by Chris Black
-States could, and often did, ban whites from marrying blacks until a Supreme Court case in 1967 called Loving v. Virginia. However, it was legal for other mixed race couples to marry, as long as a white was not involved.
-Segregation was legal and practiced in housing, businesses, and schools until a series of Supreme Court decisions and federal laws were passed from 1948-1968.
-Madison Grant, an influential attorney who wrote about the biological reality of race, fought for “sanguine purity laws,” which were the bans of whites marrying other races. He was also a driving force behind the 1921 immigration act or the “Emergency Quota Act” that sought to keep the racial makeup of the country a supermajority white.
-In 1875, the Supreme Court held that African Americans could NOT be considered citizens of the United States.
-In 1896, a Supreme Court case held that a 1/8 black man was too black to be allowed to ride on the white railway cars, suggesting a “one drop” rule be applied to matters of racial segregation.
– Two Supreme Court cases in 1901 referred to people from Guam and Puerto Rico as “savages tribes” and “alien races.”
-Prior to 1948, racially restrictive Covenants were often in property deeds, allowing only a white person to buy the property. They were so common in a city like Philadelphia in 1900, over 4,000 of the parcels had deeds that limited ownership to whites only.
-The first Congress of the USA passed a law limiting citizenship to whites only, one year BEFORE the bill of rights was passed.
-The very first sentence of the US Constitution, in the preamble, before anything else states the purpose of the country was “to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”
Posterity means your future descendants.
Taken as a whole, one gets the idea that the USA, from its founding and through most of its legal history, was purposefully exclusionary and limited. That is of course no longer the case.
Considering what was accomplished in the first 190 years of US existence compared to the last 55 or so, perhaps there was a connection to the legal regime of old and American exceptionalism, and the modern legal regime and America’s increasingly unlivable conditions.
To put the browning of America into perspective:
In 1988 there were 247,372,264 people in the US.
In 2022 there are 334,805,269 people in the US (probably much more but that’s the official number).
That’s an increase of 87,433,005 people in just 34 years, 95% of them were brown and came here because of immigration.