By Victor Greto
When the Supreme Court unanimously ruled all state anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional in 1967, it officially put an end to the legal prohibition of marriage between the races in Florida.
The Court unanimously ruled that criminal bans on interracial marriages violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.
“Under our Constitution,” Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote for the Court, “the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.”
Aside from Florida, the Court made illegal 15 other separate state laws that still prohibited marriage between the races.
In the 34 years since the decision, interracial and interethnic marriages have risen dramatically in the United States, and now make up more than 5 percent of all married couples nationwide.
According to a recent survey of interracial and interethnic couples in the U.S. conducted by the Washington Post, Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University, an overwhelming majority of couples said they are accepted by their parents and in-laws, and feel their children are more advantaged than disadvantaged by having interracial parents.
The opinions of the majority of the more than 50 people interviewed who are in or affected by interracial or interethnic relationships reflect the survey’s conclusions.
Though a significant minority of the couples tell chilling tales of prejudice both within and outside their families, the U.S. has come a long way from a checkered racial past that included the creation of a unique color line, a civil war, and persistent civil rights abuses.
“The U.S. is unique among former British and French colonies in having a single color line,” says Frank Sweet, a Civil War historian and an expert on the history of race relations in Florida.
“Most countries that have intermarriage taboos have three colors, black, white and colored,” he says.
Women were scarce in colonial days, Sweet says, and Spain’s colonies in America, including Florida, and France’s colonies in America, including Louisiana, encouraged rich planters to marry slave women and select their own biracial children as yeomen, or small farmers.
But England’s American colonies took a different course.
America’s unique take on race and intermarriage began at least a century before the U.S. became a nation when, in 1676, rich western Virginia planters suppressed a peasant rebellion by dividing black and white indentured servants and small farmers from each other, and passing laws against intermarriage.
The maneuver worked.
After a century of development, slavery — and the color line — was officially recognized by the framers of the U.S. Constitution, when the document recognized black Americans as three-fifths the value of white Americans.
Even though the new federal government banned the importation of slaves after 1808, black slavery expanded radically after Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin in 1793.
When the U.S. took over Louisiana in 1803, and Florida in 1819, it brought its own understanding of the color line to the former foreign colonies.
“They used the Army to separate white from black,” Sweet says of Florida. “If you were light enough, you could ignore your ancestry, and you became white. If you were dark and wealthy, you bailed out, went back to Cuba, Spain or Puerto Rico.”
In 1827, Florida passed a law restricting voting to white males only.
Telling who was black and who was white in the South was relatively loose before the Civil War, Sweet says.
In North Carolina, for instance, “You were accepted as legally white in every way if you were reasonably pale and had ‘good hair,’ no matter your parents’ appearance.”
By 1830, 474 biracial South Carolinians owned 2,794 slaves.
The Civil War of 1861-1865 finally freed the slaves, but state anti-miscegenation laws were written after Reconstruction ended in 1877 to keep the races separate.
The so-called “one-drop” rule — anyone with even one black ancestor was labeled black — was created with the institution of Jim Crow laws toward the end of the 19th century.
As segregation hardened, so did attitudes toward intermarriage.
By the 1960s, the former states of the Confederacy, including the so-called “border states,” all retained prohibitions against intermarriage.
Those states included Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and West Virginia.
Three years before the 1967 Supreme Court decision, at least one part of Florida’s anti-miscegenation law was struck down.
In that case, Dewey McLaughlin, a Honduran, and Connie Hoffman, who was white, lived as common-law husband and wife, and argued in an appeal to the Court that the Florida statute violated the 14th Amendment.
Because the McLaughlins weren’t married, however, the Court did not strike down the statute that prohibited marriage, but struck down the statute that prohibited interracial cohabitation.