Racial Union: Law, Intimacy, and the White State in Alabama, 1865-1954

In November of 2001, the state of Alabama opened a referendum on its longstanding constitutional prohibition against interracial marriage. A bill on the state ballot offered the opportunity to relegate the state’s anti-miscegenation law to the dustbin of history. The measure passed, but the margin was alarmingly slim: more than half a million voters, forty percent of those who went to the polls, voted to retain a racist and constitutionally untenable law. Racial Union
explains how and why, nearly forty years after the height of the Civil Rights movement, Alabama struggled to repeal its prohibitions against interracial marriage - the last state in the Union to do so. Her compelling history of Alabama’s battle over miscegenation shows how the fight shaped the meanings of race and state over ninety years. Novkov’s work tells us much about the sometimes parallel, sometimes convergent evolution of our concepts of race and state in the nation as a whole.