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Racial Constructions: The Legal Regulation of Miscegenation in Alabama, 1890–1934

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2011

Julie Novkov
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Extract

For over one hundred years—from the post–Civil War era to the post–Civil Rights era—the state of Alabama maintained a legal and social commitment to keeping blacks and whites from engaging in long-term sexual relationships with each other. Recent studies addressing the laws that barred miscegenation have shown that investigating governmental reactions to intimate interracial connections reveals much about the interplay between legal and social definitions of race as well as about the development of whiteness as a proxy for superior social, political, and legal status.

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Articles
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Law and History Review , Volume 20 , Issue 2 , Summer 2002 , pp. 225 - 277
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Copyright © the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 2002

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References

1. See, e.g., Pascoe, Peggy,“Miscegenation Law, Court Cases, and Ideologies of ‘Race’ in Twentieth-Century America,” Journal of American History 83 (1996): 44–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gross, Ariela J., “Litigating Whiteness: Trials of Racial Determination in the Nineteenth-Century South,” Yale Law Journal 108 (1998): 109–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hodes, Martha, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Wallenstein, Peter, “Race, Marriage, and the Law of Freedom: Alabama and Virginia, 1860s–1960s,” Chicago-Kent Law Review 70 (1994): 371–437Google Scholar; Zack, Naomi, Race and Mixed Race (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Welke, Barbara, “When All the Women Were White, and All the Blacks Were Men: Gender, Class, Race, and the Road to Plessy, 1855–1914,” Law and History Review 13 (1995): 261–316.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. See, e.g., Fields, Barbara J., “Ideology and Race in American History,” in Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, ed. Kousser, J. Morgan and McPherson, James M. (New York: Oxford University Press 1982), 143–77Google Scholar; Hale, Grace Elizabeth, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998)Google Scholar. Many other recent examples explore this theme, arguing against claims that whiteness has historically been a category with no real content aside from opposition to marked categories like blackness.

3. Defining race continues to be a problem in terms of what race actually is and what it signifies. Some authors advocate deconstructing whiteness itself in the hope that this process will lead to the destruction of racial privilege. See, e.g., Igatiev, Noel, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995).Google Scholar While the author sympathizes with the need to destroy racial privilege, she agrees with Omi and Winant's understanding of race as a sociopolitical construct embedded in history with different forms and meanings over time. Omi, Michael and Winant, Howard, Racial Formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1990s, 2d ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994).Google Scholar Thus, troubling and loaded though “race” is, it will appear throughout the article.

4. Gross, “Litigating Whiteness,” 109–85.

5. Wallenstein, “Race, Marriage, and the Law of Freedom,” 371–37.

6. In the years for which statistics are available (1883–1938), Alabama attorneys general filed charges against 343 individuals for violating anti-miscegenation statutes and secured 177 convictions. Attorney General of Alabama, Biennial Reports (Montgomery: State of Alabama, 1884–1938).Google Scholar The appellate cases signal the presence of significant constitutional and factual questions. If a particular legal or factual issue was forming the basis for several appeals, one can deduce that the issue was unsettled in law, society, or both. At such uncertain moments, the framing and discursive choices that individuals made could have profound effects, not only on outcomes in individual cases, but also on the ways that future judges and lawyers would conceptualize the problems.

7. Robinson, Charles F., “The Antimiscegenation Conversation: Love's Legislated Limits (1868–1967)” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Houston, 1998), 90.Google Scholar The high level of appellate litigation calls into question Alabama's representativeness. While certain factors in Alabama clearly contributed to higher rates of appeals, other states in the region were hearing the same kinds of cases and largely using the same legal principles to decide them.

8. Hodes, White Women, Black Men, 6.

9. Bardaglio, Peter, Reconstructing the Household: Families, Sex, and the Law in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 115–17.Google Scholar

10. Hodes, White Women, Black Men, 28–31, 37, 66–67, 112–22, 143.

11. Ibid., 158.

12. Bardaglio, Reconstructing the Household, 117. While the prewar state obviously exerted a high degree of patriarchal control, Bardaglio's research has shown that the postbellum legal system was far more likely to take direct control over families and to step into the traditional role of the patriarch.

