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Anti-miscegenation laws in the United States
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In the United States, anti-miscegenation laws (also known as miscegenation laws) were state laws passed by individual states to prohibit miscegenation, nowadays more commonly referred to as interracial marriage and interracial sex.
Anti-miscegenation laws were a part of American law in some States since before the United States was established and remained so until ruled unconstitutional in 1967 by the U.S. Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia. The term miscegenation was first used in 1863, during the American Civil War, by American journalists to discredit the abolitionist movement by stirring up debate over the prospect of interracial marriage after the abolition of slavery.[1] In those of the original Thirteen Colonies that became states and enacted such laws, they were enacted as state law in the early 18th century; a century or more after the complete racialization of slavery.[2]
Typically defining miscegenation as a felony, these laws prohibited the solemnization of weddings between persons of different races and prohibited the officiating of such ceremonies. Sometimes, the individuals attempting to marry would not be held guilty of miscegenation itself, but felony charges of adultery or fornication would be brought against them instead. All anti-miscegenation laws banned the marriage of whites and non-white groups, primarily blacks, but often also Native Americans and Asians.[3]
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"; Louisiana in 1920 banned marriage between Native Americans and African Americans (and from 1920–1942, concubinage as well); and Maryland in 1935 banned marriages between blacks and Filipinos.[4] While anti-miscegenation laws are often regarded as a Southern phenomenon, most western and plains states also enacted them.
Although anti-miscegenation amendments were proposed in United States Congress in 1871, 1912–1913 and 1928,[5][6] a nationwide law against racially mixed marriages was never enacted. Prior to the California Supreme Court's ruling in Perez v. Sharp (1948), no court in the United States had ever struck down a ban on interracial marriage. In 1967, the United States Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Loving v. Virginia that anti-miscegenation laws are unconstitutional.
Contents
1 Colonial era
2 After American independence
3 Anti-miscegenation laws and the U.S. Constitution
4 The repeal of anti-miscegenation laws, 1948–1967
5 Loving v. Virginia
6 Later events
7 Summary
7.1 Laws repealed before 1887
7.2 Laws repealed 1948–1967
7.3 Laws overturned on 12 June 1967 by Loving v. Virginia
7.4 Proposed anti-miscegenation amendments to the U.S. Constitution
8 Footnotes
9 Additional sources
10 Further reading
11 External links
Colonial era[edit]
The first laws criminalizing marriage and sex between whites and non whites were enacted in the colonial era in the English colonies of Virginia and Maryland, which depended economically on unpaid labor such as slavery.
At first, in the 1660s, the first laws in Virginia and Maryland regulating marriage between whites and blacks only pertained to the marriages of whites with black (and mulatto) slaves and indentured servants. In 1664, Maryland enacted a law which criminalized such marriages—the 1681 marriage of Irish-born Nell Butler to an African slave was an early example of the application of this law. Virginia (1691) was the first English colony in North America to pass a law forbidding free blacks and whites to intermarry, followed by Maryland in 1692. This was the first time in American history that a law was invented that restricted access to marriage partners solely on the basis of "race", not class or condition of servitude.[7] Later these laws also spread to colonies in the Thirteen Colonies with fewer slaves and free blacks, such as Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. Moreover, after the independence of the United States had been established, similar laws were enacted in territories and states which outlawed slavery.
A sizable number of the early indentured servants in the British American colonies were brought over from the Indian subcontinent by the British East India Company.[8] Anti-miscegenation laws discouraging interracial marriage between white Americans and non-whites affected South Asian immigrants as early as the 17th century.[citation needed] For example, a Eurasian daughter born to an Indian father and Irish mother in Maryland in 1680 was classified as a "mulatto" and sold into slavery.[8] Anti-miscegenation laws there continued into the early 20th century. For example, the Bengali revolutionary Tarak Nath Das's white American wife, Mary K. Das, was stripped of her American citizenship for her marriage to an "alien ineligible for citizenship."[8] In 1918, there was considerable controversy in Arizona when an Indian farmer B. K. Singh married the sixteen-year-old daughter of one of his white tenants.[9]
In 1685, the French government issued a special Code Noir restricted to Louisiana, which banned the marriage of Catholics and non-Catholics in that colony.[10] However, interracial cohabitation and interracial sex were never prohibited in French Louisiana (see plaçage). The situation of the children (free or slave) followed the situation of the mother.[11] Under Spanish rule, interracial marriage was possible with parental consent under the age of 25 and without it when the partners were older. In 1806, three years after the U.S. gained control over the state, interracial marriage was once again banned.[12]
It has been argued[by whom?] that the first laws banning all marriage between whites and blacks, enacted in Virginia and Maryland, were a response by the planter elite to the problems they were facing due to the socio-economic dynamics of the plantation system in the Southern colonies. The bans in Virginia and Maryland were established at a time when slavery was not yet fully institutionalized. At the time, most forced laborers on the plantations were indentured servants, and they were mostly European. Some historians have suggested that the at-the-time unprecedented laws banning "interracial" marriage were originally invented by planters as a divide-and-rule tactic after the uprising of European and African indentured servants in cases such as Bacon's Rebellion. According to this theory, the ban on interracial marriage was issued to split up the ethnically mixed, increasingly "mixed-race" labor force into "whites," who were given their freedom, and "blacks," who were later treated as slaves rather than as indentured servants. By outlawing "interracial" marriage, it became possible to keep these two new groups separated and prevent a new rebellion.
