Anti-Miscegenation Statutes in the U.S.
Introduction
Anti-miscegenation statutes in the U.S. had been in existence in many states since the early days of their founding. In California, for instance, the law forbidding the marriage of whites with non-white had existed since the middle of the 19th century—and it was not overturned until the state’s Supreme Court heard the case of Perez v. Sharp in 1948. Virginia had a similar anti-miscegenation statute, which was used to jail the Lovings who entered into an interracial marriage in the 1960s. This paper will look at two cases that challenged the Constitutionality of theses anti-miscegenation laws and how the rulings on them changed legislation throughout their respective states and ultimately throughout the country. It will also look at how these statutes might have impacted Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) and the Fourteenth Amendment, as well as explain the significance of these statutes to the Defense of Marriage Act (DOM).
Perez v. Sharp
In the case of Perez v. Sharp, 32 Cal. 2d 711 (Cal. 1948), Perez—a Mexican-American woman—and Davis, and African-American man, applied for a marriage license in Los Angeles but were refused on the basis of the California Civil Code, which stated essentially that marriages of whites to blacks or any other race were to be considered null, void and illegal. The state’s anti-miscegenation statute was meant to regulate the intermingling of the white race with non-white races, and the administrative decision by Sharp was simply based on the statute in place throughout the state. In other words, it was not necessarily a personal decision on his part but rather an administrative act in accordance with the law, which it was his duty to adhere to in his position as county clerk. Since Mexican-Americans were considered “white,” the county clerk, W. G. Sharp, was simply following the letter of the law in his administrative capacity. Not to justify the statute, but in his defense, California’s anti-miscegenation law had been in effect for nearly a century and thus Sharp’s administrative duties were to follow the law. Perez, however, realized the injustice of the law and filed suit because she believed it was her basic right as a Roman Catholic and as an American citizen to marry whomever...
References
Brown v. Board of Education. (1954). Retrieved from https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/347/483
Horsman, R. (1981). Race and Manifest Destiny: the Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism. MA: Harvard University Press.
Loving v. Virginia. (1967). Retrieved from https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/388/1
Perez v. Sharp. (1948). Retrieved from https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/1361202/perez-v-sharp/
Smith, R.J. (2007). The Great Black Way: L.A. in the 1940s and the Lost African-American Renaissance. NY: Public Affairs Publishers.
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