Anti-miscegenation laws are laws that enforce racial segregation at the level of marriage and intimate relationships by criminalizing interracial marriage, sometimes also criminalizing sex between members of different races.
In the United States, interracial marriage, cohabitation and sex have been termed "miscegenation" since the term was coined in 1863. Contemporary usage of the term is infrequent, except in reference to historical laws which banned the practice. Anti-miscegenation laws were first introduced in North America by the governments of several of the Thirteen Colonies from the late seventeenth century onward, and subsequently, they were introduced by the governments of many U.S. states and U.S. territories and they remained in force in many US states until 1967. In the 1960s, an increasing number of states repealed their anti-miscegenation laws. In 1967, in the landmark case Loving v. Virginia, the remaining anti-miscegenation laws were ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren.
Anti-miscegenation laws were also enforced in Nazi Germany as a part of the Nuremberg Laws which were passed in 1935, and they were also enforced in South Africa as a part of the system of apartheid which was introduced in 1948.
United States
The first ever anti-miscegenation law was passed by the Maryland General Assembly in 1691, criminalizing interracial marriage. By the late 1800s, 38 U.S. states had anti-miscegenation statutes. By 1924, the ban on interracial marriage was still in force in 29 states. While interracial marriage had been legal in California since 1948, in 1957 actor Sammy Davis Jr. faced backlash for his relationship with a white woman, actress Kim Novak. In 1958, Davis briefly married a black woman, actress and dancer Loray White, to protect himself from mob violence.Lanzendorfer, Joy (August 9, 2017) "Hollywood Loved Sammy Davis Jr. Until He Dated a White Movie Star", Smithsonian Retrieved February 23, 2021.
In 1958, officers in Virginia entered the home of Richard and Mildred Loving and dragged them out of bed for living together as an interracial couple, on the basis that "any white person intermarry with a colored person"— or vice versa—each party "shall be guilty of a felony" and face prison terms of five years. When former president Harry S. Truman was asked by a reporter in 1963 if interracial marriage would become widespread in the U.S., he responded, "I hope not; I don't believe in it", before adding "Would you want your daughter to marry a Negro? She won't love someone who isn't her color.""Truman Opposes Biracial Marriage", New York Times, 12 September 1963, quoted in: In 1967 the law banning interracial marriage was ruled unconstitutional (via the 14th Amendment adopted in 1868) by the U.S. Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia. Many states refused to adapt their laws to this ruling with Alabama in 2000 being the last US state to remove anti-miscegenation language from the state constitution. Even with many states having repealed the laws and with the state laws becoming unenforceable, in the United States in 1980 only 2% of marriages were interracial.
South Africa Early prohibitions on interracial marriages date back to the rule of the Dutch East India Company when High Commissioner Van Rheede prohibited marriages between European settlers and heelslag or full-blooded slave women (that is, of pure Asian or African origin) in 1685. The ban was never enforced.
In 1905, German South West Africa banned the "Rassenmischehe" (racial mixed marriage). These bans had no legal basis in German citizenship laws (issued in 1870 and 1913) and the "decrees [were] issued by either a colonial governor or the colonial secretary", they were "not laws that had received the approval of the Reichstag". Similar such laws were also adopted in the German colonies of German East Africa (1906) and German Samoa (1912).
In 1927, the Pact coalition government passed a law prohibiting marriages between whites and blacks (though not between whites and "coloured" people). An attempt was made to extend this ban in 1936 to marriages between whites and coloureds when a bill was introduced in parliament, but a commission of inquiry recommended against it.
South Africa's Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, passed in 1949 under apartheid, forbade marriages between whites and anyone who was deemed to be non-whites. The Population Registration Act (No. 30) of 1950 provided the basis for separating the population of South Africa into different races. Under the terms of this act, all residents of South Africa were to be classified as either a native "white" South African, a "black" immigrant (these typically originating from Bantu lands across the border to the north), or a "colored" person of visibly mixed race parentage. Indians were included under the category "Asian" in 1959. Also in 1950, the Immorality Act was passed, which criminalized all sexual relations between whites and non-whites. The Immorality Act of 1950 extended an earlier ban on sexual relations between whites and blacks (the Immorality Act [No. 5] of 1927) to a ban on sexual relations between whites and any non-whites. Both Acts were repealed in 1985 as a part of the reforms which were carried out during the tenure of P. W. Botha.