13. Ibid., 49.

14. Berry, Mary Frances, “Judging Morality: Sexual Behavior and Legal Consequences in the Late Nineteenth-Century South,” Journal of American History 78 (1991): 854–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15. Harris, Cheryl, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106 (1993): 1709–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16. Rogers, William, Ward, David, Atkins, Leah, and Flynt, Wayne, Alabama: The History of a Deep South State (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Kolchin, Peter, First Freedom: The Responses of Alabama's Blacks to Emancipation and Reconstruction (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1972).Google Scholar

17. Alabama Statutes (1852): Art. I, sec. 1956. As Hodes has shown, while the law of slavery conceived of black male-white female relationships as putatively forcible, consensual relationships did exist and under some circumstances were quietly tolerated. See Hodes, White Women, Black Men.

18. Alabama Statutes (1852): Art. I, sec. 4. While one should not read too much into the placement of particular code sections, the framers did consider the identification of mulattoes and free persons of color as black to be significant enough to make this the fourth section in the entire code.

19. Alabama Statutes (1852): Art. X, sec. 3307.

20. Alabama went through a brief period of flux in the wake of the Civil War as the Republican Alabama Supreme Court invalidated the new postwar statute on Fourteenth Amendment grounds in 1872. Still, by the early 1880s, Southern partisans had regained political authority in the state and Alabama's miscegenation law had survived review before the U.S. Supreme Court. Wallenstein, “Race, Marriage, and the Law of Freedom,” 405, n. 44. While the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated state bans on miscegenation in 1967 in Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967), Alabama refused to recognize its authority. In 1970, a federal district court invalidated Alabama's law in U.S. v. Brittain, 319 F. Supp. 1058 (E.D. Ala. 1970), after an Alabama justice of the peace had refused to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple.

21. Alabama Statutes (1866): Art. I, sec. 61.

22. It is difficult to develop an adequate terminology to represent the racial distinctions in play during this period. The article applies the somewhat unsatisfactory solution of using “black” to refer to individuals who were legally defined as black, “Negro” to refer to those whom dominant society perceived as being of pure racial heritage, and “mulatto” to designate those of mixed race who were nonetheless considered black. The word “Negro” was uncapitalized through the nineteenth and early twentieth century; it began to be capitalized in response to a growth of racial pride among blacks in the wake of the Harlem Renaissance. I have capitalized it in quotations and references.

23. See, e.g., Hoover v. State, 59 Ala. 58 (1877); Ford v. State, 53 Ala. 150 (1875); Love v. State, 124 Ala. 82 (1899); Jackson v. State, 129 So. 306 (Ala. 1930).

24. The first case in the series was decided in 1868 and the last in 1970.

25. While the article does not analyze the number of prosecutions, the numbers of appeals did not reflect large differences in the number of prosecutions. In the 1930s, Alabama prosecutors were still pursuing suspected miscegenators with about as much vigor as in the 1880s. Attorney General of Alabama, Biennial Reports.

26. An interesting side note is that no appellate cases were reported between Jackson v. State in 1954 and the U.S. District Court's invalidation of Alabama's anti-miscegenation statute in 1970 in U.S. v. Brittain. The reasons for this absence have largely to do with turmoil generated by intensive white hostility toward the Civil Rights movement. The white struggle to continue repression became almost completely identified with the issue of school desegregation for a generation.

27. See, e.g., Zack, Race and Mixed Race. Throughout this article, I refer to the parties in the cases as black and white. In a certain sense, this undermines the precise point that I am trying to make: that race was often ambiguous and difficult to establish. In another sense, however, these designations reflect the common understandings of most of the individuals involved in the cases, even though defendants tried to challenge these social consensuses. For this reason and for the sake of simplicity, the defendants are mostly referred to as black or white. It is hoped that the reader will keep in mind that these terms were for a time under serious contestation. A related issue is the use of words like “Negro” and “mulatto” to refer to blacks; the words (along with worse ones) were commonly used but to the modern ear convey an oppressive quality. I have tried to heighten this sense of discomfort by putting the word “Negro” in quotation marks when I use it to refer to those whom the legal and social systems understood as black. I assume that the word “mulatto” itself is unusual and unsettling enough not to require specific marking in this way.