After American independence[edit]
In 1776, seven out of the Thirteen Colonies that declared their independence enforced laws against interracial marriage. Although slavery was gradually abolished in the North after independence, this at first had little impact on the enforcement of anti-miscegenation laws. An exception was Pennsylvania, which repealed its anti-miscegenation law in 1780, together with some of the other restrictions placed on free blacks, when it enacted a bill for the gradual abolition of slavery in the state.
The Quaker planter and slave trader Zephaniah Kingsley, Jr. publicly advocated, and personally practiced, racial mixing as a way toward ending slavery, as well as a way to produce healthier and more beautiful offspring. These views were tolerated in Spanish Florida, where free people of color had rights and could own and inherit property. After Florida became a U.S. territory in 1821, he moved with his multiple "wives", children, and slaves to Haiti.[13]
For the radical abolitionists who organized to oppose slavery in the 1830s, laws banning interracial marriage embodied the same racial prejudice that they saw at the root of slavery. Abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison took aim at Massachusetts' legal ban on interracial marriage as early as 1831. Anti-abolitionists defended the measure as necessary to prevent racial amalgamation and to maintain the Bay State's proper racial and moral order. Abolitionists, however, objected that the law, because it "distinguished between 'citizens on account of complexion,'" violated the broad egalitarian tenets of Christianity and republicanism as well as the state constitution's promise of equality. Beginning in the late 1830s, abolitionists began a several-year petition campaign that prompted the legislature to repeal the measure in 1843. Their efforts—both tactically and intellectually—constituted a foundational moment in the era's burgeoning minority-rights politics, which would continue to expand into the twentieth century.[14]
As the US expanded, however, all the new slave states as well as many new free states such as Illinois[15] and California[16] enacted such laws.
Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, South Carolina and Alabama legalized interracial marriage for some years during the Reconstruction period. Anti-miscegenation laws rested unenforced, were overturned by courts or repealed by the state government (in Arkansas[17] and Louisiana[18]). However, after white Democrats took power in the South during "Redemption", anti-miscegenation laws were re-enacted and once more enforced, and in addition Jim Crow laws were enacted in the South which also enforced other forms of racial segregation.[19][not specific enough to verify] In Florida, the new Constitution of 1888 prohibited marriage between "a white person and a person of negro descent" (Article XVI, Section 24).
A number of northern and western states permanently repealed their anti-miscegenation laws during the 19th century. This, however, did little to halt anti-miscegenation sentiments in the rest of the country. Newly established western states continued to enact laws banning interracial marriage in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Between 1913 and 1948, 30 out of the then 48 states enforced anti-miscegenation laws.[20] Only Connecticut, New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, Vermont, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Alaska, Hawaii, and the District of Columbia never enacted them.
Anti-miscegenation laws and the U.S. Constitution[edit]
At least three proposed constitutional amendments intended to bar interracial marriage in the United States were introduced in Congress.[21]
In 1871, Representative Andrew King (Democrat of Missouri) was the first politician in Congress to propose a constitutional amendment to make interracial marriage illegal nationwide. King proposed this amendment because he predicted (correctly, as the case of Loving v. Virginia later demonstrated) that the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868 to give equal civil rights to the emancipated ex-slaves (the Freedmen) as part of the process of Reconstruction, would render laws against interracial marriage unconstitutional.
In December 1912 and January 1913, Representative Seaborn Roddenbery (Democrat of Georgia) again introduced a proposal in the United States House of Representatives to insert a prohibition of miscegenation into the US Constitution and thus create a nationwide ban on interracial marriage. According to the wording of the proposed amendment, "Intermarriage between negros or persons of color and Caucasians... within the United States... is forever prohibited." Roddenbery's proposal was more severe because it defined the racial boundary between whites and "persons of color" by applying the one-drop rule. In his proposed amendment, anyone with "any trace of African or Negro blood" was banned from marrying a white spouse.
