June 13, 1967

Marriage is one of the “basic civil rights of man,” fundamental to our very existence and survival. To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual, and cannot be infringed by the State.

On the history of antimiscegenation laws, see historian Peggy Pascoe’s What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America. Pascoe makes it clear that these laws were a foundation for larger projects of white supremacy and shows that until the late 1950s most western states had laws prohibiting whites from marrying African Americans, Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and/or Asian Americans. Pascoe also cites a 1968 poll that found that 75 percent of whites disapproved of interracial marriage, and only 17 percent approved of it. “In little more than a generation,” Pascoe concludes, “most White Americans somehow managed to forget how fundamentally they had once believed these bans to be and, moreover, managed to persuade themselves that they, and their government, had always been firmly committed to civil rights and racial equality.”¹⁰⁸