Anti-miscegenation laws were state statutes that made it a crime for people of different races to marry, live together, or have sexual relationships. At their peak, most U.S. states enforced some version of these bans, tracing back to a 1661 Maryland statute. The Supreme Court struck down every remaining law of this kind in Loving v. Virginia in 1967, and Congress added a federal statutory backstop in 2022 through the Respect for Marriage Act.
What the Laws Did
These statutes did not simply withhold marriage licenses. They criminalized interracial unions, voided any marriage that took place, and reached into private life. Most states treated interracial marriage as a felony.1U.S. Government Publishing Office. H. Res. 431 – Supporting the Goals and Ideals of Loving Day Under the Virginia statute at issue in Loving, both spouses faced one to five years in the penitentiary. Alabama imposed two to seven years of imprisonment or hard labor for interracial cohabitation.2Justia. Pace v. Alabama, 106 U.S. 583 A Florida statute struck down in 1964 made it a crime for an unmarried interracial couple to share a room overnight, while imposing no such penalty on same-race couples.
The civil consequences ran alongside the criminal ones. Interracial marriages were treated as void from the start, meaning the law acted as if the marriage never existed. Couples lost inheritance rights, spousal property protections, and legal standing to make decisions for each other. Children’s legitimacy could be thrown into doubt, though some states preserved children’s status by separate statute. Traveling to another state to marry did not help: couples who returned home could be prosecuted just as if they had married locally.
How the Laws Classified Race
Enforcing a marriage ban required deciding who belonged to which race, and legislatures built elaborate systems to answer that question. Most laws targeted marriages between white and Black people, but many reached further. State statutes used categories like “Mongolian,” “Malay,” “Chinese,” “Japanese,” and “Korean” to restrict marriages involving Asian Americans. Wyoming’s law prohibited marriage between white people and anyone classified as “Negro, Mulatto, Mongolian, or Malay.” Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924 authorized state officials to certify an individual’s “racial composition” as “Caucasian, Negro, Mongolian, American Indian, Asiatic Indian, Malay, or any mixture thereof.”3Supreme Court of the United States. Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1
Definitions varied. Some states used a “one-drop rule”: Virginia’s code defined a “colored person” as anyone “in whom there is ascertainable any Negro blood.”3Supreme Court of the United States. Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 Other states set fractional thresholds — one-eighth, one-sixteenth, one-thirty-second — which generally grew stricter over time. County clerks verified racial identity before issuing a license, relying on applicants’ statements, appearance, and genealogical records.
Early Court Rulings
For most of American history, courts upheld these laws. In Pace v. Alabama (1883), the Supreme Court sustained an Alabama statute that imposed two to seven years for interracial adultery or fornication, compared with a fine and up to six months for the same conduct between people of the same race. The Court reasoned that because both partners in the interracial couple faced the same punishment, neither race was being discriminated against.2Justia. Pace v. Alabama, 106 U.S. 583 That reasoning stood for over 80 years.
The first crack came from a state court. In 1948, the California Supreme Court in Perez v. Sharp struck down California’s ban on marriages between white people and “Negroes, Mongolians, members of the Malay race, or mulattoes,” holding the statutes too vague to enforce and finding they violated the Equal Protection Clause by restricting a fundamental right on racial grounds.4Stanford Supreme Court of California. Perez v. Sharp, 32 Cal.2d 711 The decision did not bind other states, but it signaled a shift.
Loving v. Virginia
Richard Loving, a white man, and Mildred Jeter, a Black woman, married in Washington, D.C., in 1958 and returned home to Virginia. They were charged with violating Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act and sentenced to one year in prison, suspended on the condition that they leave the state and not return together for 25 years.
The Supreme Court took the case in 1967 and ruled unanimously that Virginia’s laws violated both the Equal Protection Clause and the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Chief Justice Warren rejected the state’s argument that punishing both spouses equally made the statute nondiscriminatory. He noted that the law only prohibited white people from marrying outside their race, not people of other races from marrying each other, which pointed to a white-supremacist purpose rather than any legitimate state interest.5Justia. Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1
The opinion went further. The Court called marriage “one of the basic civil rights of man, fundamental to our very existence and survival,” and held that racial restrictions on marriage violated the liberty protected by the Due Process Clause.3Supreme Court of the United States. Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 At the time of the decision, 16 states still had enforceable bans on their books. Loving invalidated all of them.
What Remained After Loving
Loving made these laws unenforceable, but it did not physically remove them from state codes and constitutions. Several states left their bans on paper for decades. Alabama was the last to act. Voters there approved a constitutional amendment deleting the interracial marriage ban in November 2000, 33 years after Loving. About 40 percent of voters opposed the change. The provisions had no legal effect by then, but they remained in the text.
Federal Protection Today
In 2022, Congress passed the Respect for Marriage Act, adding a federal statutory safeguard for interracial and same-sex marriages. The law requires every state to give full faith and credit to a marriage that was valid where it was performed, regardless of the spouses’ race, ethnicity, or national origin. No state official may deny a right or claim arising from such a marriage on the basis of the couple’s racial background.6U.S. Government Publishing Office. 28 USC 1738C – Certain Acts, Records, and Proceedings and the Effect Thereof It also defines marriage for all federal purposes: if a marriage between two people is valid where it was performed, the federal government must recognize it.7Congress.gov. Public Law 117-228, Respect for Marriage Act
Enforcement runs two ways. The Attorney General may bring a civil action against anyone acting under state authority who violates the statute, and individuals harmed by a violation can sue in federal court for injunctive relief.6U.S. Government Publishing Office. 28 USC 1738C – Certain Acts, Records, and Proceedings and the Effect Thereof Even if a future court revisited the constitutional framework behind Loving, the federal statute would independently require states to recognize interracial marriages performed elsewhere.