Sixteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

One theme that has been pervasive in US history and literature and that has been accompanied by a 300-year-long tradition of legislation, jurisdiction, protest, and defiance is the attempt to prohibit, contain, or deny the presence of black-white interracial marriages, making thereby the black-white divide the deepest and historically most pervasive of all American color-lines. By following a trail marked by three miscegenation cases, The Estate of Monks (1941), which dealt with inheritance, the path-breaking Perez vs. Lippold (1948), and Loving vs. Virginia (1967), this paper will examine the relations between court ruling and twentieth-century American racial ideologies, and the impact it had on American society.