interracial marriage in the United States
Interracial marriage is the union of people of different races or ethnicities. Such unions have been common throughout history, and the United Nations’ 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirmed the right to marry “without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion.” By the 2020s about 20 percent of marriages in the United States involved people of different races.
The prevalence—and acceptance—of such unions is a relatively recent occurrence in the United States. Starting in colonial days, many jurisdictions embraced discriminatory laws banning marriages of people of different races. The term miscegenation was coined during the height of the Civil War to bring increased attention to such couples; well into the 20th century more than half of U.S. states had miscegenation laws on the books. The last of them were struck down in 1967 when the U.S. Supreme Court declared laws banning interracial marriage unconstitutional in its landmark ruling Loving v. Virginia. Elsewhere in the world, laws against interracial marriage existed in Nazi Germany and under apartheid in South Africa during the 20th century.
Read more about the U.S. Supreme Court case that protected interracial marriage.
Early history of marriage bans
The history of interracial marriage bans in the United States dates to 1664 when Maryland became the first British colony to restrict “freeborn English women” from “intermarry[ing] with Negro slaves,” describing such marriages as a “disgrace to our Nation.” Virginia soon followed suit. Although most laws were enacted to prohibit Black and white marriages, a 1786 Massachusetts law also banned unions of Native American and white couples. But in the early years of the republic, some states began reconsidering their actions. Pennsylvania repealed its ban in 1780 and Massachusetts in 1843.
The introduction of “miscegenation”
During much of the 19th century the most commonly used word to describe the mixing of races was “amalgamation.” That all changed when a pamphlet by an anonymous author found its way onto the streets of New York City in 1864, at the height of the U.S. Civil War. It was titled Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro. The pamphlet’s author had coined the word miscegenation, using the Latin words miscere (“to mix”) and genus (“race”) to construct it.
The pamphlet was radical for its time, extolling the virtues of the mixing of races through marriage with language that included:
The miscegenetic or mixed races are much superior, mentally, physically, and morally, to those pure or unmixed.
and
A continuance of progress can only be obtained through a judicious crossing of diverse elements.
The language was so progressive that even some abolitionists, shown an early version in December 1863, expressed concern that the pamphlet was too bold in its proclamations. The reason for the boldness soon became clear. The authors turned out to be David Goodman Croly and George Wakeman, who worked for the New York World newspaper, which was staunchly anti-abolitionist and opposed the reelection of Pres. Abraham Lincoln in 1864. They created the pamphlet in the hope that it would be seen as the Republican plan for dealing with an eventual end to slavery and stir up intense opposition to Lincoln. They even sent one of the early copies to the White House in an attempt to get Lincoln to endorse it. There is no indication Lincoln ever saw it.
The pamphlet did not succeed in achieving the authors’ objectives, as Lincoln ultimately won reelection, but it was an early use of political disinformation, the intentional misleading of others through the manipulation of facts. It also introduced a word into the lexicon that was fraught with racist overtones.
Interracial marriage in the 20th century
In 1871 the first of three attempts to amend the U.S. Constitution to ban interracial marriage at the federal level was introduced by Rep. Andrew King of Missouri. The fight against interracial marriage continued into the 20th century with amendments introduced in 1912, in response to the marriage of boxer Jack Johnson to a white woman, and again in 1928, with a proposal that not only banned interracial marriages but also called for those who attempted to marry or those who performed such ceremonies to be punished.
None of the proposed constitutional amendments targeting interracial marriage got traction, so there was never a nationwide ban, but in some ways none was needed because of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Pace v. Alabama (1883). The court unanimously ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment did not outlaw state restrictions on interracial marriage. Throughout the first half of the 20th century, 30 states, at various times, had laws banning interracial marriage, including a California law that was struck down by the California Supreme Court in 1948. The argument for the legality of the bans maintained that the law treated all racial groups equally. In its opinion the California court said:
The right to marry is the right of individuals, not of racial groups.…Since the essence of the right to marry is freedom to join in marriage with the person of one’s choice, a segregation statute for marriage necessarily impairs the right to marry.
Although most of the legislation was intended to prevent the marriages of Black and white couples or white and Native American couples, Asian Americans were targeted by the Cable Act, passed by Congress in 1922. Although the law restored citizenship to women who had married noncitizens and thus lost their citizenship, it specifically excluded marriages to those “ineligible for citizenship,” language meant to single out Asian men.
“Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual, and cannot be infringed by the State.”—U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren in Loving v. Virginia
In 1964, in a unanimous ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Pace decision, declaring in McLaughlin v. Florida that laws banning interracial relationships were in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. It cleared the way for the landmark unanimous ruling three years later in Loving v. Virginia that laws banning interracial marriage are unconstitutional. With the Loving decision, interracial marriage became legal in all 50 states.
Interracial marriage in the 21st century
According to an analysis of U.S. Census data, in 1967 about 3 percent of newlyweds had a spouse of a different racial or ethnic background. In 2019 that number had grown to 19 percent of all newlyweds. Public opinion of interracial marriage has changed even more starkly. A 2022 survey by the Gallup polling group showed that 94 percent of Americans approved of interracial marriage. That near-universal acceptance compares with an approval rating of just 4 percent in 1958, the first year Gallup asked the question.
There are many reasons for the change in opinion, including the overall shift in the demographics of the country that has led to greater diversity among romantic partners. Education has also played a key role, as interracial marriage is more likely among the more educated. In 2020, with the election of Kamala Harris as the vice president of the United States, the country had its first interracial second couple. Harris married attorney Doug Emhoff in 2014, 150 years after the word miscegenation was introduced in America.
The anti-abolitionist roots of “miscegenation” and its misguided popularity as scientific theory in the Jim Crow South make it a term that has fallen out of common usage as derogatory.