1664—Maryland bans interracial marriages due to concern over whether children issuing from a black male slave and white female would be property or persons: “Freeborn English women [often indentured servants] forgetful of their free condition and to the disgrace of our nation do intermarry with Negro Slaves by which also [various] suits may arise touching the issue [children] of such women . . . a great damage doth befall the Masters of such Negroes.” (spelling modernized)

1691—Virginia outlaws interracial couples and labels their children as “that abominable mixture and spurious issue.” Others follow: Massachusetts (1705), North Carolina (1715), South Carolina (1717), Pennsylvania (1726).

1788—U.S. Constitution identifies slaves as “three fifths” persons when identifying citizenship for taxing and representation in Congress.

1857—Dred Scott case, heard before the Supreme Court, not only finalizes the fact that slaves were not and could not be citizens in the southern slave states, but furthermore establishes that escaped slaves are not citizens in northern states. The ruling institutionalizes blacks’ lack of basic rights, thus strengthening taboos against interracial relationships and commitments.

1865—Thirteenth Amendment abolishes slavery: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude . . . shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” South Carolina’s 1865 “Black Code” (much like other states’) forbids interracial marriage to freed slaves: “Marriage between a white person and a person of color shall be illegal and void.”

1868—Fourteenth Amendment recognizes blacks as full U.S. citizens. “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State where they reside.” The amendment has little to no effect on the various state laws against intermarriage of the races.

1883—Though Congress attempts to override “Black Codes” in a series of laws issued from 1866-1875—including an explicit mention of freed slaves’ rights to enter any contract (i.e., marriage)—the Supreme Court voids most of the legislation. The era of Jim Crow, based upon the Supreme Court’s willingness to give individual states the freedom to discriminate against blacks, begins in earnest. The hope among blacks that they would soon be accepted as American citizens faded.

1884—Former slave Frederick Douglass, black America’s first and perhaps foremost intellectual, sees intermarriage as a logical answer to the race problem. He suggests that “The future of the Negro therefore is . . . that he will be absorbed, assimilated, and it will only appear finally . . . in the features of a blended race.” After his first wife’s death, he married Helen Pitts, a white woman. Douglass is criticized from all directions, but spends nine apparently happy years with Helen before dying in 1895. The issue of assimilation raised by Douglass remains one of the lightning rod issues in discussions over interracial marriages.

1896—Plessy v. Ferguson case, ruled on by the Supreme Court, is perhaps the greatest formal blow dealt interracial relationships. The court rules against a seven-eighths white man (still classified black!) who sued Louisiana for being forced to ride in the “colored” coach on a train. The plaintiff’s lawyer uses intermarriage as an argument against the Louisiana transportation laws: “A man may be white and his wife colored, a wife may be white and her children colored. Has the State the right to compel the husband to ride in one car and the wife in another? Or to assign the mother to one car and the children to another?”

The Supreme Court’s response: “We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff’s argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.”

1905—On July 6 Joseph Woodman, an African American, and his white fianc‚e attempt to leave Arkansas to go north and marry. They are stopped by a sheriff’s posse, and Woodman is lynched. Between 1885 and 1915, according to historian Paul Spickard, there occur at least 2,715 lynchings of black men and women in America. The fear of “miscegenation”—race mixing—fuels the intensity of white violence against blacks.

1907—The irrational fear of whites concerning blacks is reflected in South Carolina Senator Benjamin Tillman’s congressional speech defending Jim Crow law. Tillman rhetorically cites a plot supposedly being discussed by blacks, “The President is our friend. The North is with us. We intend to kill all the white men, take the land, marry the white women, and then these white children will wait on us.” Tillman claims,“[The blacks’] minds are those of children, while they have the passions and strength of men.”

1915—America’s first full-length motion picture, D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation depicts blacks as rapists and the KKK the heroes.

Between 1880 and 1920—Thirteen plains states add antimiscegenation statutes to their laws. This, along with the many southern states who either reinstated or reinforced existing laws, adds up to thirty of the then forty-eight states having anti-intermarriage laws by 1920.

1918—World War I offers black servicemen a status which, among many other things, offered an opportunity to meet European women. A French leaflet warns its own officers not to encourage such liaisons: “White Americans become greatly incensed at any public expression of intimacy between white women with black men.”

1921—W. E. B. Du Bois, the great black intellectual, is no fan of interracial marriage. “We have not asked amalgamation; we have resisted it. It has been forced on us by brute strength, ignorance, poverty, degradation and fraud. It is the white race, roaming the world, that has left its trail of bastards and outraged women and then raised holy hands to heaven and deplored ‘race mixture.’ ” Yet, Du Bois offers this slap at the racial hypocrites. “We are abundantly satisfied with our own race and blood. And at the same time we say and as free men must say that whenever two human beings of any nation or race desire each other in marriage, the denial of their legal right to marry is not simply wrong—it is lewd.”

1932—Alabama. Seven black men and two boys thirteen and fourteen years old are accused of raping two white girls. Despite the complete lack of evidence, eight are found guilty by an all-white jury; the U.S. Supreme Court, however, overturns the convictions.

1940s—In post-World War II America, a new black middle class struggles with interracial romance in the context of being a “normal American” vs. selling their birthright for a mess of whiteness. Celebrity intermarriage is often treated reverentially by new magazines such as Ebony and Negro Digest. Yet interracial couples remain on the edges of both black and white society, seen by whites as a “black couple” and by blacks as acceptable, but not enviable.

1964—The Supreme Court strikes down laws that more severely punish interracial cohabitation or adultery than such crimes committed by couples of the same race. (See 1662.)

1967—Loving v. Virginia case. Richard Loving, a white man, had married Mildred Jeter, a black woman. Upon returning to their Virginia home, the couple was awakened from sleep by an angry sheriff and arrested. They were forced to choose between leaving Virginia or going to prison. For nine years after their 1958 arrest, they fought through the courts, and finally the Supreme Court ruled in their favor. By doing so, it also invalidates miscegenation laws which still exist in sixteen states.

1997—Will white and black continue to view one another with the symbolic valuations assigned each by the above ugly history? That history itself suggests we will. Laws have been passed, public sentiment has shifted. Yet we do not know one another as mere persons. We still fear one another. Yet what is the lesson taught by the love between a Christian husband (African American) and a Christian wife (Anglo-American)? “Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action” (1 John 3:18, NRSV).