Interracial Marriage in the United States
Interracial marriage in the United States has been legal throughout the United States since at least the 1967 U.S. Supreme Court (Warren Court) decision Loving v. Virginia (1967) that held that "anti-miscegenation" laws were unconstitutional. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in the court opinion that "the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual, and cannot be infringed by the State."
The number of interracial marriages as a proportion of all marriages has been increasing since 1967, so that by 2010 15.1% of all new marriages in the United States were mixed race compared to a low single-digit rate in the mid-20th century. Interracial marriage has continued to rise throughout the 2010s.
Public approval of interracial marriage rose from around 5% in the 1950s to around 80% in the 2000s. The proportion of interracial marriages is markedly different depending on the ethnicity and gender of the spouses.
Historical background
The first "interracial" marriage in what is today the United States was that of the woman today commonly known as Pocahontas, who married tobacco planter John Rolfe in 1614.
The Quaker Zephaniah Kingsley married (outside the U.S.) a black enslaved woman that he bought in Cuba. He also had three black common-law enslaved wives; he manumited all four. In 1828 he published a Treatise, reprinted three times, on the benefits of intermarriage, which according to Kingsley produced healthier and more beautiful children, and better citizens. In Spanish Florida, where Kingsley lived, he was tolerated until Florida became a U.S. territory, for which reason he eventually moved with his family to Haiti (today the Dominican Republic).
The prospect of black men marrying white women terrified many Americans before the Civil War. It was magnified into the greatest threat to society, the result of freeing blacks: according to them, White American women would be raped, defiled, sullied, by these savage jungle beasts. Extramarital "interracial" unions were not rare, most commonly white male and black female (see Sally Hemings, Lydia Hamilton Smith, and Children of the plantation), and although restricted to the lower classes common-law unions of black male with white female are not unknown.
However, the first legal black-white marriage in the United States was that of African-American professor William G. Allen and a white student, Mary King, in 1853. When their plans to marry were announced, Allen narrowly escaped being lynched. Their marriage was secret, and they left the country immediately for England, never to return.
In Social Trends in America and Strategic Approaches to the Negro Problem (1948), Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal ranked the social areas where restrictions were imposed on the freedom of Black Americans by Southern White Americans through racial segregation, from the least to the most important: basic public facility access, social equality, jobs, courts and police, politics and marriage. This ranking scheme illustrates the manner in which the barriers against desegregation fell: Of less importance was the segregation in basic public facilities, which was abolished with the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
However, the most tenacious form of legal segregation, the banning of interracial marriage, was not fully lifted until the last anti-miscegenation laws were struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren in a unanimous ruling Loving v. Virginia. The court's landmark decision, which was made on June 12, 1967, has been commemorated and celebrated every year on the Loving Day (June 12) in the United States.
Source: Wikipedia