28. The statute also implicitly required the prosecutor to show that the black and white couple was of different genders, though this was not a major factor. Unsurprisingly, no cases addressed prosecutions of same-sex couples for miscegenation.

29. Alabama Statutes (1896): sec. 5096.

30. See, e.g., Alsabrooks v. State, 53 Ala. 24 (1875); Bodifield v. Slate, 86 Ala. 67 (1889) (both holding that evidence of occasional acts of intercourse was not sufficient to support a conviction of adultery).

31. Linton v. State, 88 Ala. 216, 219 (1890).

32. While the parties and attorneys in these cases referred to the women involved as prostitutes, one should not necessarily assume that they were all women who engaged in sexual relations for pay as a regular practice. The understanding of prostitution as paid sex work is relatively modern. Some of the women may indeed have been prostitutes in this sense, but others may only have had reputations for engaging in sexual relations outside of the bonds of marriage with multiple partners. Thanks to Peggy Pascoe for raising this distinction.

33. Linton v. State, 216–18.

34. Ibid., 218–20.

35. McAlpine v. State, 117 Ala. 93, 96–98 (1898).

36. Ibid., 100–103.

37. Love v. State, 124 Ala. 82, 84 (1899).

38. Ibid., 84.

39. Love v. State, Bill of Exceptions, Alabama Supreme Court Records, Nov. Term 1899, Alabama Department of History and Archives (hereinafter ADAH).

40. Love v. State, 84.

41. Story v. State, 59 So. 480 (Ala. 1912).

42. Ibid., 482. Ibid.

43. Ibid.

44. Smith v. State, Bill of Exceptions, Alabama Court of Appeals Records, 4 Div. 481 (1917): 6, 2, ADAH.

45. Smith v. State, Judgment Entry, Alabama Court of Appeals Records, 4 Div. 481 (1917): 2, ADAH.

46. Smith v. State, 75 So. 627, 628 (Ala. App. 1917).

47. Welke points out that many of the plaintiffs were indeed trying to differentiate themselves from the lower class whites and Negroes who traveled in the smoker cars on trains. Welke, “When All the Women Were White, and All the Blacks Were Men,” 284–89.

48. Story v. State, 482.

49. Ibid. See also Welke, “When All the Women Were White, and All the Blacks Were Men.”

50. Stanton, William, The Leopard's Spots: Scientific Attitudes toward Race in America, 1815–59 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 166–68.Google Scholar

51. See generally Gould, Stephen J., The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981).Google Scholar Lee Baker has shown that leading anthropologists at the turn of the century influenced the public realm through their commitment to theories of racial hierarchy expressed in world's fair exhibitions and widely circulated magazines. Baker, Lee, From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896–1954 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 51–55.Google Scholar

52. See in particular Baker, From Savage to Negro.

53. Barringer, P. B., The American Negro: His Past and Future, 3d ed. (Raleigh, N.C.: Edwards and Broughton, 1900), 3.Google Scholar

54. Smith, William Benjamin, The Color Line: A Brief in Behalf of the Unborn (New York: McClure, Phillips, 1905).Google Scholar Republished in Racial Determinism and the Fear of Miscegenation Post-1900, vol. 8 of Race and the Negro Problem, ed. Smith, John David (New York: Garland, 1993), 16, 33.Google Scholar

55. White, G. Edward, “The American Law Institute and the Triumph of Modernist Jurisprudence,” Law and History Review 15 (1997): 10–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

56. Baker, From Savage to Negro, 104–7.

57. Hale, Making Whiteness, 284–88.

58. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, 146–233.

59. Saks, Eva, “Representing Miscegenation Law,” Raritan 8 (1988): 39–69.Google Scholar

60. Cox, Earnest Sevier, The South's Part in Mongrelizing the Nation (Richmond, Va.: The White America Society, 1926), 93.Google Scholar

61. Russell, Sylvester, The Amalgamation of America: Normal Solution of the Color and Inter-Marriage Problem (Chicago, Ill.: Sylvester Russell Book Concern, 1920), 5.Google Scholar

62. Reuter, Edward Byron, The Mulatto in the United States (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 355.Google Scholar (Initially published as a dissertation in 1918.)

