February 2004

Activist judges and the coming of the mongrels

    

  

 
In the middle of a night in 1958, the sheriff came and arrested the couple. They were convicted but given a suspended sentence.

In that year, only 4% of their fellow countrymen approved of their kind of relationship. There was extensive moral disapproval and a huge consensus behind the law.

Nine years later, their case reached the US Supreme Court, which overturned the statute under which they had been convicted.

“Activist judges perverting the will of the people,” declared opponents of the verdict.

“Against natural law!” screamed others. “Contrary to the will of God!”

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Richard Loving was white. His wife Mildred was black. The law under which they were convicted could be traced back to 1691, when their state of Virginia enacted the first anti-miscegenation law in what would later be the United States, forbidding the marriage of a white person with one from another race.

"Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents," their sentencing judge decreed. "And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix."

Just three years earlier, in 1955, Virginia’s Supreme Court had reaffirmed that interracial marriage rested on a foundation of “natural law…. As clearly divine as that which imparted…. Different natures” to the races.

In 1948, the state government of California argued before its own Supreme Court in Perez vs Sharp, that interracial marriages produced weak progeny, who themselves would be sterile and thus unable to procreate further. Furthermore, such marriages promoted social and racial conflict.

 

The case of Loving vs Virginia

Richard and Mildred Loving first got married in Washington DC, which didn’t have an anti-miscegenation law, then moved back to Caroline County, Virginia, where they were arrested in October 1958.

They pleaded guilty on 6 January 1959, and were sentenced to 1 year in jail. However, the trail judge suspended their sentence for 25 years on condition that they left the state of Virginia for that entire period.

Not liking life in Washington DC, they commenced proceedings to overturn their conviction. After many difficulties with the appeals courts, their case finally reached the US Supreme Court. 

 
This echoed the view of US Senator John F Miller from California, who said in 1878, “Were the Chinese to amalgamate at all with our people… the result of that amalgamation would be… a mongrel of the most detestable that has ever afflicted the earth.”

“Mongrelisation” was a common term used for a century or so to paint the outcome of interracial liaisons as a hideous debasement. If the idea scared and disgusted people, that was the very intention behind the word’s use.

California passed its law in 1880. Reflecting the different immigration patterns of that West Coast state facing Asia across the Pacific and adjoining Mexico, its law specifically added “Mongolian” and “Mulatto” to “Negro” as the races banned from marrying whites. In those days, “Mongolian” meant East Asian (derived from peril of Mongol hordes under Ghenghis Khan), and “Mulatto” was a negative word derived from the mixture of a donkey and a horse, producing a mule, (which was not itself able to reproduce).

The same line of argument was used in 1869 when a Georgia court decreed that . "The amalgamation of the races is not only unnatural, but is always productive of deplorable results,"

One can go on and on, right to the very beginning when in 1630, soon after the establishment of the first English colonies in the Americas, the Governor and Council of Virginia ruled that Hugh Davis (a white man) be convicted of "lying with a Negro". He was sentenced to be soundly whipped before an assembly of enslaved blacks and others for "abusing himself to the dishonor of God and shame of Christians."

So there you are - a felony with centuries of tradition, the full weight of Christian teaching and massive popular support behind it. 

* * * * *

And it still has support. In a survey in 1994, 16 percent of Americans said they would ban interracial marriage outright. Only 45 percent supported it, not yet a simple majority. The balance had some reservation or other.

Nevertheless, I will ask you now: with hindsight, were the “outrageously undemocratic activist judges” right? Should we criminalise love between a person of one race and another? Or are we a slightly more enlightened human race today because we’ve been forced to confront the issue?  

© Yawning Bread 

 

The case of Perez vs Sharp

This 1948 California case was the first in which a state court overturned a state law.

In 1948, Andrea Perez, a Mexican-American woman, and Sylvester Davis, an African-American man, filed a lawsuit against then Los Angeles County Clerk W.G. Sharp.

Earlier, they had sought a marriage license from the Los Angeles County Clerk’s Office but were denied such because Perez was racially classified as white and Davis as negro. 

At the time, under California state law, no marriage licence could be issued between a "white" person and a "negro" person. 

The case went all the way to the California Supreme Court where they succeeded.

 

 

Footnotes

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Suggested reading

http://slate.msn.com/id/30352/ White Weddings: the incredible staying power of the laws against interracial marriage, by David Greenberg

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A51886-2003Jul13 Evolution on gay marriage? - a commentary by Fred Hiatt, Washington Post

http://www.ameasite.org/loving.asp an abridged version of the Supreme Court decision in Loving vs Virginia

Addenda

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