"The Speaker was responsibly relying upon the data graphic included in that New York Times ," Tom Hester Jr., a spokesman for the Assembly Democrats, wrote in an email. So from 1948 on, California is put into the ‘legal column,’" Renee Romano, the author of "Race Mixing: Black-White Marriage in Postwar America" and an associate professor of history at Oberlin College in Ohio, said in an email. Sharp case, it was no longer legally enforceable. Colorado, Montana, North Dakota and South Dakota followed suit.īy 1958, two dozen states still prohibited interracial marriage: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming.Īlthough California still technically had a miscegenation law on its books in 1958, "once the state Supreme Court declared the law invalid in the 1948 Perez V. Oregon repealed its law in 1951, becoming the first state to do so since Ohio in 1887. It’s actually more than that, PolitiFact New Jersey found. It put the number of states where interracial marriage was illegal in 1958 at 16. And I think for those of us that believe in equality, equality, equality, marriage equality represents the third leg on the stool of civil rights and equality in this country."Ī spokesman said Oliver based her statistic on a New York Times article published earlier this month. It is a snapshot in time in the history of our country issue. "Without question, Senator (Stephen) Sweeney said it best: this is a civil rights issue.
Supreme Court eventually heard Richard and Mildred Loving’s case and ruled state statutes banning interracial marriage unconstitutional.īut, "in 1958, there were 16 states in this country that prohibited - prohibited - an African-American and a Caucasian from being married," Oliver (D-Essex) said on Jan. Oliver recounted the story of an interracial couple forced to leave Virginia in the 1950s or face jail time for being married. "This is a civil rights issue," Assembly Speaker Sheila Oliver said during a news conference announcing Democratic plans to legalize same-sex marriage in New Jersey. Gay rights advocates are casting the fight for same-sex marriage as a struggle mirrored in the nation’s past.