Anti-miscegenation laws were state statutes, and in some cases state constitutional provisions, that prohibited marriage and often cohabitation between people of different races. They existed in American law for more than three centuries, from colonial Virginia in 1661 until the Supreme Court struck them down in Loving v. Virginia in 1967. At their peak in the 1920s, thirty-eight states enforced them. Sixteen states still had them on the books the day Loving was decided.
Where the Laws Came From
The first bans appeared in the mid-seventeenth century, written into colonial codes alongside the legal framework for slavery. Virginia prohibited interracial marriage in 1661.1Jim Crow Museum. Laws that Banned Mixed Marriages Maryland followed in 1664 with a harsher statute: a freeborn English woman who married an enslaved man was forced to serve her husband’s master for the length of her husband’s life, and any children of the marriage were enslaved.2Maryland State Archives. Blacks before the Law in Colonial Maryland In 1691, Virginia added banishment for any white person who married a Black, mixed-race, or Native American person, requiring the offender to leave the colony within three months of the wedding.3Encyclopedia Virginia. An Act for Suppressing Outlying Slaves (1691)
These colonial statutes set the pattern that other states copied and expanded as the country grew.
What the Laws Prohibited
The legal theory behind the bans was simple. Marriage is a civil contract regulated by the state, so the state could set eligibility requirements, including racial ones. By defining who could legally marry, legislatures could withhold every benefit of marriage from couples who didn’t qualify.
The restrictions did not stop at the ceremony. Many statutes also criminalized interracial cohabitation, so a couple living together could be prosecuted even without a marriage license.4Tennessee Secretary of State. Anti-Miscegenation Laws In Mississippi, prosecutors treated interracial cohabitation as a misdemeanor and had to show that the couple lived together “openly and notoriously” as if married.5Cambridge Core. Unlawful Intimacy – Mixed-Race Families, Miscegenation Law, and the Legal Culture of Progressive Era Mississippi
Who Counted as What Race
Enforcing these bans required legislatures to decide who belonged to which race, and the definitions were rigid. Under the “one-drop rule,” a single ancestor of African descent made a person legally Black regardless of appearance or self-identification. This was not just custom. A Louisiana court ruled as late as 1985 that a woman with one Black great-great-great-great-grandmother could not identify as white on her passport.6PBS. Mixed Race America – Who Is Black? One Nation’s Definition
Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924 was the most detailed attempt to codify these categories. It defined a white person as someone with “no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian” and banned interracial marriage on that basis.7National Park Service. The Racial Integrity Act, 1924 – An Attack on Indigenous Identity The statute included a carve-out sometimes called the “Pocahontas Exception,” which allowed people with up to one-sixteenth Native American ancestry to still count as white, a concession to prominent Virginia families who claimed descent from Pocahontas.
Who the Laws Targeted
The bans most often prohibited marriages between white and Black people, but their reach was broader. States classified people of East Asian descent under the label “Mongolian” and barred them from marrying white people. Virginia’s 1924 law specifically named Native Americans, “Asiatic Indians,” and Malays as prohibited partners for white citizens, and Arizona added similar categories in 1931.8Cambridge Core. Unsuitable Suitors – Anti-Miscegenation Laws, Naturalization Laws, and the Construction of Asian Identities
Criminal Penalties
Violating one of these laws was often a felony. Virginia’s code prescribed one to five years in the state penitentiary for a white person who married a “colored person,” and the non-white spouse faced the same sentence.9Missouri Attorney General’s Office. Opinion No. 308 (1967) Mississippi went further, with sentences of up to ten years.5Cambridge Core. Unlawful Intimacy – Mixed-Race Families, Miscegenation Law, and the Legal Culture of Progressive Era Mississippi
The penalties reached anyone who helped. In Wyoming, a minister who officiated an interracial wedding faced fines or up to five years in prison, making it hard for couples to find someone willing to marry them even when they were prepared to face the consequences themselves.
A conviction also erased the marriage. Virginia’s code declared that marriages between a white person and a “colored person” were “absolutely void without any decree of divorce or other legal process.”9Missouri Attorney General’s Office. Opinion No. 308 (1967) The state treated the marriage as if it had never happened.
