The Quality of Citizenship

Under Title 20, Section 54 of a Virginia law passed in 1924, white Virginians are permitted to marry only whites--those who have "no trace whatever of any blood other than Caucasian." (In deference to the proud descendants of Pocahontas, there is an exception in favor of those who may be "one-sixteenth or less" American Indian, but otherwise all white.) Under the law, white-colored marriages of Virginia residents are "absolutely void" even if they have been contracted out of state, and both parties in an interracial marriage may be sentenced to five years in the state penitentiary.*

In practice, 20-54 is peacefully implemented not in the courts but in the local marriage-license bureaus. A test case arose in 1953, however, in which a white woman petitioned the courts in Portsmouth, Va. to annul her marriage to her Chinese sailor husband of 15 months.

When the annulment was granted, the Chinese seaman's lawyers appealed. Last week the Virginia Supreme Court reviewed the constitutionality of the law for the first time and upheld it. Said Justice Archibald C. Buchanan: "We are unable to read in the 14th Amendment . . . any words or intendment which prohibit the state from enacting legislation to preserve the racial integrity of its citizens . . . so that it shall not have a mongrel breed of citizens. We find there is no requirement that the state shall not legislate to prevent the obliteration of racial pride, but must permit the corruption of blood, even though it weaken or destroy the quality of its citizenship. Both sacred and secular history teach that nations have better advanced in human progress when they cultivated their own . . . peculiar genius." Justice Buchanan concluded: "Regulation of the marriage relation is, we think, distinctly one of the rights guaranteed to the states and safeguarded by that bastion of states' rights, somewhat battered perhaps, but still a sturdy fortress . . . the tenth section of the Bill of Rights: 'The powers not delegated to the U.S. by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.' " The Chinese seaman's lawyers at once prepared to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to declare unconstitutional Virginia's ban upon interracial marriages.

*Marriages between whites and Negroes are prohibited in 27 states: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas. Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, Wyoming. California's 1872 miscegenation statute was declared unconstitutional in 1948.

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