Although interracial relationships and related issues receive much attention today, they’ve taken place in America since colonial times.

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(Free-Press-Release.com) May 31, 2010 -- Although interracial relationships and related issues receive much attention today, they’ve taken place in America since colonial times. In fact, America’s first “mulatto” child was born in 1620. When slavery of blacks became institutionalized in the U.S., however, anti-miscegenation laws surfaced which barred such unions, thereby stigmatizing them.

Considering that anti-miscegenation laws remained on the books until the latter half of the 20th century, it’s no wonder that stigma continues to enshrine interracial unions. Are you involved in such a relationship or contemplating entering one? Then, read the tips below designed to help mixed couples navigate a society which isn’t always kind.
The Fight for Interracial Marriage

Just three years after Emmett Till’s horrific murder, Virginians Mildred Jeter, an African American, married Richard Loving, a white man, in the District of Columbia. After returning to Virginia the Lovings were arrested for breaking the state’s anti-miscegenation laws but told the one-year prison sentence given to them would be dropped if they left Virginia and did not return as a couple for 25 years. But the Lovings violated this condition, returning to Virginia as a couple to visit family. When authorities discovered them, they were again arrested. This time they appealed the charges against them until their case made it to the Supreme Court, which ruled in 1967 that anti-miscegenation laws violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
In addition to calling marriage a basic civil right, the Court stated, “Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.”

During the height of the Civil Rights Movement, not only did laws change regarding interracial marriage but public views did as well. That the public was slowly embracing interracial unions is evidenced by the theatrical release of a 1967 film based entirely on an imminent interracial marriage, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” To boot, by this time, the fight for civil rights had grown very integrated. Whites and blacks often fought for racial justice side-by-side, allowing interracial romance to bloom. In Black, White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self (2001), Rebecca Walker, daughter of African American novelist Alice Walker and Jewish lawyer Mel Leventhal, described the ethos that impelled her activist parents to marry.
“When they meet…my parents are idealists, they are social activists…they believe in the power of organized people working for change,” Walker wrote. “In 1967, when my parents break all the rules and marry against laws that say they can’t, they say that an individual should not be bound to the wishes of their family, race, state, or country. They say that love is the tie that binds, and not blood.” Get more from InterraicalFriends.com

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