Nedra Austin, Anti-Miscegenation Laws and the Negro Woman (1987)

The first Negroes in Virginia were brought to Jamestown in 1619. Race mixing began shortly thereafter. Miscegenation typically involved white men and Negro women, partly due to the shortage of white women in early colonial days. In In Re Davis (1630) and Re Sweet (1640), white men were punished for fornication with black women. The Virginia General Assembly made a mulatto child's freedom conditional on that of the mother in 1662. Because fathers were not obligated to support their mulatto children or the mothers of their mulatto children, the law encouraged illicit miscegenation. A 1691 act banished interracial married couples. Under the law, a white woman who had a mulatto child was fined and bound out to servitude if she could not pay; her child was also bound out.

Before the civil war, sexual relationships between white men and slave women were publicly condemned but privately practiced and tacitly overlooked. White women, bound by Victorian ideals of purity and religion, were viewed as sexually inhibited, while Negro women were typically described as more passionate. White women were encouraged to be chaste, while slave women were pictured as outlets for men's sexual desires. Slavery depended on a growing slave population, which also led masters to ignore or participate in sexual exploitation of slave women. Despite the violent or coercive mistreatment of bound women, they were considered promiscuous. Their high birth rates and skimpy clothing-both consequences of their status as property-were used to justify the creation of negative imagry.

The General Assembly passed laws in 1748 and 1753 that reiterated the 1705 anti-miscegenation law. The tone did not change after the Revolutionary War. In 1792 the legislature passed a law jailing and fining interracial married couples and fining the priests who married them. Interracial couples also were punished if they married out of state to circumvent the law. The law encouraged extramarital miscegenation; interracial couples were penalized for legitimizing their relationship.

The Civil War and Emancipation Proclamation forced Virginia to revise its miscegenation laws. Banning marriage between free blacks and whites encouraged sexual exploitation of Negro women, implied their inferiority to white women, and legitimized white men's sexual advances toward them. In 1873 the Virginia General Assembly renewed the 1792 anti-miscegenation law, with changes to allow for emancipation. Penalties increased in 1878. The next year Virginia passed a law voiding interracial marriages.

These laws continued into the twentieth century. Additional glosses were added in the 1924 "Bill to Preserve the Integrity of the White Race," which defined "white" to include only people without non-white blood, and prohibited the marriage of whites to any non-whites (Asians, Hispanics, etc.). White women were considered to be repositories of racial purity. Once again that tacitly left white men free to produce mulatto children without impairing white racial purity. This remained the status quo until 1967 when the United States Supreme Court voided Virginia's anti-miscegenation laws under the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment in Loving v. Virginia . Nevertheless, negative views of black women that were created by anti-miscegenation sentiment remain.

 

Revised July 23, 2003 (MD)