Intermarriage, History of

Pre-Civil Rights Era

F. James Davis finds that mixed relationships and some intermarriage became common between white indentured servants and slave and free blacks in the 17th century in Chesapeake area colonies. Even though these relationships occurred primarily among the underclass, they were widely condemned and eventually subject to legal sanctions. Moreover, as plantation slavery spread and the number of encounters between free whites and black slaves increased, so did the level of sanctions against mixed-race relationships and intermarriage.

In the wake of the Civil War, most states increased their efforts to maintain the current racial order; this included criminalization of interracial marriage in many states, as well as legal residential segregation, black codes, and other Jim Crow-era policies. Additionally, in 1882, the Supreme Court determined in Pace v. Alabama that state bans on interracial marriage were constitutional. Moreover, groups such as the Ku Klux Klan took to terrorizing blacks as a method of preventing social relations between white women and black men. These vigilante efforts to protect white women also extended beyond blacks to enforce social distance between [Page 1217]white women and Mexicans, Chinese, Jews, and other non-Anglo groups.

The world war period, however, introduced a number of challenges to the Jim Crow system, as well as other gender, sexual, and class constraints. The participation of thousands in the war effort resulted in massive residential change, exposure to new countries and populations, a backlash to lynching and other violent terrorist practices, and a broadening of labor force participation for women and minorities in a variety of sectors, including technical and industrial fields, resulting in a boost in the diversification of unions. These shifts were not continuous, however, as Michael Rosenfeld notes; increased suburbanization and residential segregation at the close of the war period temporarily curtailed the expansion of intermarriage until postsecondary education became widespread at the end of the baby boom.

Milton Gordon reports that by 1957, intermarriage even between European ethnics, Catholics, and Protestants was relatively rare, with over 91 percent of Protestants in homogeneous marriages. At that time, 90 percent of minorities were black, distanced from whites by law, social sanction, and often force. Thus, until the 1960s, intermarriage between racial, ethnic, and religious groups was rare.

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