Mildred Loving, who fought to overturn Virginia’s anti-miscegenation laws, died on May 2, 2008, at 68. Read her story here.

In finding the Lovings guilty of violating Virginia law, Judge Leon Bazile reasoned that if blacks and whites were meant to mix, God would not have put them in separate continents. Judge Bazile obviously would not have been for “globalization,” but did he really think white people were created in North America? 

The Lovings’ appeal led to a Supreme Court ruling in 1967 which struck down laws banning mixed-race marriages, then still in the books in 16 states. Until 1948, when California became the first state to overturn its law, 38 states had anti-miscegenation laws. The U.S. thus had something in common with Nazi Germany and South Africa during Apartheid, a distinction no other country had. Lovely bedmates!

The last state to overturn its law was Alabama, home of Martin Luther King, in 2000 after a special election where 40% of voters still believed in “the necessity for a law that prohibits blacks and whites from mixing blood,” according to a Salon article. Now, wouldn’t you know it, Obama won in Alabama! Times do change.

Anti-miscegenation laws didn’t just segregate black and white blood. Interestingly, in 1933, Salvador Roldan, a Filipino, was granted the right to marry his white fiance due to a loophole in California law which failed to name the Malay race specifically (along with “Mongolians, Negroes, Mulattos and persons of mixed blood”) as verboten. Two months later, the statute was amended to include the Malay race, voiding Roldan’s and all other previous marriages between Filipinos and whites.

The White Man’s Burden, however, makes mixing blood overseas OK. This is called “purificacion de la raza” (purifying the race), also known as whitening.

The Salon interview piece (2001, linked above) mentions a strange paradox. Werner Sollors of Harvard responds.

Is it still true that, as Alain Locke wrote in 1916, “The North loves the Negro and dislikes Negroes, while the South hates the Negro and loves Negroes” is a generalization with a hint of truth?

Locke was looking at a relatively early stage of the migration of Southern blacks to the North, but even now you could find a bit of lip service paid to racial mixing from pro-integrationist Northerners who have little interracial contact, and you could find hostile white Southerners who have a lot of close contact with blacks. That is a paradox.

Nadine Gordimer was here a couple of years ago and one thing that she said struck her about Cambridge, Mass., was that the social life seemed to be much more segregated or monoracial than it was in South Africa.

Really? How so?

She was referring to dinner parties, or people hanging out, or clusters of groups going in one direction or another. In South Africa, one always had the sense that there was a big political thing that prohibited integration. Once that thing was dispelled, the social integration followed very quickly, at least for people like intellectuals, writers, academics. And that may not be the same case with some areas of the Northern United States.

Oh, yeah, Obama lost in Massachussetts (and New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire).