2
must also question whether race is destined always to be a power-laden division articulated in
political and social contexts.
Before reviewing the significance of the developmental narrative that has been
developed, a brief description of Alabama’s dealings with the problem of miscegenation after
1954 is in order. This description will answer the basic question of what happened to the legal
structure that supported so many prosecutions for generations, showing that its dismantling was
not accomplished through the fiat of the US Supreme Court. It also underlines the fact that after
1954, miscegenation ceased to be the crucial developmental location that it was in earlier years,
as racial controversies involving the state and the law recentered elsewhere.
The Demise of Criminal Sanctions against Miscegenation
As noted in Chapter Seven, by the 1950s, the main legal forum affecting Alabama’s
efforts to suppress miscegenation was the federal rather than the state courts. Nonetheless, both
Jackson and Naim had failed to produce rulings from the US Supreme Court, and the Court
tacitly decided to defer consideration of the problem of miscegenation while the heated battle
over desegregation was taking place.
2
Judicial reconsiderations in other states were sparse; only
California’s high court took this route to invalidation in the closely divided case of Perez v.
Sharp in 1948. Still, several states outside the south dealt with the issue legislatively by
repealing their criminal prohibitions in the 1950s, beginning with Oregon in 1951 and followed
by Montana, North and South Dakota, Colorado, Idaho, and Nevada (Wallenstein 2002: 254).
By the mid-1960s, the criminal prohibition of miscegenation was almost exclusively a southern
phenomenon, with seventeen states maintaining their laws until 1967: Alabama, Arkansas,
Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina,
Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia (Id. at 253-54).
For the south, these statutes had sufficient symbolic significance that their repeal was
quite unlikely; further, even if prosecutions were uncommon, they could still be used to prevent
2
In 1954 and 1955 respectively, the US Supreme Court had considered reviewing appeals of cases involving
miscegenation from Alabama and Virginia. The 1954 case, Jackson, involved an appeal of a black woman
convicted under Alabama’s statute. The 1955 case, Naim, involved a Chinese man’s appeal of a civil ruling that his
marriage was invalid due to Virginia’s prohibition of miscegenous marriages. In both instances, the Court declined
review, in part because several of the Justices were concerned about taking on another racially controversial issue in
the wake of mass resistance to school desegregation.
Convention