Australia In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, so-called Half-Caste Acts in the Northern Territory, Western Australia and Queensland regulated marriage between indigenous and non-indigenous adults, often requiring permission from an official to marry. Officials were concerned with controlling relations between indigenous women and Chinese fishermen and pearl divers. From the mid-1930s there was a shift to control who Aboriginal peoples could marry, in order to promote assimilation, until 1961 when the federal Marriage Act removed all restrictions.
Asia
China Laws and policies which discouraged miscegenation were passed during the rule of various dynasties, including an 836 CE decree which forbade Chinese people from having relationships with members of other people groups such as Iranians, Africans, Arabs, Indians, Malays, Sumatrans, and so on.
India While there are no specific provisions regarding the freedom to marry someone who is a member of a different race in the Constitution of India, Article 21 of the Constitution, which is a Fundamental Right, is widely regarded as to provide that freedom as it comes under "personal liberty", which the Constitution guarantees to protect.
After the events of the Indian Rebellion of 1857, several anti-miscegenation laws were passed by the British colonial government.
North Korea After the deterioration of relations between North Korea and the Soviet Union in the 1960s, North Korea began to enact practices such as forcing its male citizens who had married Eastern European women to divorce them.Andrei Lankov, The Real North Korea: Life and politics in the failed Stalinist utopia (Oxford 2015) page 20
Additionally, the North Korean government has been accused of performing forced abortions and infanticides on repatriated defectors to "prevent the survival of half-Chinese babies".
Europe Nazi Germany The U.S. was the global leader of countries where codified racism was practiced, and its race laws fascinated the Nazis. The National Socialist Handbook for Law and Legislation of 1934–1935, edited by the lawyer Hans Frank, contains a pivotal essay by Herbert Kier on the recommendations for race legislation which devoted a quarter of its pages to U.S. legislation—from segregation, race based citizenship, immigration regulations, and anti-miscegenation. The Nazis enacted miscegenation statutes which discriminated against Jews, Roma and Sinti ("Gypsies"), and Black people. The Nazis considered the Jews to be a race supposedly bound by close genetic (blood) ties to form a unit which one could neither join nor secede from, rather than a religious group of people. The influence of Jews had been declared to have detrimental impact on Germany, in order to justify the discrimination and persecutions of Jews. To be spared, one had to prove one's Aryan descent, normally by obtaining an Aryan certificate.
Jews, Romani and Black people Although Nazi doctrine stressed the importance of physiognomy and genes in determining race, in practice, race was only determined through the religions which were followed by each individual's ancestors. Individuals were considered non-'Aryan' (i.e. Jewish) if at least three of four of their grandparents had been enrolled as members of a Jewish congregation; it did not matter if those grandparents had been born to a Jewish mother or had converted to Judaism. The actual religious beliefs of the individual himself or herself were also immaterial, as was the individual's status under halakhic law.
An anti-miscegenation law was enacted by the Nazi government in September 1935 as a part of the Nuremberg Laws. The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour ('Gesetz zum Schutze des deutschen Blutes und der deutschen Ehre'), enacted on 15 September 1935, forbade sexual relations and marriages between Germans classified as so-called 'Aryans' and Germans classified as Jews. This applied also to marriages concluded in Germany with only one spouse of German citizenship. On 26 November 1935, the law was extended to include, "Gypsies, Negroes or their bastard offspring". Such extramarital intercourse was marked as Rassenschande ("race defilement") and could be punished by imprisonment — later usually followed by the deportation to a concentration camp, often entailing the inmate's death. Germans of African and other non-European descent were classified following their own origin or the origin of their parents. Sinti and Roma ("Gypsies") were mostly categorised following police records, e.g. mentioning them or their forefathers as Gypsies, when having been met by the police as travelling peddlers.