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Race, History, and Racial Erasure
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Julie Novkov
University of Oregon
The developmental process that started in Alabama with the close of the Civil War saw
profound disruptions with the opening of the civil rights movement in the early 1950s.
Nonetheless, the deep history of gradual rationalization of white supremacy and the white power
structure’s continual bargaining over the use of race as a political category suggest that the
function of race in Alabama’s politics and culture was too profound to be swept away easily.
The civil rights movement did not arise spontaneously, but rather as a reaction to the confluence
of social and political factors, not the least of which was the claustrophobic and insistently static
way that the state portrayed itself to its citizens in the 1940s and 1950s. This state, however,
would be the basis upon which a new state would have to be constructed. As in the
transformation from an antebellum to a postbellum state, the transformation from a pre-civil
rights to a post-civil rights state would build on the foundations laid by previous generations.
Overt white supremacy would ultimately be purged from the legal code as it had been earlier
from uncontrolled expression in the courtroom, and the formal barriers between white and black
would be dismantled judicially and legislatively, often through the agency of the federal
government. Nonetheless, the fundamental dichotomy of white and nonwhite, the political
foundation of white supremacy, would persist. It continues to be an issue, as the controversy in
2000 over amending Alabama’s constitution to remove the prohibition against interracial
marriage demonstrates.
The history of the legal regulation of miscegenation in Alabama is both a history of the
politics of race and a history of development. Miscegenation was the premier site for legal
actors to negotiate the meaning of race and racial division in the developing state. Reflecting on
this history will show that race cannot be dismissed as a category with political significance,
even though the state has largely purged overt references to it and has gradually erased it from its
governing documents. We must consider critically and carefully the potential impact of
strategies like deconstruction of race to ensure that they will not do more harm than good. We
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Note: This paper is a slightly modified draft of the conclusion to a book manuscript entitled Racial Constructions,
which relates the history of postbellum legal regulation of miscegenation in Alabama.
Convention