"Racial Integrity"

Introduction to African Americans as a Minority in the United States

We spend time on racial intermarriage because, in my opinion, it is a strong indicator of the degree to which society is integrated. If interracial marriages are freely and openly accepted in society, we can say that that society is on the top of the Bogardus Scale of "social distance". Looking at our own country’s history, we can see just how far we’ve come (and some would say how far we have to go) in the last 200 years.

Background:

The Notion of "Racial Integrity" -- In an attempt to prevent the mixing of races and preserve "racial integrity" many states passed laws against racial intermarriage. Generally speaking, society encourages homogamy (marriage between people who are alike with regard to race, ethnicity, religion social class background) through informal norms, and in some cases, formal norms (laws). Functionalists argue that this promotes social stability by preserving the distribution of wealth. Conflict theorists argue that people who have wealth and power try to keep it among themselves by controlling marriage carefully. Interactionists would say that people from similar backgrounds have more shared experiences and symbols that make building and maintaining relationships easier. Maintaining homogamy was easier in the distant past, before romantic love emerged as a major criterion of mate selection-- an attribute of modern industrial society. The move from large extended families and tribal/clan networks to small nuclear families reduced the direct influence of the parents in the selection of mates (matchmaking) as a means of establishing alliances between families. Romantic love has the potential of cutting across all barriers-- racial, ethnic, religious, and social class. To counter this, many states passed laws, including the notorious "racial integrity" laws. (No doubt, racism and the type of racist sentiments we read about in Gould's book also played a very powerful role in this). What follows is a copy of the newspaper article that describes the situation behind the 1967 U.S. Supreme Court case (Loving vs. Virginia) that ended prohibitions against racial intermarriage.

Richmond Times Dispatch: Sunday, October 11, 1992; p. C-4

MARRIAGE LED COUPLE TO JAIL-- (Supreme Court Ruling Broke Ban on Biracial Unions) by Anne Gearan (The ASSOCIATED PRESS)

SPARTA--On a warm night when she was a new bride of 17, Mildred Loving awoke in terror to a sheriff standing above her bed. He arrested her for the crime of being a black woman married to a white man. It was the beginning of a legal battle that led to the Supreme Court's rejection 25 years ago of all laws forbidding interracial marriage. "I believe that's why we were put here," Mrs. Loving said softly. "That's why we were married. "But in 1958 Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving were simply a young couple in love who wanted to marry. "I didn't know it was against any law. We were just happy," she said.

Her husband may have known about Virginia's anti-miscegenation, or race mixing law. But she didn't ask why they traveled 80 miles from Caroline County to Washington, D.C., to marry. "We weren't out to change nothing," she said. But the marriage of the pretty, slim woman and the shy, gangly bricklayer changed everything. It put them in jail. It forced them to leave the hilly countryside near some of the storied battlefields of a war over race fought a century before. And, in 1967, it resulted in a ruling that overturned one of the, last legal struts to racism and segregation in Virginia and 15 other states. "It was taken for granted before 1954," said Erwin Griswold, former US solicitor general. "It was all part of the Jim Crow pattern."

Mildred Loving is alone now-- The marriage that entered her name in law school textbooks ended in 1975 when a drunken driver broadsided the couple's car and killed her husband. She lives quietly in the small cinderblock house Loving built for her and three children after the Supreme Court decision allowed them to return to Virginia [Photograph caption] "MIXED AND MATCHED. Mildred and Richard Loving didn't want to overturn Virginia's anti-miscegenation law, they just wanted to get married."

At 52, Mrs. Loving is hobbled by arthritis and rarely ventures more than a few miles from the tiny town where she and Loving grew up. She thinks of the case only rarely. "It's history. It's all different now." Then, the Lovings were the only black-white married couple they knew. There were about 231,000 such couples in the United States last year, according to Census data. Mrs. Loving knew her husband from childhood. No one voiced objections to their plans to marry. An anonymous enemy called authorities a month after the couple was married. Three officers came to the house and woke them at 2 a.m. "I was scared to death," she said. With a flashlight on their faces, the officers demanded that Richard Loving identify the woman beside him. "He didn't say anything. So I spoke up. I said I was his wife." They had broken a 1922 law that said: "If any white person intermarry with a colored person or any colored person intermarry with a white person, he shall be guilty of a felony."

Mildred and Richard Loving were sentenced to a year in prison. The judge suspended the sentence on condition the couple leave the state. He told them "Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The Lovings spent several unhappy years in Washington, unable to travel to Virginia together. In 1964, Mildred Loving wrote to Attorney General Robert Kennedy, asking whether the just-passed Civil Rights Act would help them return home. No, Kennedy replied. But he urged her to contact the American Civil Liberty Union. They did, and attorney Bernard Cohen said he took the case for free. The case bounced back and forth between state and federal courts for several years, before the Virginia Supreme Court ruled the law valid.

Before arguing the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, Cohen tried to explain the issues to Richard Loving. "He was very country, sort of rough. He just said. 'Tell them I don't understand why if a man loves a woman he can't marry her no matter what her color.'"

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