63. Cox, The South's Part in Mongrelizing the Nation, 92–93.

64. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” 1725.

65. Reuter, The Mulatto in the United States, 355.

66. Hale, Making Whiteness, 284–88.

67. Saks, “Representing Miscegenation Law,” 52.

68. Norwood, Thomas M., Address on the Negro (Savannah, Ga.: Braid and Hutton, 1907), 28.Google Scholar

69. Ibid., 26.

70. Ibid.

71. Ibid., 27.

72. Ibid., 23.

73. In 1883 in Pace v. Alabama, the U.S. Supreme Court had upheld Alabama's anti-miscegenation statute against a challenge under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment on the ground that it provided the same prohibitions and penalties for both blacks and whites. Pace and Cox v. Alabama, 106 U.S. 583 (1883).

74. Norwood, Address on the Negro, 5.

75. Journal of the Proceedings of the Constitutional Convention of the State of Alabama (Montgomery, Alabama, May 21, 1901): 12 (Mr. John Knox).

76. Ibid., 15.

77. Official Proceedings of the Constitutional Convention of the State of Alabama, May 21, 1901-September 3, 1901 (Wetumpka, Ala.: Wetumpka Printing Co., 1940), 2: 2650.

78. Ibid. The conventioneers briefly considered adding Chinese and Native Americans to the list of people who should not be permitted to marry whites, upon a delegate's suggestion that “Indians and Chinese are sorrier than Negroes,” but another delegate pointed out that “The proudest blood that flows in white veins in Alabama is Indian blood, and if we adopt that amendment we would insult some of the proudest and best people of the State.” Ibid., 2652.

79. Willrich, Michael, “The Two Percent Solution: Eugenic Jurisprudence and the Socialization of American Law, 1900–1930,” Law and History Review 16 (1998): 63–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

80. Felix v. State, 18 Ala. 720, 726 (1851).

81. Alabama Statutes (1923): sec. 5001.

82. Metcalf v. State, Indictment, Alabama Court of Appeals Records, 6 Div. 482 (1916), ADAH.

83. Metcalf v. State, Judgment of conviction, Alabama Court of Appeals Records, 6 Div. 482 (1917), ADAH.

84. Metcalf v. State, Bill of Exceptions, Testimony of Henry Tice, Alabama Court of Appeals Records, 6 Div. 482 (1917): 1, ADAH.

85. Metcalf v. State, Bill of Exceptions, Testimony of Ophelia Metcalf, Alabama Court of Appeals Records, 6 Div. 482 (1917): 3, ADAH.

86. Thomas Owen, History of Alabama and Dictionary of Alabama Biography (Spartanburg, S.C.: The Reprint Company, 1978), 3: 1212.

87. Metcalf v. State, 78 So. 305, 305 (1918).

88. Simmons v. State, 78 So. 306 (1918).

89. Reed v. State, Bill of Exceptions, Testimony of Henry Rivers, Alabama Court of Appeals Records, 1 Div. 433 (1920): 12, ADAH.

90. Reed v. State, Oral Charge, Alabama Court of Appeals Records, 1 Div. 433 (1920), ADAH.

91. Ibid.

92. Reed v. State, Bill of Exceptions, Affidavit of John J. Richardson, Alabama Court of Appeals Records, 1 Div. 433 (1920): 1, ADAH.

93. Ibid., 11.

94. Reed v. State, Bill of Exceptions, Testimony of George W. Sullivan, Alabama Court of Appeals Records, 1 Div. 433 (1920): 14–15, ADAH.

95. Reed v. State, Bill of Exceptions, Testimony of Robert Dorman, Alabama Court of Appeals Records, 1 Div. 433 (1920): 15, ADAH.

96. Reed v. State, Bill of Exceptions, Testimony of A. G. Richardson, Alabama Court of Appeals Records, I Div. 433 (1920): 10, ADAH.

97. Reed v. State, Bill of Exceptions, Testimony of John J. Richardson, Alabama Court of Appeals Records, 1 Div. 433 (1920): 11–12, ADAH.

98. Ibid.

99. Reed v. State, Bill of Exceptions, Testimony of Reuben P. Reed, Alabama Court of Appeals Records, 1 Div. 433 (1920): 13–14, ADAH.