Roddenbery's proposed amendment was also a direct reaction to African American heavyweight champion Jack Johnson's marriages to white women, first to Etta Duryea and then to Lucille Cameron. In 1908, Johnson had become the first black boxing world champion, having beaten Tommy Burns. After his victory, the search was on for a white boxer, a "Great White Hope", to beat Johnson. Those hopes were dashed in 1910, when Johnson beat former world champion Jim Jeffries. This victory ignited race riots all over America as frustrated whites attacked celebrating African Americans.[22] Johnson's marriages to and affairs with white women further infuriated white Americans. In his speech introducing his bill before the United States Congress, Roddenbery compared the marriage of Johnson and Cameron to the enslavement of white women, and warned of future civil war that would ensue if interracial marriage was not made illegal nationwide:
No brutality, no infamy, no degradation in all the years of southern slavery, possessed such villainous character and such atrocious qualities as the provision of the laws of Illinois, Massachusetts, and other states which allow the marriage of the negro, Jack Johnson, to a woman of Caucasian strain. [applause]. Gentleman, I offer this resolution ... that the States of the Union may have an opportunity to ratify it. ...
Intermarriage between whites and blacks is repulsive and averse to every sentiment of pure American spirit. It is abhorrent and repugnant to the very principles of Saxon government. It is subversive of social peace. It is destructive of moral supremacy, and ultimately this slavery of white women to black beasts will bring this nation a conflict as fatal as ever reddened the soil of Virginia or crimsoned the mountain paths of Pennsylvania.
... Let us uproot and exterminate now this debasing, ultra-demoralizing, un-American and inhuman leprosy
—  Congressional Record, 62d. Congr., 3d. Sess., December 11, 1912, pp. 502–503
Spurred on by Roddenbery's introduction of the anti-miscegenation amendment, politicians in many of the 19 states lacking anti-miscegenation laws proposed their enactment. In 1913, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which had abolished its anti-miscegenation law in 1843, enacted a measure (not repealed until 2008[23]) that prevented couples who could not marry in their home state from marrying in Massachusetts.[24]
In 1928, Senator Coleman Blease (Democrat of South Carolina) proposed an amendment that went beyond the previous ones, requiring that Congress set a punishment for interracial couples attempting to get married and for people officiating an interracial marriage. This amendment was also never enacted.
The constitutionality of anti-miscegenation laws was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1883 case Pace v. Alabama (106 U.S. 583). The Supreme Court ruled that the Alabama anti-miscegenation statute did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. According to the court, both races were treated equally, because whites and blacks were punished in equal measure for breaking the law against interracial marriage and interracial sex. This judgment was overturned in 1967 in the Loving v. Virginia case, where the Supreme Court declared anti-miscegenation laws a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment and therefore unconstitutional.
The repeal of anti-miscegenation laws, 1948–1967[edit]
The constitutionality of anti-miscegenation laws only began to be widely called into question after World War II. In 1948, the California Supreme Court in Perez v. Sharp ruled that the Californian anti-miscegenation statute violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution and was therefore unconstitutional. This was the first time since Reconstruction that a state court declared an anti-miscegenation law unconstitutional, and California was the first state since Ohio in 1887 to repeal its anti-miscegenation law.
As a result, during the 1950s, anti-miscegenation laws were repealed or overturned in state after state, except in the South. Nonetheless, in the 1950s, the repeal of anti-miscegenation laws was still a controversial issue in the U.S., even among supporters of racial integration.
In 1958, the political theorist Hannah Arendt, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany,[25] who escaped from Europe during the Holocaust, wrote in an essay in response to the Little Rock Crisis, the Civil Rights struggle for the racial integration of public schools which took place in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957, that anti-miscegenation laws were an even deeper injustice than the racial segregation of public schools. The free choice of a spouse, she argued in Reflections on Little Rock, was "an elementary human right": "Even political rights, like the right to vote, and nearly all other rights enumerated in the Constitution, are secondary to the inalienable human rights to 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness' proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence; and to this category the right to home and marriage unquestionably belongs." Arendt was severely criticized by fellow liberals, who feared that her essay would arouse the racist fears common among whites and thus hinder the struggle of African Americans for civil rights and racial integration. Commenting on the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka against de jure racial segregation in education, Arendt argued that anti-miscegenation laws were more basic to racial segregation than racial segregation in education.
Arendt's analysis of the centrality of laws against interracial marriage to white supremacy echoed the conclusions of Gunnar Myrdal. In his essay Social Trends in America and Strategic Approaches to the Negro Problem (1948), Myrdal ranked the social areas where restrictions were imposed by Southern whites on the freedom of African-Americans through racial segregation from the least to the most important: jobs, courts and police, politics, basic public facilities, "social equality" including dancing and handshaking, and most importantly, marriage. This ranking was indeed reflective of the way in which the barriers against desegregation fell under the pressure of the protests of the emerging Civil Rights Movement. First, legal segregation in the army, in education and in basic public services fell, then restrictions on the voting rights of African-Americans were lifted. These victories were ensured by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But the bans on interracial marriage were the last to go, in 1967.
