Pérez v. Sharp (1948)

A critical forerunner to the landmark 1967 Loving v. Virginia case (whereby the United States Supreme Court rendered state statutes against interracial marriages unconstitutional), the lesser-known but historically significant Andrea D. Pérez and Sylvester Davis, Jr. v. A. W. Sharp lawsuit of 1948 marked the end of antimiscegenation law in California by overturning the state's ban on interracial marriage that had been established in 1850, shortly after California gained statehood.

The plaintiffs in the case, Andrea Pérez and Sylvester Davis, were of Mexican American and African American heritage, respectively. Pérez and Davis had met at work in Los Angeles during World War II and quickly fell in love, but a county clerk refused to issue a marriage license to the couple on the grounds that their wedding would violate California's antimiscegenation law. Forty states have enacted antimiscegenation laws at some point in their histories, and 38 states still maintained such statutes by the end of World War II. California's statute, enacted in 1850 and revised in succeeding decades, declared, “no license may be issued authorizing the marriage of a white person with a Negro, mulatto, Mongolian or member of the Malay race.” Although ensconced in since-discarded racial terminology, the California statute essentially prohibited whites (including Mexicans) from marrying blacks, Asians, and Filipinos.

On their marriage application, Pérez identified her race as “white” and Davis as “Negro.” At the time, the U.S. government officially recognized Mexicans as racially white, even though the American public popularly viewed and treated Mexican Americans as a nonwhite minority group, as anti-Mexican prejudice and discrimination were commonplace across the southwest. Such a contradiction reveals the inconsistencies between race as a politically defined category and race as a popularly constructed sociocultural concept.

Following the rejection of their marriage application, the couple sought the intervention of the California Supreme Court to overrule the county clerk's denial. The court ruled narrowly, 4–3, in favor of Pérez and Sharp, ruling that marriage is a fundamental human right and that the state cannot interfere with this right by imposing [Page 1694]race-based restrictions. The court also found California's antimiscegenation law to violate the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits states from denying life or liberty to its population and guarantees equal protection of laws to all persons. Writing for the majority, Associate Justice Robert Traynor commented, “A member of these races may find himself barred from marrying the person of his choice, and that person to him may be irreplaceable.”