What Voided Marriages Did to Families
Because the state refused to recognize the marriage, children born to interracial couples were classified as illegitimate. A North Carolina court stated the position bluntly: “The purported marriage is absolutely null and void. Being a nullity, it is good for no legal purpose. The children of a prohibited interracial marriage are illegitimate.”4Tennessee Secretary of State. Anti-Miscegenation Laws
The consequences were financial as well as social. Illegitimate children had severely limited inheritance rights, and the surviving partner in a voided marriage could not claim a share of the deceased spouse’s estate through intestate succession. The Social Security Administration later acknowledged that under these statutes, a spouse in an interracial marriage “could not share in [the worker’s] interstate personal property as a wife,” which meant no survivor benefits either.10Social Security Administration. SSR 67-56 – Validity of Marriage Between White and Negro Persons A family built over decades could lose everything when one partner died.
Traveling to Marry Elsewhere
Some couples tried to work around local bans by marrying in a state that allowed interracial marriage. Several states blocked this route with “evasion statutes” that denied recognition to out-of-state marriages that would have been illegal at home. If a couple left with the intent of marrying elsewhere and returning, their home state treated the marriage as void from the start, giving them none of the legal protections of marriage.
The constitutional basis for ignoring another state’s marriage license was the public policy exception to the Full Faith and Credit Clause. States generally have to respect each other’s legal proceedings, but the Supreme Court had recognized that a state could refuse to apply another state’s laws when they conflicted with its own strong public policy.
How the Laws Ended
The Supreme Court initially upheld anti-miscegenation laws. In Pace v. Alabama (1883), the Court approved an Alabama statute that punished interracial adultery more harshly than same-race adultery, reasoning that because the white and Black partners received the same sentence, the law did not discriminate against either race.11Justia U.S. Supreme Court. Pace v. Alabama, 106 U.S. 583 (1883) That “equal application” reasoning shielded the statutes for decades.
The first breakthrough came from a state court. In Perez v. Sharp (1948), the California Supreme Court struck down that state’s ban and became the first state high court to do so, holding that marriage is “something more than a civil contract subject to regulation by the state; it is a fundamental right of free men.”12Supreme Court of California Resources. Perez v. Sharp The court also found that the statute’s racial categories were too vague to enforce.
The case that ended the laws nationally began with a police raid on a bedroom in Caroline County, Virginia. In 1958, Richard Loving, a white man, and Mildred Jeter, a Black woman, married in Washington, D.C., and returned home. Police arrested them and charged them under the Racial Integrity Act. They pleaded guilty in 1959 and received a suspended one-year sentence on the condition that they leave Virginia for twenty-five years.
On June 12, 1967, Chief Justice Earl Warren delivered the unanimous opinion in Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967), striking down Virginia’s statutes and every similar law in the country.13Justia U.S. Supreme Court. Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967) The Court rested its decision on two provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment. Under the Equal Protection Clause, it found Virginia’s justification for the laws “obviously an endorsement of the doctrine of White Supremacy,” and held that restricting marriage “solely because of racial classifications violates the central meaning of the Equal Protection Clause.” Under the Due Process Clause, it held that “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.”14Library of Congress. Loving v. Virginia
What’s Left Today
Loving made the laws unenforceable, but it did not remove them from state codes and constitutions. Several states left their bans in place as dead-letter provisions, requiring a public vote to formally repeal. Mississippi did not remove its constitutional prohibition until 1987.15Ballotpedia. Mississippi Race and Marriage, Amendment 3 (1987) Alabama was the last state to act, voting on November 7, 2000, thirty-three years after Loving. The repeal passed, but more than forty percent of voters chose to keep the ban in the state constitution.16Ballotpedia. Alabama Interracial Marriage, Amendment 2 (2000)
The Social Security Administration moved faster, ruling after Loving that state anti-miscegenation statutes were “unconstitutional and void” and could no longer be used to deny spousal benefits.10Social Security Administration. SSR 67-56 – Validity of Marriage Between White and Negro Persons
In 2022, Congress passed the Respect for Marriage Act, which codified the right to marry free from discrimination based on race, ethnicity, or national origin, and requires every state to give full faith and credit to marriages lawfully performed in another state. The federal backstop eliminated the public policy exception that had once let states ignore interracial marriages performed elsewhere.