Most white Americans in the 1950s were opposed to interracial marriage and did not see laws banning interracial marriage as an affront to the principles of American democracy. A 1958 Gallup poll showed that 94 percent of white Americans disapproved of interracial marriage.[26] However, attitudes towards bans on interracial marriage quickly changed in the 1960s.
By the 1960s, civil rights organizations were helping interracial couples who were being penalized for their relationships to take their cases to the Supreme Court. Since Pace v. Alabama, the court had declined to make a judgment in such cases. But in 1964, the Warren Court decided to issue a ruling in the case of an interracial couple from Florida who had been convicted because they had cohabited. In McLaughlin v. Florida, the Supreme Court ruled that the Florida state law which prohibited cohabitation between whites and non-whites was unconstitutional and based solely on a policy of racial discrimination. However, the court did not rule on Florida's ban on marriage between whites and non-whites, despite the appeal of the plaintiffs to do so and the argument made by the state of Florida that its ban on cohabitation between whites and blacks was ancillary to its ban on marriage between whites and blacks. However, in 1967, the court did decide to rule on the remaining anti-miscegenation laws when it was presented with the case of Loving v. Virginia.
Loving v. Virginia[edit]
Main article: Loving v. Virginia
All bans on interracial marriage were lifted only after an interracial couple from Virginia, Richard and Mildred Loving, began a legal battle in 1963 for the repeal of the anti-miscegenation law which prevented them from living as a couple in their home state of Virginia. The Lovings were supported by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the Japanese American Citizens League and a coalition of Catholic bishops.
In 1958, Richard and Mildred Loving had married in Washington, D.C. to evade Virginia's anti-miscegenation law (the Racial Integrity Act). Having returned to Virginia, they were arrested in their bedroom for living together as an interracial couple. The judge suspended their sentence on the condition that the Lovings leave Virginia and not return for 25 years. In 1963, the Lovings, who had moved to Washington, D.C, decided to appeal this judgment. In 1965, Virginia trial court Judge Leon Bazile, who heard their original case, refused to reconsider his decision. Instead, he defended racial segregation, writing:
Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay, and red, and placed them on separate continents, and but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend the races to mix.[27]
The Lovings then took their case to the Supreme Court of Virginia, which invalidated the original sentence but upheld the state's Racial Integrity Act. Finally, the Lovings turned to the U.S Supreme Court. The court, which had previously avoided taking miscegenation cases, agreed to hear an appeal. In 1967, 84 years after Pace v. Alabama in 1883, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Loving v. Virginia that:
Marriage is one of the "basic civil rights of man", fundamental to our very existence and survival ... 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 to marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.
The Supreme Court condemned Virginia's anti-miscegenation law as "designed to maintain White supremacy".
Later events[edit]
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.[28][29][30]
In 2009, Keith Bardwell, a justice of the peace in Robert, Louisiana, refused to officiate a civil wedding for an interracial couple. A nearby justice of the peace, on Bardwell's referral, officiated the wedding; the interracial couple sued Keith Bardwell and his wife Beth Bardwell in federal court.[31] After facing wide criticism for his actions, including from Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, Bardwell resigned on November 3, 2009.[32]
Summary[edit]
U.S. States, by the date of repeal of anti-miscegenation laws:
No laws passed
Repealed before 1887
Repealed from 1948 to 1967
Overturned on 12 June 1967 by Loving v. Virginia[33]
Laws repealed before 1887[edit]
State
First law passed
Law repealed
Races whites were banned from marrying
Note
Illinois 1829 1874 Blacks
Iowa 1839 1851 Blacks
Kansas 1855 1859 Blacks Law repealed before reaching statehood
Maine 1821 1883 Blacks, Native Americans
Massachusetts 1705 1843 Blacks, Native Americans Passed the 1913 law preventing out-of-state couples from circumventing their home-state anti-miscegenation laws, which itself was repealed on July 31, 2008
Michigan 1838 1883 Blacks
New Mexico 1857 1866 Blacks Law repealed before reaching statehood
Ohio 1861 1887 Blacks Last state to repeal its anti-miscegenation law before California did so in 1948
Pennsylvania 1725 1780 Blacks
Rhode Island 1798 1881 Blacks, Native Americans
Washington 1855 1868 Blacks, Native Americans Law repealed before reaching statehood
Wyoming 1869 1882 Blacks, Asians, Filipinos Law repealed before reaching statehood, re-enacted after statehood, in 1913[34]
Laws repealed 1948–1967[edit]
State
First law passed
Law repealed
Races whites were banned from marrying
Note
Arizona 1865 1962 All non-Whites ("Filipinos") and Indians ("Hindus") added to list of "races" in 1931. As interpreted by the Supreme Court of Arizona in State v. Pass, 59 Ariz. 16, 121 P.2d 882 (1942), the law prohibited persons of mixed racial heritage from marrying anyone.
