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APPENDIX A
ANNOTATED TABLE OF CONTENTS
Racial Constructions: Miscegenation and the Creation of
White Supremacy in Alabama, 1865-1954
CHAPTER ONE
MISCEGENATION AS A CONTESTED SITE
This chapter introduces the study. It reviews briefly and critiques previous literature on racial
formation and miscegenation. Alabama is an ideal site for the research because it punished
miscegenation more stringently than its neighbors and its courts produced far more appellate litigation
on miscegenation than the courts of any other state. The chapter explains how a study of regulating
miscegenation in Alabama between the Civil War and the civil rights era can illuminate how racial
ideologies emerged, were institutionalized, and transformed. It also outlines how these ideologies
expressed in law contributed to the creation and development of the white supremacist state. It
outlines the materials used for the study and explains why looking at appellate cases and their records
enables a close focus on the interplay between the state on the one hand and social and cultural forces
on the other as they worked dynamically to shape racial policies and racial categories.
CHAPTER TWO
CREATING A CONSTITUTIONAL ORDER: 1865-1883
This chapter considers post-war litigation over the constitutionality of Alabama’s 1865 statute
rendering miscegenation a felony. This struggle set up the initial central place of miscegenation in
the state-based and national postwar debates over race. The chapter discusses the significance of the
Alabama Supreme Court’s invalidation of its statute on constitutional grounds in 1872, and the
strategies that the attorney general and courts used to re-establish its constitutionality in the 1870s and
early 1880s. The chapter explores the state’s articulated interests in the family as the fundamental
unit of state and society and demonstrates how the cases decided after 1872 laid the groundwork for
the constitutional order of white supremacy.
CHAPTER THREE
EVIDENCE, POLLUTION OF BLOOD AND BLOODLETTING: 1883-1917
This chapter considers legal battles over prosecutions for miscegenation and interracial rape between
1883 and 1917, linking these battles to the rise of a social order of white supremacy. It covers
Alabama’s constitutional convention of 1901, in which the conventioneers forbade the legislature
from ever allowing the legitimization of interracial marriages. The chapter places these state actions
in the context of the rise of eugenic theories about race and heredity. Alabama’s courts’ rulings
emphasized the need to prove that an allegedly miscegenous connection involved an ongoing
agreement to continue a relationship, which refined the state’s interest in preventing the formation of
interracial families. The courts also articulated rules about the content and admissibility of
confessions touching the elements of miscegenation, grounding the debates to come later.
CHAPTER FOUR
LITIGATING RACE: 1918-1928
This chapter focuses on the era when the pact popularized in Birth of a Nation was finalized: these
years saw the consolidation of the agreement that the south was to have free rein over racial politics,
as the Ku Klux Klan gained political influence nationally. In these years, the courts considered
several appeals contesting the state’s methods for establishing race in prosecutions for miscegenation.
The chapter explains how both the Alabama Supreme Court and the legislature attempted to solve the
problems created by strictly hereditary definitions of race. Drawing from rulings in the previous
period, the high court ruled that appearance and associations could constitute an admission of one’s
Convention