100. Reed v. State, Bill of Exceptions, Testimony of A. G. Richardson, Alabama Court of Appeals Records, 1 Div. 433 (1920): 10, ADAH.

101. Reed v. State, Bill of Exceptions, Testimony of John J. Richardson, Alabama Court of Appeals Records, 1 Div. 433 (1920): 11–12, ADAH.

102. Reed v. State, Bill of Exceptions, Testimony of Reuben P. Reed, Testimony of Henry Rivers, Alabama Court of Appeals Records, 1 Div. 433 (1920): 12–14, ADAH.

103. Bynum, Victoria, “‘White Negroes’ in Segregated Mississippi: Miscegenation, Racial Identity, and the Law,” Journal of Southern History 44 (1998): 247–75.Google Scholar Bynum's article addresses a similar prosecution for miscegenation of a man suspected to be black; she shows the difficulties that members of the community faced in their negotiations of the tensions between being defined by legal standards for blackness and performing whiteness.

104. Ibid., 274, 256–58. Bynum claims that Davis was in effect adjudicated to be white through the overturning of his conviction and the state's decision not to prosecute him again. Her assertion may be too strong, as Mississippi's rule at the time drew the line of blackness at the third generation (as did the Alabama law until 1927) but did not define as white those who had black ancestors further back in the family tree. A clearer illustration of the principle that the ability to marry a white did not necessarily render an individual white for all purposes was the Alabama constitutional conventioneers' decision not to include Native Americans in their prohibition of miscegenation. No one would argue that a “full-blooded Indian” or even a so-called “half breed” was white, but such an individual could legally marry a white person in many southern states.

105. Zack, Race and Mixed Race. 86–110.

106. Reed v. State, Bill of Exceptions, Testimony of Henry Rivers, Alabama Court of Appeals Records, 1 Div. 433 (1920): 12, ADAH.

107. Reed v. State, Bill of Exceptions, Testimony of George W. Sullivan, Testimony of John J. Richardson, Alabama Court of Appeals Records, 1 Div. 433 (1920): 12, 14–15, ADAH.

108. Reed v. State, Bill of Exceptions, Testimony of Robert Dorman, Alabama Court of Appeals Records, 1 Div. 433 (1920): 15, ADAH.

109. Reed v. State, Oral Charge, Alabama Court of Appeals Records, 1 Div. 433 (1920), ADAH.

110. Reed v. State, 92 So. 511, 511 (Ala. App. 1922).

111. Reed v. State, Jury Charges and Verdict, Alabama Court of Appeals Records, 1 Div. 433 (1920), ADAH.

112. Reedv. State, 512.

113. Wilson v. State, Bill of Exceptions, Testimony of Ivy Medicus, Alabama Court of Appeals Records, 1 Div. 527 (1923): 7, ADAH.

114. Ibid, at 10–13.

115. Wilson v. State, Bill of Exceptions, Testimony of William Earnest, Alabama Court of Appeals Records, 1 Div. 527 (1923): 14–15, ADAH.

116. Wilson v. State, Bill of Exceptions, Testimony of Cliff Adams, Alabama Court of Appeals Records, 1 Div. 527 (1923): 17, ADAH.

117. Ibid.

118. The defense attorney's appellate brief revealed that Charles Medicus was charged but not prosecuted, since his wife refused to testify against him. Wilson v. State, Bill of Exceptions, Brief of Edward Grove, Alabama Court of Appeals Records, 1 Div. 527 (1923): 38–39, ADAH.

119. Ibid, at 25–26, 33.

120. Wilson v. State, 101 So. 417, 420–21 (Ala. App. 1924).

121. Ibid. at 421.

122. Weaver v. State, Bill of Exceptions, Testimony of Dudley Weaver, Alabama Court of Appeals Records, 1 Div. 756 (1927): 6, ADAH.

123. Ibid, at 7.

124. Weaver v. State, Bill of Exceptions, Testimony of Wade Weaver, Alabama Court of Appeals Records, 1 Div. 756 (1927): 8, ADAH.

125. Stanton, The Leopard's Spots, 29–37.

126. Weaver v. State, Bill of Exceptions, Testimony of J.W. Henson, Alabama Court of Appeals Records, 1 Div. 756 (1927): 13–14, ADAH.