California 1850 1948 Blacks, Asians, Filipinos Until Roldan v. Los Angeles County, it was unclear whether the law applied to Filipinos.[35] Anti-miscegenation law overturned by state judiciary in Supreme Court of California case Perez v. Sharp. Most Hispanics were included in White category.
Colorado 1864 1957 Blacks
Idaho 1864 1959 Blacks, Native Americans, Asians
Indiana 1818 1965 Blacks
Maryland 1692 1967 Blacks, Filipinos Repealed its law in response to the start of the Loving v. Virginia case, and was the last state to repeal its law before the Supreme Court made all such laws unenforceable. Maryland also was one of the states to ban marriages between some peoples of color, preventing black–Filipino marriages in addition to Filipino–white and black–white marriages.
Montana 1909 1953 Blacks, Asians
Nebraska 1855 1963 Blacks, Asians
Nevada 1861 1959 Blacks, Native Americans, Asians, Filipinos On December 11, 1948, a court order struck down the law forbidding marriage between Harry Bridges and Noriko Sawada, citing the California case Perez v. Sharp and declaring such laws infringements on the basic principles of freedom.
North Dakota 1909 1955 Blacks
Oregon 1862 1951 Blacks, Native Americans, Asians, Native Hawaiians
South Dakota 1909 1957 Blacks, Asians, Filipinos
Utah 1852 1963 Blacks, Asians, Filipinos Initially enacted via the Act in Relation to Service
Wyoming 1913 1965 Blacks, Asians, Filipinos
Harry Bridges and Noriko Sawada Overturn 94-year old miscegenation law.
Laws overturned on 12 June 1967 by Loving v. Virginia[edit]
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State
First law passed
Races whites were banned from marrying
Note
Alabama 1822 Blacks Repealed during Reconstruction, law later reinstated
Arkansas 1838 Blacks Repealed during Reconstruction, law later reinstated
Delaware 1721 Blacks
Florida 1832 Blacks Repealed during Reconstruction, law later reinstated (note law reinstated banning just blacks)
Georgia 1750 All non-whites
Kentucky 1792 Blacks
Louisiana 1724 Blacks Repealed during Reconstruction, law later reinstated
Mississippi 1822 Blacks Repealed during Reconstruction under the 1868 constitution, law later reinstated by the 1890 constitution.
Missouri 1835 Blacks, Asians
North Carolina 1715 Blacks, Native Americans Starting in 1887, North Carolina also prevented marriages between Blacks and "Croatan Indians", but all other marriages between people of color were not covered by legislation
Oklahoma 1897 Blacks Oklahoma's law was unique in its phrasing, preventing marriages of "any person of African descent ... to any person not of African descent." This statute was invoked occasionally to void marriages between blacks and Native Americans.[36]
South Carolina 1717 All non-whites Repealed during Reconstruction, law later reinstated
Tennessee 1741[citation needed] Blacks, Native Americans
Texas 1837 All non-whites
Virginia 1691 All non-whites Previous anti-miscegenation law made more severe by Racial Integrity Act of 1924
West Virginia 1863 Blacks
Proposed anti-miscegenation amendments to the U.S. Constitution[edit]
At least three proposed Constitutional amendments to bar interracial marriage have been introduced before the U.S. Congress.[37]
In 1871, Representative Andrew King, a Democrat of Missouri, was the first politician to propose banning interracial marriage nation-wide. King proposed this amendment because he feared that the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868 to give ex-slaves citizenship (the Freedmen) as part of the process of Reconstruction, would someday render laws against interracial marriage "unconstitutional". He was correct, as the case of Loving v. Virginia in 1967 demonstrated.
In December 1912 and January 1913, Representative Seaborn Roddenbery, a Democrat of Georgia, again introduced a proposal in the House of Representatives to insert a prohibition of miscegenation into the US Constitution. According to the wording of the proposed amendment, "Intermarriage between Negroes or persons of color and Caucasians... within the United States... is forever prohibited." Roddenbery's proposal was more severe because it defined the racial boundary between whites and "persons of color" by applying the one-drop rule. In his proposed amendment, anyone with "any trace of African or Negro blood" was banned from marrying a white spouse.
