Page:Race distinctions in American Law (IA racedistinctions00stepiala).pdf/99

 *sissippi, and the North Carolina courts arrived at the same conclusion about South Carolina; but neither court specified the years to which its statement applied, and a careful examination of the annual laws of Mississippi and South Carolina between 1865 and 1880 reveals no statutes repealing the laws against intermarriage in those States. One is led to conclude, therefore, that the statutes against miscegenation were disregarded in a few instances during Reconstruction, rather than repealed. This conclusion is helped out by the fact that the legislatures manifested no inclination to permit miscegenation. The legislature of South Carolina,[3] for instance, in 1865, before the State government went into the hands of the Reconstructionists, enacted laws, covering twenty-five or more finely printed pages, defining the rights of Negroes in the most minute details, as was seen in considering the "Black Laws" of 1865-68. These laws were repealed nine months later, but the legislature was careful to add that the repealing act did not apply to that part of the Act of 1865 which said that marriage between a white person and a person of color should be illegal and void. The legislature of Texas,[4] in like manner, on November 10, 1866, repealed most of its statutes relating to free Negroes, but added that nothing in the act should be construed to repeal any laws prohibiting intermarriage of the white and black races. The repealing statute of Arkansas[5] of February 6, 1867, made practically the same exception as to intermarriage.

Determined as many of the Reconstruction promoters were to wipe out every vestige of legally recognized race distinctions, they did not allow their zeal to carry them to the extent of legislating as to the social relations of the