Jasmine Introduction

In 1990, my parents were driving home from a trip to Yosemite when they decided to stop at a small store in the valley to purchase a snack. As they went to pay, they noticed a man staring at them. He walked up to them and as he looked back and forth between them, he announced, “I don’t like chocolate milk.” Another man joined him, looming over my parents with a menacing air. “I really don’t like chocolate milk.” My father is black. My mother is white. And the man’s meaning was clear. My parents left the store as quickly as possible to avoid the implied threat, and fortunately, the two men did not follow them. The experience left them shaken, however, and it was a clear indicator that more than two decades after Loving v. Virginia made anti-miscegenation laws illegal nationwide, opponents of interracial marriages were far from extinct. In fact, a year after my parents had this encounter, a Gallup poll found that 42% of Americans disapproved of marriage between blacks and whites, while 10% had no opinion.

If these numbers were so dismal in 1991, what must they have been like in 1967, when the Supreme Court decided Loving v. Virginia? The answer is stark: in 1968, a full 73% of Americans were found to disapprove of marriage between blacks and whites, with 8% having no opinion. Surprisingly, despite this overwhelmingly negative opinion of interracial relationships, only sixteen states had anti-miscegenation laws on the books when the Loving decision came out. To what extent was there a correlation between purist attitudes and living in states that forbade interracial marriage? Who were these 73% of Americans who were so worried about the consequences of racial mixing? Perhaps more interestingly, who were the approximately 20% of Americans who believed that race should not be a barrier to love? 
We can gain insight into these questions by analyzing newspaper articles and other forms of media from states where interracial marriage was banned and states where it was not, paying particular attention to which groups were mentioned as supporting either side. In performing this analysis, I discovered that there was a regional pattern for the tone of the media surrounding the case, but also that multiple key groups did not necessarily conform to the attitudes one might have expected of them. Specifically, several Christian organizations fought for the Lovings and interracial marriage, while some civil rights groups were reluctant to advocate on their behalf. I argue, therefore, that support for the Lovings was in most cases incidental to individuals' and organizations' larger political goals, rather than being a cause in and of itself.