Roddenbery's proposed amendment was a direct reaction to African American boxer Jack Johnson's marriages to white women, first to Etta Duryea and then to Lucille Cameron. In 1908, Johnson had become the first black boxing world champion, having beaten Tommy Burns. Johnson's marriages to and affairs with white women infuriated white Americans. In his speech introducing his bill before the United States Congress, Roddenbery compared the marriage of Johnson and Cameron to the enslavement of white women, and warned of future civil war that would ensue if interracial marriage was not made illegal nationwide:
No brutality, no infamy, no degradation in all the years of southern slavery, possessed such villainous character and such atrocious qualities as the provision of the laws of Illinois, Massachusetts, and other states which allow the marriage of the Negro, Jack Johnson, to a woman of Caucasian strain. [Applause]. Gentleman, I offer this resolution ... that the States of the Union may have an opportunity to ratify it. ... Intermarriage between whites and blacks is repulsive and averse to every sentiment of pure American spirit. It is abhorrent and repugnant to the very principles of Saxon government. It is subversive of social peace. It is destructive of moral supremacy, and ultimately this slavery of white women to black beasts will bring this nation a conflict as fatal as ever reddened the soil of Virginia or crimsoned the mountain paths of Pennsylvania. ... Let us uproot and exterminate now this debasing, ultra-demoralizing, un-American and inhuman leprosy
Congressional Record, 62d. Congr., 3d. Sess., December 11, 1912, pp. 502–503.
Roddenbery's proposal of the anti-miscegenation amendment unleashed a wave of racialist support for the move: 19 states that lacked such laws proposed their enactment. In 1913, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which had abolished its anti-miscegenation law in 1843, enacted a measure (not repealed until 2008[23]) that prevented couples who could not marry in their home state from marrying in Massachusetts.[24]
In 1928, Senator Coleman Blease, a Democrat of South Carolina, proposed an amendment that went beyond the previous ones, requiring that Congress set a punishment for interracial couples attempting to get married and for people officiating an interracial marriage. This amendment was also never enacted.[38]
Footnotes[edit]
Jump up ^ Fredrickson, George M. (1987), The Black Image in the White Mind, Wesleyan University Press, p. 172, ISBN 0-8195-6188-6
Jump up ^ Woodson, Carter G. (1918), "The Beginnings of the Miscegenation of the Whites and Blacks", The Journal of Negro History, 3 (4): 335–353, doi:10.2307/2713814, JSTOR 2713814
Jump up ^ "Preserving Racial Identity: Population Patterns and the Application of Anti-Miscegenation Statutes to Asian Americans, 1910-1950". SSRN 283998  . Missing or empty |url= (help)
Jump up ^ Martin, Byron Curti, Racism in the United States: A History of the Anti-Miscegenation Legislation and Litigation, pp. 1026, 1033–4, 1062–3, 1136–7 (See version of article in the USC Digital collection) }
Jump up ^ Courtroom History, Loving Day, archived from the original on 31 December 2007, retrieved 2008-01-02
Jump up ^ Edward Stein (2004), Past and Present Proposed Amendments to the United States Constitution regarding marriage (pdf), 82 (3), Washing State University Law Quarterly, retrieved 2008-01-04 , archived from the original Archived March 7, 2008, at the Wayback Machine. on 2006-08-12.
Jump up ^ Frank W Sweet (January 1, 2005), The Invention of the Color Line: 1691—Essays on the Color Line and the One-Drop Rule, Backentyme Essays, archived from the original on 2007-04-09, retrieved 2008-01-04
^ Jump up to: a b c Francis C. Assisi (2005), Indian-American Scholar Susan Koshy Probes Interracial Sex, INDOlink, archived from the original on 30 January 2009, retrieved 2 January 2009
Jump up ^ Echoes of Freedom: South Asian Pioneers in California, 1899-1965 - Chapter 9: Home Life, The Library, University of California, Berkeley, archived from the original on 18 February 2009, retrieved 2009-01-08
Jump up ^ Interracial Marriage and Cohabitation Laws, Redbone Heritage Foundation, retrieved 2008-01-04
Jump up ^ {fr} A. Mérignhac, Précis de législation & d'économie coloniales, librairie de la société du recueil Sirey, Paris 1912, p. 45
Jump up ^ Kimberly S. Hanger, Bounded Lives, Bounded Places: Free Black Society in Colonial New Orleans,1769-1803. Durham N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 1997.
Jump up ^ Schafer, Daniel L. (2013). Zephaniah Kingsley and the Atlantic World : Slave Trader, Plantation Owner, Emancipator. University Press of Florida. ISBN 9780813044620.
Jump up ^ Kyle G. Volk, Moral Minorities and the Making of American Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2014), 104-116.
Jump up ^ Steiner, Mark. "The Lawyer as Peacemaker: Law and Community in Abraham Lincoln’s Slander Cases" Archived September 19, 2011, at the Wayback Machine.. The History Cooperative
Jump up ^ enacted similar anti-miscegenation laws."Chinese Laborers in the West" Archived 2011-07-26 at the Wayback Machine. Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program
Jump up ^ Robinson II, Charles F., University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. The Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture. (accessed January 4, 2007).
