Racial Purity and Interracial Sex in the Law of Colonial and Antebellum Virginia

Posted in Articles, Identity Development/Psychology, Law, Media Archive, United States, Virginia on 2011-02-13 20:20Z by Steven

Racial Purity and Interracial Sex in the Law of Colonial and Antebellum Virginia

Georgetown Law Review
Volume 77, Number 6 (August 1989)
pages 1967-2029

A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., Judge (1928-1998)
United States Court of Appeals (3rd Circuit)

Barbara K. Kopytoff, Professor of Law (1938-1999)
University of Pennsylvania

I. Introduction

There is probably no better place than Virginia to examine the origins of the American doctrine of racial purity and the related prohibitions on interracial sex and interracial marriage. Many people applaud Virginia as the “mother of Presidents” (four of the first five Presidents were Virginians) and the “mother of revolutionaries,” such as Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and Patrick Henry. Yet few stress that colonial Virginia was also the “mother” of American slavery and a leader in the gradual debasement of blacks through its institution of slavery. Virginia was also one of the first colonies to formulate a legal definition of race and to enact prohibitions against interracial marriage and interracial sex. For more than three centuries, the Virginia courts and legislatures advocated and endorsed concepts of racial purity that we would call racist.

While Virginia was a pioneer in these areas of law both before and after the Civil War, the pre-Civil War law was significantly different from that of the early twentieth century. The law of racial purity in the eighteenth century defined “white” as a less exclusive term than did the law of the twentieth century: people some of whose ancestors were known to be African could be legally white. The laws banning interracial sex and marriage were less harsh on blacks before the Civil War than they were afterwards: they did not punish blacks at all for marriage or for voluntary sexual relations with whites…

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