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While anti-miscegenation laws are often regarded as a Southern phenomenon, most states of the Western United States and the Great Plains also enacted them. Although anti-miscegenation amendments were proposed in the United States Congress in 1871, 1912–1913, and 1928, [ 7 ] [ 8 ] a nationwide law against mixed-race marriages was never enacted.
Many states refused to adapt their laws to this ruling with Alabama in 2000 being the last US state to remove anti-miscegenation language from the state constitution. [7] Even with many states having repealed the laws and with the state laws becoming unenforceable, in the United States in 1980 only 2% of marriages were interracial. [8]
Anti-miscegenation laws, banning interracial marriage between whites and non-whites, had existed long before the emergence of eugenics. First enacted during the colonial era when slavery had become essentially a racial caste , such laws were in effect in Virginia and in much of the United States until the 1960s.
The laws of Arizona, California, Mississippi, Texas, and Utah referred to "Mongolians". Asians in California were barred by anti-miscegenation laws from marrying White Americans (a group including Hispanic Americans). Nevada and Oregon referred to "Chinese," while Montana listed both "Chinese" and "Japanese" persons. [40]
Interracial marriage in the United States has been fully legal in all U.S. states since the 1967 Supreme Court decision that deemed anti-miscegenation state laws unconstitutional (via the 14th Amendment adopted in 1868) with many states choosing to legalize interracial marriage at much earlier dates. Anti-miscegenation laws have played a large ...
Enacted three miscegenation laws between 1809 and 1913, and a 1952 statute that required adoption petitions to state the race of both the petitioner and child. A 1913 miscegenation law broadened the list of races unacceptable as marriage partners for whites to include persons belonging to the "African, Korean, Malayan, or Mongolian race."
However, all slave states and many free states enforced such laws in the Antebellum era. During Reconstruction, when biracial Republican coalitions controlled the legislatures, several Southern states repealed anti-miscegenation laws. As Democrats returned to power, between 1870 and 1884, legislatures passed anti-miscegenation laws in all the ...
In the United States, such laws were known as anti-miscegenation laws, with the Maryland General Assembly the first to criminalize interracial marriage in 1691. [22] From 1913 until 1948, 30 out of the then 48 states enforced such laws. [ 23 ]