FIFTY YEARS AGO: June 12, 1967
This day now has a grassroots celebration behind it, called Loving Day. While not an official national public holiday,
the celebrations have occurred across the country, and in cities worldwide. This year, for instance, there were Loving Day celebrations in the UK, in France, in the Netherlands and in Japan. And
this map of the United States, showing interracial marriage rates, is interesting to see.
Chief Justice Earl Warren, in the unanimous Supreme Court decision in Loving v. Virginia
I first heard about
Loving v. Virginia in college, and being that it came down in the 60s I wondered what
Thurgood Marshall's opinion on the case was. That's when I learned that he was not sworn in as an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court until June 13, 1967 -- the day after
Loving v. Virginia was decided.
Speaking of Justice
Marshall, when his first wife died, he began to court a co-worker at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund,
Cecilia Suyat, who was Filipino-Hawaiian.
She had a flower in her hair. He wore his trademark black horn-rimmed glasses and gazed down at her. She was a 4-foot-11 woman of Philippine descent married to a black legal giant.
“He was 6-foot-2. He would always say, ‘How’s the weather down there, gal?’ I’d say, ‘Same as up there, man!’ I’d keep telling him: ‘I don’t care how tall you are. I could still beat you up. I’ll get on a chair,’ ” she says, laughing...
Cissy’s journey here was an unlikely one. Born in Hawaii to immigrant parents, Cecilia “Cissy” Suyat moved to New York after her father balked at her marrying a Filipino whose family spoke a different dialect.
“For my father, that was a no-no,” she said. “Imagine that? Another dialect, instead of another race?”
“So he said, ‘You go to New York with your aunt and uncle and take some business courses. And if you still love him in a year, come back and marry him.’ ”
Instead, she says, she decided she wanted to stay in New York. Her father agreed but told her, “You’ve got to support yourself.”
She went to the employment office.
“The clerk, she saw my dark skin, and she sent me to the national office of the NAACP,” she says. “That is the only reason I can think of that she sent me to the NAACP for my first job. And to this day, I thank her, because had it not been for her, I wouldn’t have known anything about a race problem.”
She also wouldn’t have met Thurgood Marshall, the head of the NAACP’s legal team.
In 1948, she started working as a stenographer, then was promoted to be the secretary to the director of the NAACP’s branch offices. She earned $35 a week and played a supporting role in the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision...
Nine months after the Brown decision, his first wife, Vivian “Buster” Burey, died of cancer at the age of 44. One of the country’s most accomplished black men was suddenly a widower.
He soon began courting Cissy, who resisted when he proposed. “I said, ‘No way. No way. People will think you are marrying a foreigner,’ ” she says. Her own family would raise objections, too.
“He said, ‘I don’t care what people think. I’m marrying you.’ He was so persuasive. So we got married. And, actually, there was no repercussion because people knew me.”
On Dec. 17, 1955, Roy Wilkins, then executive secretary of the NAACP, gave her away at St. Philip’s Episcopal Church in Harlem. At their New York apartment, the couple’s visitors included the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks.
At the time, sixteen states had "anti-miscegenation" laws on the books. You can easily guess in which region of the country they were all located. Most of them soon stopped enforcing them, but still kept them on the books. It wasn't until 2000 that the last state (Alabama) finally and formally repealed their laws.
Speaking of Alabama:
In Alabama, it took until 2000 to remove these laws. A referendum was passed that removed this article from the Alabama State Constitution:
"The Legislature shall never pass any law to authorize or legalize any marriage between any white person and a Negro, or a descendant of a Negro." (Alabama State Constitution, Article IV, Section 102)
This section was introduced in 1901. According to a poll conducted by the Mobile Register in September of 2000, 19% of voters said that they would not remove section 102. This is comparable to the 22% in South Carolina. However, 64% said that they would vote to remove it. While this is a majority, it is still far from a unanimous vote.
Nearly one out of every five Alabama voters in 2000 were against removing the words against "miscegenation". Surely things have improved since then, right?
Well, yes, and no. A few facts:
- According to a 2013 Gallup poll, 11% of Americans still do not approve of interracial marriages;
- One-in-six American newlyweds (17%) are married to a person of a "different race or ethnicity" according to a May 2017 Pew Research Center analysis. This is five times more than in 1967, the year of the Loving decision.
- One-in-ten of all married Americans are in an interracial or interethnic marriage (about 11 million).
- According to a 2015 Pew Research analysis, 6.9% of adult Americans (22 million) are multiracial. Compare this to the percentage of Americans who are Asian American (5.6%).
- In 2011, 46% of Mississippi Republicans thought interracial marriage should be illegal.
Finally, according to a
May 2017 Pew Research report:
The view that the rise in the number of interracial marriages is good for society is particularly prevalent among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents; 49% in this group say this, compared with 28% of Republicans and those who lean Republican. The majority of Republicans (60%) say it doesn’t make much of a difference, while 12% say this trend is bad for society. Among Democrats, 45% say it doesn’t make much difference while 6% say it’s bad thing. This difference persists when controlling for race. Among whites, Democrats are still much more likely than Republicans to say more interracial marriages are a good thing for society.
In other words, twice as many Republicans as Democrats say that interracial marriage is a "bad thing". More interesting is that that ratio holds up, no matter what race the Democrat respondent or the Republican respondent is.
Much progress has been made, but we still have some ways to go.