Skip to main content icon/video/no-internet
icon backReturn to Entries

Anti-Miscegenation Laws

Anti-miscegenation laws criminalized both marriage and sexual relationships between people of European descent and non-Europeans, typically indigenous people and people of African descent. Colonial legislatures passed the first anti-miscegenation laws in the British North American colonies of Maryland and Virginia in the second half of the 17th century; assemblies in other British colonies quickly followed suit. These laws bolstered a racial divide that would persist from the colonial era through the 1960s.

The Supreme Court eventually ruled in Loving v. Virginia (1967) that anti-miscegenation laws violated the Constitution's equal protection clause. The Loving decision marked a permanent shift in U.S. race relations and has been regarded as a major victory for advocates of civil rights and marriage equality.

Effects on Politics, Economy, and Culture

Anti-miscegenation laws have played a critical role in the nation's political, economic, and cultural history. During the 17th century, the colonies of Virginia and Maryland grew increasingly dependant on plantation agriculture. Many laborers first arrived from England as indentured servants, contractually bound to work in the tobacco fields for a period between four to seven years. On completing their indenture, many of these former servants, often at odds with Native populations, settled the backcountry.

As a response to the impermanence of white servitude and conflicts on the frontier, colonists looked to Africa for a permanent source of labor. Within a generation slavery became associated with blackness, as whiteness became associated with freedom. Throughout this time, white lawmakers passed anti-miscegenation laws to clarify and strengthen the social hierarchy and segment the labor force into wage-earning, free white men and enslaved blacks; they also criminalized sexual partnerships with Native Americans, thus formalizing racial segregation. At the same time, individual rights, such as the vote and the acquisition and transfer of land and property (including indentured servants), configured U.S. citizenship as a category almost exclusively reserved for white, able-bodied men.

Growth of Slavery

After the American Revolution, the relationship between race and slavery solidified further. Cotton supplanted tobacco as America's most profitable export, and many planters moved west to plant the crop in the fertile ground of the Mississippi Delta. By the middle of the 19th century, the southern economy was wholly dependent upon slavery, and many of the region's lawmakers, plantation owners, and writers grew ever more strident in their defense of the institution. Sociologist George Fitzhugh and influential politicians like John C. Calhoun, Alexander H. Stephens, Jefferson Davis, James Henry Hammond, and others asserted that people of African descent were inferior. Accordingly, miscegenation posed a threat to the labor system and the social order, both of which were rooted in a white supremacist ideology.

Eventually, the Civil War brought about the abolition of slavery by the end of 1865, and with it, new possibilities for freedom and equality emerged. Radical Reconstruction led to an unprecedented level of black political participation. Mississippi elected the nation's first two black senators (Hiram Rhodes Revels and Blanche Bruce), and southern states sent integrated delegations of representatives to state and federal governments.

Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow

Due to the success of Republican-led Reconstruction efforts, disaffected Confederates organized paramilitary groups like the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and the White Leagues. These organizations initiated a campaign of political terrorism against black politicians, Reconstruction advocates, and their white allies; they sought to “redeem” the south and to restore white rule. The KKK leveraged deadly violence, targeting anyone who was involved or expressed solidarity with Reconstruction. Black southerners, under the threat of death or torture, ultimately submitted to yet a new formation of white supremacy: Jim Crow. After white southerners suppressed African American political involvement, they passed several new measures that ensured segregation into the foreseeable future.

...

  • Loading...
locked icon

Sign in to access this content

Get a 30 day FREE TRIAL

  • Watch videos from a variety of sources bringing classroom topics to life
  • Read modern, diverse business cases
  • Explore hundreds of books and reference titles

Read next

More like this

Sage Recommends

We found other relevant content for you on other Sage platforms.

close

Have you created a personal profile? Login or create a profile so that you can save clips, playlists and searches

close
close
close Signed In to profile You are signed in as:
close
Logged in Institution Institution