurious [children] which hereafter may increase in this dominion, as well as by negroes, mulattos, and Indians intermarrying with English, or other white women, as by their unlawful accompanying with one another,

"Be it enacted ... that ... whatsoever English or other white man or woman being free, shall intermarry with a negro, mulatto or Indian man or woman bond or free shall within three months after such marriage be banished and removed from this dominion forever …

"And be it further enacted ... that if any English woman being free shall have a bastard child by any negro or mulatto, she pay the sum of fifteen pounds sterling, within one month after such bastard child shall be born, to the Church wardens of the parish ... and in default of such payment she shall be taken into the possession of the said Church wardens and disposed of for five years, and the said fine of fifteen pounds, or whatever the woman shall be disposed of for, shall be paid, one third part to their majesties ...”

Leaders in Maryland's colonial government liked this idea so much that they implemented a similar policy a year later. And in 1705, Virginia expanded the policy to impose massive fines on any minister who performed a marriage between a person of color and a white person -- with half the amount (ten thousand pounds) to be paid to the informant.

Historical Note – It was advanced by Dr. Samuel Cartwright (1793–1863) of Louisiana that slaves suffered from two diseases:

(1) Drapetomania (Combining the Greek words for “runaway slave” and “mad or crazy”) – a disease that Cartwright claimed caused slaves to run away. Dr. Jonathan Miller, an English pathologist, had defined this term tongue-in-cheek as "a morbid desire to be free." Piling on, Cartwright concluded that the slaves, in fact, loved it on some subconscious level.

Cartwright did have a cure, which was “clearly implied, though not directly expressed” in the Old Testament, which he believed taught the “true art of governing the negroes in such a manner that they cannot run away.” There, they were apparently told to become, as Cartwright put it, “the submissive knee-bender.”

(2) Dysaethesia Aethiopica – a disease which Dr. Cartwright claimed made slaves apt to commit intentional acts of mischief or “rascality.” This rascality was, he insisted, not intentional, “but is mostly owing to the stupidness of mind and insensibility of the nerves induced by the disease.” The symptoms were many:

“Thus, they break, waste and destroy everything they handle,–abuse horses and cattle,–tear, burn or rend their own clothing, and, paying no attention to the rights of property, steal others, to replace what they have destroyed. They wander about at night, and keep in a half nodding sleep during the day. They slight their work,–cut up corn, cane, cotton or tobacco when hoeing it, as if for pure mischief. They raise disturbances with their overseers and fellow-servants without cause or motive, and seem to be insensible to pain when subjected to punishment.”

Unsatisfied with merely the outward symptoms of the malady, Cartwright also insisted that this “disease” gave the black people “lesions of the body discoverable to the medical observer, which as always present and sufficient to account for the symptoms.”

But reform, although painfully slow followed. In 1780, Pennsylvania, which had passed a law banning interracial marriage in 1725, repealed it as part of a series of reforms intended to gradually abolish slavery within the state and grant free blacks equal legal status. And, much later, in 1843, Massachusetts becomes the second state to repeal its anti-miscegenation law, further cementing the distinction between Northern and Southern states on slavery and civil rights.

Anti-miscegenation views remained – still strong and widely supported. In 1871, Rep. Andrew King (D-MO) proposed a U.S. constitutional amendment banning all marriage between whites and people of color in every state throughout the country. It was the first of three such attempts.

In 1883, in Pace v. Alabama, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that state-level bans on interracial marriage did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The ruling would hold for more than 80 years. It was perhaps the most devastating ruling against miscegenation since colonial times.

Historical Note – In southwest Ohio, about a mile from the Indiana state line, lies a long-forgotten town with a special place in African American history. In 1818, James Clemens, a freed slave from Rockingham County, Virginia, settled in Darke County, Ohio, with his wife Sophia Sellers and their five children, and began to farm. Smothers says some slave owners not only acknowledged the children they bore with slaves but also provided them with financial support. Such was the case with James and Sophia, who purchased land in Ohio with the help of Sellers' father, he says. The settlement at Longtown is now on the National Register of Historic Places.

According to W. E. B. Dubois, Longtown became a haven for interracial couples. Longtown is one of only two communities in Ohio to be considered tri-racial: persons of African-American, European and Native American ancestry lived here. The Clemens Farmstead, a two-story brick house, sits about 100 feet from Stingley Road, and the facade is a common bond brick pattern with classical Greek Revival details.

Daily Oklahomian, 1907

Then, in 1922, Congress passed the Cable Act marking the climate of anti-Asian xenophobia that defined the early decades of the 20th century. Asian Americans were also targeted in this case. The Cable Act retroactively stripped the citizenship of any U.S. citizen who married "an alien ineligible for citizenship," which -- under the racial quota system of the time -- primarily meant Asian Americans.

