POS 4624 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1-2: Fornication, Miscegenation, Reconstruction Era
10 May 2018
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Department
Course
Professor
Representing Miscegenation Law by Eva Saks
• Miscegenation laws began in 1661 in Maryland
o Criminalized marriage between white women and black men
o Had moral concerns (blackness being a punishment from God)
o Economic concerns that the interrelation would produce legally free children
• These laws were never meant to make white men stop raping/having sex with black
women (especially their slaves)
o Had economic incentives
• Reconstruction era civil rights acts put white men on the defense and the Southern states
created miscegenation laws
o Federal courts upheld more severe punishment for interracial fornication in Pace
v. Alabama
Racial Purity and Interracial Sex in the Law of Colonial and Antebellum Virginia by
Higginbotham and Kopytoff
• Virginia was the first colony to create slavery and created concepts of racial purity that
created racist legislation
• 1662 – children were bond or free according to the condition of the mother
o Being legally white did not make someone free and being legally negro or mulatto
did not automatically make one a slave – everything depended on the mother
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