My understanding is in the south, in general, miscegenation likely carried the death penalty or a charge of rape (at least if the guy was black and the woman white). But how was it viewed in the midwest, northeast, west, etc? Did views change any before and after the civil war? Were views in 1930 different than the views in 1870?
I assume views were more libertarian in the northeast since the northeast usually seems more socially tolerant. What about the newly settled west and southwest? What about the midwest?
It was not necessarily rape, though an interracial marriage not considered legal in some states.
It looks like the laws cropped up during the Colonial period and were in most of the 13 colonies. Prior to the Civil War, a few states (e.g., Massachusetts and Pennsylvania) repealed the laws; after the war, most states stopped enforcing them. However, after reconstruction, the laws were strengthened and fully enforced in the South and existed in 31 of the 48 states in 1940.
In the 40s, the laws were slowly repealed once and for all, and they were finally declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1967.
It looks like nine states – Minnesota, Wisconsin, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, plus Alaska and Hawaii – never had any laws against interracial marriage at all. Ten repealed them by 1887 and 14 more had repealed them before the Supreme Court ruling. The last 17 – the Confereracy, plus Oklahoma, Missouri, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Delaware (which repealed their law just before the ruling) – had their laws invalidated, but in some cases they remained on the books for years afterwards.
There were at best a few pockets in the U.S. that didn’t view miscegenation as a crime against nature/humanity/morality/whatever.
When I say pockets, I mean small numbers of people of certain classes or beliefs or social connections, not regions or states or cities. New York City may have had some, but that still meant that the vast majority of people were against it. I’m sure that’s true for Atlanta as well.
The first census stats I see are from 1970, with just over 300,000 interracial marriages, or less than 1%. It would have been much rarer than that earlier, although certainly a good proportion of couples just wouldn’t have bothered trying to get a formal ceremony.
They would have faced prejudice everywhere from just about everyone, and that includes blacks and whites, as well as the even smaller numbers of Hispanics, Asians, and others considered non-whites. Heck, marriages between adherents of different religions were treated almost as badly by anyone who knew of the differences.
I know I read somewhere that the old law that Mitt Romney seized on to limit the number of out-of-state gay couples coming to Massachusetts to get married (that you had to be a resident of the state for x years for a valid marriage) was originally put in place to prevent out-of-state mixed-race couples from coming to Massachusetts to get married.
If all states did that, then people resident in different states just couldn’t get married. When I got married I was resident in NY, my fiancée in CO and the wedding took place in NJ.