Equal Protection Under the Law

Anti-Miscegenation Statutes in the U.S.
Introduction
Anti-miscegenation statutes in the U.S. had been in existence in many states since the early days of their founding. In California, for instance, the law forbidding the marriage of whites with non-white had existed since the middle of the 19th century—and it was not overturned until the state’s Supreme Court heard the case of Perez v. Sharp in 1948. Virginia had a similar anti-miscegenation statute, which was used to jail the Lovings who entered into an interracial marriage in the 1960s. This paper will look at two cases that challenged the Constitutionality of theses anti-miscegenation laws and how the rulings on them changed legislation throughout their respective states and ultimately throughout the country. It will also look at how these statutes might have impacted Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) and the Fourteenth Amendment, as well as explain the significance of these statutes to the Defense of Marriage Act (DOM).
Perez v. Sharp
In the case of Perez v. Sharp, 32 Cal. 2d 711 (Cal. 1948), Perez—a Mexican-American woman—and Davis, and African-American man, applied for a marriage license in Los Angeles but were refused on the basis of the California Civil Code, which stated essentially that marriages of whites to blacks or any other race were to be considered null, void and illegal. The state’s anti-miscegenation statute was meant to regulate the intermingling of the white race with non-white races, and the administrative decision by Sharp was simply based on the statute in place throughout the state. In other words, it was not necessarily a personal decision on his part but rather an administrative act in accordance with the law, which it was his duty to adhere to in his position as county clerk. Since Mexican-Americans were considered “white,” the county clerk, W. G. Sharp, was simply following the letter of the law in his administrative capacity. Not to justify the statute, but in his defense, California’s anti-miscegenation law had been in effect for nearly a century and thus Sharp’s administrative duties were to follow the law. Perez, however, realized the injustice of the law and filed suit because she believed it was her basic right as a Roman Catholic and as an American citizen to marry whomever her Church saw fit for her to marry.
As both Perez and Davis were Catholic and argued that the Catholic Church was perfectly accepting of their marriage, the state of California should be as well. Their case was based, in other words, on the argument that California’s anti-miscegenation statute violated their rights under the 14th Amendment, which holds that states shall not pass laws that restrict the basic rights of American citizens. In the final ruling of the case, the basic civil right of Perez and Davis to be married as Roman Catholics according to the laws and prescriptions of their Church was recognized by the California Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of the plaintiff in Perez v. Sharp. The ruling thus overturned the state’s anti-miscegenation statute.
Loving v. Virginia
In the case of Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967), Mildred Loving—a “colored” woman—and Richard Loving, a white man, married in Virginia. The state of Virginia had an anti-miscegenation statute called the Racial Integrity Act of 1924. The statute forbade whites and persons of “color” from marrying. Again, this statute was meant to regulate the intermingling of non-white races with the white race. The administrative force of the statute was used in the case of the Lovings to give an example to others. But, of course, by the late 1960s the consciousness of America had changed. The ruling classes were no longer in favor—and the ‘60s had become a turbulent time in a number of ways, what with the assassinations of JFK, MLK, Malcolm X and RFK, the rise of the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, and the counter-culture movement embodied by the hippie generation. Against this backdrop, the Lovings were a target for the state of Virginia’s administration: they represented the new culture that did not care about race, racial integrity or racial purity. For the Lovings and their supporters, the state’s administrators were clinging on to an old way of looking at the world—a way that was no longer welcome in the U.S. by the new, rising order. Virginia found the Lovings guilty of interracial marriage and they were sentenced to a year in prison. The Lovings sued and the case was picked up by the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court heard the case and ruled that all anti-miscegenation statutes in the U.S. were violations of the Constitution and of the Fourteenth Amendment’s focus on equality in particularly. The Court stated that marriage is a basic civil right and that for a state to refuse marriage on the basis of race alone is to violate the Equal Protection Clause and the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which deals with the administration of justice. The constitutional clauses that were evoked by the Court were meant to show that all people of all races who are citizens of the U.S. have protection under the law when it comes to exercising their basic civil rights—one of which is the decision of whom to marry. The Court thus overturned all anti-miscegenation laws in the U.S. with its ruling on Loving v. Virginia in 1967.
Brown v. Board of Education
The anti-miscegenation statute applied in the case of Perez v. Sharp could have influenced Brown v. Board of Education in the sense that segregation was on the minds of many Americans in mid-20th century, and many Americans wanted to see the ideal of equality, which was supposedly guaranteed to all citizens in the Constitution, more fully embraced. The anti-miscegenation statute of California that was used to forbid the granting of a marriage license to Perez and Davis was similar in spirit to the segregation laws that were in place throughout many states in the U.S. The Supreme Court in the case of Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) ruled that state laws mandating segregation of schools were unconstitutional and thus had to be abolished. This was the Court essentially showing that the spirit of segregation and racism that underlined so many of these laws—from segregation to anti-miscegenation to the Jim Crow laws that were in effect through much of the South (Smith, 2007)—were inherently unconstitutional and against the spirit of freedom and equality that the country’s rules had been set up to observe and protect for all citizens most notably under the Fourteenth Amendment which forbade states from restricting the civil rights of U.S. citizens. The anti-miscegenation statutes clearly restricted citizens’ civil rights, as did mandatory segregation laws.
The anti-miscegenation statute applied in the case of Loving v. Virginia could have impacted the case of Brown v. Board of Education in the same way. Though the Loving case came after Brown, the statute had been on the books for many decades. That statute was just another indication of the unethical treatment of state legislators towards minority groups and to the continued repression of anyone who was not an Anglo-Saxon in the U.S. Indeed, much of American society had been determined by the ideals of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) culture that had been developed and upheld by so many of the country’s leaders throughout the 18th and 19th centuries (Horsman, 1981).
The Defense of Marriage Act (DOM)
The DOM was a federal law that allowed states to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages based on the formal definition of marriage given at the federal level as being between one man and one woman. Polygamy was thus not recognized as valid marriage at the federal level and same sex marriages were not recognized as valid at the federal level. When the law was ruled unconstitutional after being challenged in the United States v. Windsor (2013), the DOM was overturned.
The anti-miscegenation statutes applied in the case of the Lovings in Virginia and in the case of Perez in California relate to the DOM in terms of administrative justice, which, according to the Supreme Court in the United States v. Windsor (2013) was lacking in the DOM. The DOM failed to recognize the civil rights of individuals to marry whomever they wanted without respect to others’ beliefs about what marriage should be for and who should marry. In other words, by forbidding same-sex marriage, the federal government was essentially committing an act of administrative injustice that was antithetical to the spirit of equality and due process highlighted in the Perez and Loving cases.
Conclusion
The anti-miscegenation statutes in the U.S. were found to violate the constitutional right of citizens to pursue basic civil rights—such as marriage. The ability to pursue basic civil rights also applied to education, as was shown in Brown v. Board of Education, and again later in the issue of same-sex marriage. Equality and due process (administrative justice) were factors in all of these cases.

References
Brown v. Board of Education. (1954). Retrieved from
https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/347/483
Horsman, R. (1981). Race and Manifest Destiny: the Origins of American Racial
Anglo-Saxonism. MA: Harvard University Press.
Loving v. Virginia. (1967). Retrieved from
https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/388/1
Perez v. Sharp. (1948). Retrieved from
https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/1361202/perez-v-sharp/
Smith, R.J. (2007). The Great Black Way: L.A. in the 1940s and the Lost African-
American Renaissance. NY: Public Affairs Publishers.