Jump up ^ Miscegenation and competing definitions of race in twentieth-century Louisiana.
Jump up ^ Wallenstein, Peter, Tell the Court I love my wife
Jump up ^ Where were interracial couples illegal?, Loving Day, archived from the original on 31 December 2007, retrieved 2008-01-04
Jump up ^ John R. Vile (2003), Encyclopedia of constitutional amendments, proposed amendments, and amending issues, 1789-2002 (second ed.), ABC-CLIO, p. 243, ISBN 978-1-85109-428-8
Jump up ^ Rust and Rust, 1985, p. 147
^ Jump up to: a b "Governor signs law allowing out-of-state gays to wed". The Boston Globe. 2008-07-31. Retrieved 2009-09-11.
^ Jump up to: a b "Big marriage rulings are coming in the next month". Gay People's Chronicle. 2006-02-17. Retrieved 2009-09-11.
Jump up ^ John McGowan (15 December 1997). Hannah Arendt: An Introduction. University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 9781452903385.
Jump up ^ Gallup, Inc. "In U.S., 87% Approve of Black-White Marriage, vs. 4% in 1958". Gallup.com. Retrieved 1 May 2016.
Jump up ^ Tucker, Neely (June 13, 2006). "Loving Day Recalls a Time When the Union of a Man And a Woman Was Banned". Washington Post.
Jump up ^ Alabama removes ban on interracial marriage, USA Today, November 7, 2000, archived from the original on September 14, 2002, retrieved 2008-01-04
Jump up ^ Suzy Hansen. "Mixing it up". Salon. Retrieved 1 May 2016.
Jump up ^ https://web.archive.org/web/20141016171345/http://blogs.kqed.org/lowdown/2013/03/24/less-than-50-years-ago-the-supreme-court-put-an-end-to-race-based-marriage-bans/. Archived from the original on October 16, 2014. Retrieved August 14, 2014. Missing or empty |title= (help)
Jump up ^ Eileen Sullivan and the Associated Press, "Man's halt of interracial marriage sparks outrage" in New York Times, October 16, 2009; Humphrey v. Bardwell on Justia.
Jump up ^ "La. justice quits after interracial flap - US news - Life - Race & ethnicity - msnbc.com". msnbc.msn.com. November 3, 2009. Retrieved 2011-04-18.
Jump up ^ Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, South Carolina and Alabama repealed their laws during the Reconstruction period, but the laws were later reinstated and remained in force until 1967.
Jump up ^ Bern Haggerty, Profile, WILLIAM JEFFERSON HARDIN: TWO STORIES ABOUT WYOMING'S FIRST BLACK LEGISLATOR, Wyoming Lawyer (February, 2000) (citing 1882 Wyo. Terr. Sess. Laws ch. 54)
Jump up ^ Min, Pyong-Gap (2006), Asian Americans: contemporary trneds and issues, Pine Forge Press, p. 189, ISBN 978-1-4129-0556-5
Jump up ^ See for example Stevens v. United States, 146 F.2d 120 (1944)
Jump up ^ John R. Vile (2003), Encyclopedia of constitutional amendments, proposed amendments, and amending issues, 1789-2002 (second ed.), ABC-CLIO, p. 243, ISBN 9781851094288
Jump up ^ Anti-Miscagenation laws, Reference.com
Additional sources[edit]
"Jack Johnson and White Women: The National Impact", Al-Tony Gilmore, Journal of Negro History (Vol. 58, No. 1, 18-38, Jan., 1973).
Further reading[edit]
Pascoe, Peggy. What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America. Oxford University Press, 2009.
Spiro, Jonathan P. (2009), Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant, Univ. of Vermont Press, ISBN 978-1-58465-715-6, lay summary (29 September 2010)
Tucker, William H. (2007), The funding of scientific racism: Wickliffe Draper and the Pioneer Fund, University of Illinois Press, ISBN 978-0-252-07463-9, lay summary (4 September 2010)
Strandjord, Corinne. Filipino Resistance to Anti-Miscegenation Laws in Washington State Great Depression in Washington State Project, 2009.
Johnson, Stefanie. Blocking Racial Intermarriage Laws in 1935 and 1937: Seattle's First Civil Rights Coalition Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project, 2005.
External links[edit]
Loving v. Virginia (No. 395) Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute
Loving at Thirty by Harvard Law School Professor Randall Kennedy at SpeakOut.com
Loving Day: Celebrate the Legalization of Interracial Couples
"The Socio-Political Context of the Integration of Sport in America", R. Reese, Cal Poly Pomona, Journal of African American Men (Volume 4, Number 3, Spring, 1999)
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Atlantic Marine Construction Co. v. United States District Court
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Atlantic Marine Construction Co., Inc. v. United States District Court
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued October 9, 2013
Decided December 3, 2013
Full case name
Atlantic Marine Construction Co., Inc. v. United States District Court for the Western District of Texas
Docket nos.
12-929
Citations
571 U.S. ___ (more)
Opinion announcement
Opinion announcement
Holding
A forum selection clause may be enforced by a motion to transfer under 28 U.S.C. 1404(a). When such a motion is filed, the district court should transfer the case except in limited and extraordinary circumstances.
Court membership
Chief Justice
John G. Roberts
Associate Justices
Antonin Scalia · Anthony Kennedy
Clarence Thomas · Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Stephen Breyer · Samuel Alito
Sonia Sotomayor · Elena Kagan
Case opinions
Majority
Alito, joined by unanimous
Laws applied
Title 28 United States Code Section 1404(a)
Atlantic Marine Construction Co., Inc. v. United States District Court for the Western District of Texas, 571 U.S. ___ (2013), was United States Supreme Court decision dealing with the enforcement of forum selection clauses.[1]
Contents
[hide]
1 Background
2 Opinion
3 See also
4 References
5 External links
Background[edit]
Petitioner, a corporate citizen of Virginia, entered into a contract to build a child development center in Fort Hood, Texas.[2] The Petitioner then entered into a subcontract with a Texas corporation for work on the project.[3] The contract specified that any litigation resulting from the contract would be brought in state court in Norfolk, Virginia or in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.[4] When a dispute arose under the contract, the Texas corporation filed suit in the United States District Court for the Western District of Texas, invoking that court's diversity jurisdiction.[3] The Petitioner moved to dismiss the suit on the grounds that venue was "wrong" under 28 U.S.C. 1406(a) and "improper" under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(3), citing the contract's forum selection clause.[3] In the alternative, the Petitioner sought transfer to the Eastern District of Virginia under 28 U.S.C. 1404(a).[3] The district court denied both motions.[3] On appeal, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit refused to grant a writ of mandamus directing the district court to grant either motion.[5]
Opinion[edit]
In a unanimous opinion authored by Associate Justice Samuel Alito, the Supreme Court clarified that the proper procedure to enforce a forum selection clause is through a motion to transfer under 28 U.S.C. 1404(a).[6] When such a motion is made, the district court should grant it unless extraordinary circumstances counsel against doing so.[7] Noting that Section 1404(a) does not provide for transfer to non-federal court venues, the Court said that the doctrine of forum non conveniens still exists within the federal courts.[8] While that doctrine has been codified at Section 1404(a) for the federal system, the same factors that apply in analyzing motions user that statute can be used to transfer cases to non-federal forums.[9]
See also[edit]
Law portal
List of United States Supreme Court cases, volume 571
List of United States Supreme Court cases
Lists of United States Supreme Court cases by volume
List of United States Supreme Court cases by the Roberts Court
References[edit]
Jump up ^ Atlantic Marine Construction Co., Inc. v. United States District Court for the Western District of Texas, No. 12-929, 571 U.S. ___, slip op. at 1 (2013).
Jump up ^ Atlantic Marine Construction, slip op. at 2 (noting that Atlantic Marine's principal place of business was in Virginia).
^ Jump up to: a b c d e Atlantic Marine Construction, slip op. at 2.
Jump up ^ Atlantic Marine Construction, slip op. at 2 (citing In re Atlantic Marine Constr. Co., 701 F. 3d 736, 737–738 (5th Cir. 2012)).
Jump up ^ Atlantic Marine Construction, slip op. at 3.
Jump up ^ Atlantic Marine Construction, slip op. at 4, 8-9.
Jump up ^ Atlantic Marine Construction, slip op. at 4, 8-9 ("Only under extraordinary circumstances unrelated to the convenience of the parties should a §1404(a) motion be denied.").
Jump up ^ Atlantic Marine Construction, slip op. at 8-10.
Jump up ^ Atlantic Marine Construction, slip op. at 9-10 (""Section 1404(a) is merely a codification of the doctrine of forum non conveniens for the subset of cases in which the transferee forum is within the federal court system; in such cases, Congress has replaced the traditional remedy of outright dismissal with transfer.").
External links[edit]
Text of Atlantic Marine Construction Co., Inc. v. United States District Court for the Western District of Texas, 571 U.S. ___ (2013), is available from: Bloomberg Law
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Atlantic_Marine_Construction_Co._v._United_States_District_Court&oldid=762683816"
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John G. Roberts

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/wiki/Fort_Hood,_Texas
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Fort Hood, Texas

values: Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

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values: Category:United States Supreme Court cases of the Roberts Court

values: Category:United States contract case law

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