Finally, in 1964, in McLaughlin v. Florida, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that laws banning interracial sex violate the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

McLaughlin struck down Florida Statute 798.05, which read:

"Any negro man and white woman, or any white man and negro woman, who are not married to each other, who shall habitually live in and occupy in the nighttime the same room shall each be punished by imprisonment not exceeding twelve months, or by fine not exceeding five hundred dollars."

While the ruling did not directly address laws banning interracial marriage, it laid down the groundwork for a ruling that definitively did.

In 1967, the aforementioned Loving case saw the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously overturn Pace v. Alabama (1883), ruling that state bans on interracial marriage violate the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

As Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote for the Court:

"There is patently no legitimate overriding purpose independent of invidious racial discrimination which justifies this classification. The fact that Virginia prohibits only interracial marriages involving white persons demonstrates that the racial classifications must stand on their own justification, as measures designed to maintain White Supremacy …

"The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men ... To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State."

What lingered? In 2000, following a November 7^th ballot referendum, Alabama became the last state to officially legalize interracial marriage. The Alabama State Constitution still contained an unenforceable ban in Section 102:

"The legislature shall never pass any law to authorize or legalize any marriage between any white person and a Negro or descendant of a Negro."

The Alabama State Legislature stubbornly clung to the old language as a symbolic statement of the state's views on interracial marriage; as recently as 1998, House leaders successfully killed attempts to remove Section 102.

When voters finally had the opportunity to remove the language, the outcome was surprisingly close: although 59% of voters supported removing the language, 41% favored keeping it. Interracial marriage remains controversial in the Deep South, where a 2011 poll found that a plurality of Mississippi Republicans still supports anti-miscegenation laws.

Conclusion

I am using a skillfully written conclusion verbatim from Francis Wardle PhD. – Associate Faculty

Dissertation Chair, and Committee Member of the University of Phoenix – to end this entry. It looks toward the future with great hope that some day prejudice will die. Wardle ...

“It is critically important for intellectuals from outside the U.S. studying race and racial relationships in the U.S. to deeply understand the unique history, politics and current realities of race within the U.S. These unique elements include a history of White supremacy, the eugenics movement and the social policies it produced, the creation and maintenance of the one-drop rule and the rule of hypodescent, and historical and legal issues surrounding interracial marriage.

“Further, observers of race in U.S. society must understand the relationship of states’ rights to federal authority and control. For example, the one-drop rule, eugenics policies, and laws against interracial marriage were all state laws, and not federal mandates, as was the legal right to own slaves.

“Today the ridged boundaries between racial groups, adherence to the one-drop rule, and the rule of hypodescent are all under siege. While academics, diversity experts, multicultural writers, and those who profess to care for the equality of minority groups still religiously adhere to the old paradigms about race, much of U.S. society – particularly the young – are rejecting these ridged, limiting and outmoded constructs.”

Historical Note – Jim Crow laws were designed to keep blacks as second-class citizens, through rules that kept them from voting, having equal educational opportunity, and accessing public and private facilities, etc. While targeted to blacks, this law applied to most non-whites. Violation of Jim Crow laws produced an increasing number of court cases by people who did not believe they were subject to these laws – because they did not view themselves as black. These cases – including several U.S. Supreme Court decisions (which supported states’ rights) – upheld the one-drop rule – any amount of African blood made a person black. Thus, a white person cannot have any trace of any other blood (genes) anywhere in their background to be considered white.

The rule of hypodescent derived from the one-drop rule. This rule describes the way Americans classify race according to blood. It places racial identity on a continuum, from most preferred (White), through intermediate forms (i.e. Asian, Native American) to least prestigious (black), and assigns the status of a child from parents of two groups to the race of lowest status, regardless of their physical appearance. Thus all offspring – and subsequent generations – of one White and one Black person are considered black.

Sources

Bárbara C. Cruz and Michael J. Berson. “The American Melting Pot? Miscegenation Laws in the United States.” OAH Magazine of History.Vol. 15, No. 4, Family History. Summer, 2001.

Eric Foner. Give Me Liberty!: An American History, Vol. 1. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006.

Tom Head. “Interracial Marriage Laws History & Timeline.” ThoughtCo. February 23, 2018.

“Miscegenation.” https://sharetngov.tnsosfiles.com/tsla/exhibits/blackhistory/pdfs/Miscegenation%20laws.pdf.

“The Peculiar Doctor Cartwright: Justifying Slavery Through Medical Quackery.” http://www.thiscruelwar.com/peculiar-doctor-cartwright/. September 28, 2016.

Jessica Vinas-Nelson. “Interracial Marriage in 'Post-Racial' America. Origins. vol. 10, issue 12 - September 2017.

Francis Wardle PhD. “Interracial Marriage in the United States of America.” The Center for the Study of Biracial Children. September 6, 2013.