When did Interracial Marriage become Legal in every U.S State?

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The first “interracial” marriage in the United States was that of the woman known as Pocahontas, who espoused tobacco planter John Rolfe in 1614.

The Quaker Zephaniah Kingsley married a black enslaved woman he purchased in Cuba. He further had three black common-law enslaved spouses; he freed all four. In 1828 Zephaniah Kingsley published a Monograph on the advantages of intermarriage, which according to Kingsley, birthed healthier and more gorgeous kids and better residents. He lived in Spanish Florida until Florida became a part of the U.S., for which reason he ultimately emigrated with his family to Haiti.

The possibility of black men mating white women frightened many Americans before the Civil War. It was exaggerated into the biggest threat to the nation. Adulterate “interracial” connections were not rare, most usually white male and black female.

The first legal black-white marriage in the U.S. was between Black-American professor William G. Allen and a white student, Mary King, in 1853. When their intentions to wed were announced, Allen miraculously avoided being lynched. Their wedding was secretive, and they left the U.S. quickly for England and never come back.

In 1948, the California Supreme Court ruled in Perez v. Sharp that the Californian anti-miscegenation laws violated the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the first time since Reconstruction that a state court stated such legislation lawless, and making California the first state since Ohio in 1887 to reverse its anti-miscegenation law.

But the banning of interracial marriage was not entirely lifted until the last anti-miscegenation regulations were punched down by the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren in a unanimous ruling Loving v. Virginia. The court’s milestone decision, which was made on June 12, 1967.

The map below shows when did interracial marriage become legal in each American state.

Nowadays, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the amount of interracially married couples has grown from 310 thousand in 1970 to 651 thousand in 1980, to 964 thousand in 1990, to 1.5 million in 2000 and 2.3 million in 2008; estimating for 0.7%, 1.3%, 1.8%, 2.6% and 3.9% of the total amount of married couples in those years, respectively.

In 2015, 17 percent of all U.S. honeymooners had a mate of a different race, marking more than a quintuple rise since 1967, when 3 percent of honeymooners intermarried.

Attitudes about intermarriage are shifting as well. According to the General Social Survey in 1990, 63 percent of non-black adults stated they would be against a close relative mating a black person. Today, the figure is at 14 percent.