127. Ibid, at 11.

128. Weaver v. State, Bill of Exceptions, Testimony of Jim Dudd Weaver, Alabama Court of Appeals Records, 1 Div. 756 (1927): 16–17, ADAH.

129. Weaver v. State, 116 So. 893, 895 (Ala. App. 1928).

130. Ibid.

131. Ibid.

132. Journal of the Alabama House (Montgomery, Alabama, June 15, 1927), 843.

133. Alabama Statutes (1928): sec. 5001.

134. Bynum, “‘White Negroes’ in Segregated Mississippi,” 255.

135. Cassady was between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, so the judge transferred her case to the county probate court. Williams v. State, Bill of Exceptions, Alabama Court of Appeals Records, 4 Div. 515 (1930): 6, ADAH.

136. Williams v. State, Bill of Exceptions, Testimony of Sarah Bryant, Alabama Court of Appeals Records, 4 Div. 515 (1930): 10, ADAH.

137. Ibid.

138. Ibid, at 11.

139. Williams v. State, Bill of Exceptions, Testimony of Dr. L. E. Broughton, Alabama Court of Appeals Records, 4 Div. 515 (1930) 10, ADAH.

140. Ibid, at 15–16.

141. Williams v. State, Bill of Exceptions, Testimony of H. C. Johnson, Alabama Court of Appeals Records, 4 Div. 515 (1930): 22, ADAH.

142. Ibid.

143. Williams v. State, Bill of Exceptions, Testimony of Sarah Bryant, Alabama Court of Appeals Records, 4 Div. 515 (1930): 11, ADAH.

144. Williams v. State, Bill of Exceptions, Testimony of W. Jack Stanley, Alabama Court of Appeals Records, 4 Div. 515 (1930): 20, ADAH.

145. Williams v. State, Bill of Exceptions, Testimony of Sarah Bryant, Alabama Court of Appeals Records, 4 Div. 515 (1930): 11, ADAH.

146. Williams v. State, Bill of Exceptions, Testimony of H. I. Mitchell, Alabama Court of Appeals Records, 4 Div. 515 (1930): 25, ADAH.

147. Williams v. State, Bill of Exceptions, Testimony of A. J. Williams, Alabama Court of Appeals Records, 4 Div. 515 (1930): 30, ADAH.

148. Williams v. State, Given charges, Alabama Court of Appeals Records, 4 Div. 515 (1930): 1–2, ADAH.

149. Williams v. State, Oral Charge, Alabama Court of Appeals Records, 4 Div. 515 (1930): 4, ADAH.

150. Williams v. Slate, Bill of Exceptions, Alabama Court of Appeals Records, 4 Div. 515 (1930): 2, ADAH.

151. Williams v. State, 125 So. 690, 691 (Ala. App. 1930).

152. Williams v. State, Bill of Exceptions, Testimony of Sara Bryant, Alabama Court of Appeals Records, 4 Div. 43 (1933): 10, ADAH. The court stenographer in the second trial spelled her first name without an “h” at the end.

153. Ibid., 10.

154. Williams v. State, Bill of Exceptions, Testimony of Jerry M. Woodall, Alabama Court of Appeals Records, 4 Div. 43 (1933): 21, ADAH.

155. Williams v. State, Bill of Exceptions, Testimony of Jesse Williams, Alabama Court of Appeals Records, 4 Div. 43 (1933): 76, ADAH.

156. Ibid., 60.

157. Williams v. State, 152 So. 264, 265 (Ala. App. 1934).

158. Agnew v. State, 54 So. 2d 89, 91 (Ala. App. 1951).

159. Willrich “The Two Percent Solution,” 63–65.

160. Haney-López, Ian, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 1996).Google Scholar

161. White, “The American Law Institute and the Triumph of Modernist Jurisprudence” Willrich, “The Two Percent Solution,” 67.

162. Hale, Making Whiteness, 284–88.

163. Pascoe, “Miscegenation Law, Court Cases, and Ideologies of ‘Race’ in Twentieth-Century America.”

164. U.S. v. Brittain. 319 F. Supp. 1058 (E.D. Ala. 1970).