Loving Day: Looking Back

Loving day is in two days. It’s a big deal to me, although it probably doesn’t mean a thing to you. Loving Day is the day that the Supreme Court of the United States of America unanimously struck down all laws prohibiting miscegenation. It’s a term you probably don’t know. In a nutshell, miscegenation is marriage (or romantic or sexual relationship) outside ones own race. Until June 12, 1967, the United States <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-miscegenation_laws_in_the_United_States" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">always had some states prohibiting miscegenation</a>. These weren’t civil laws. They were criminal laws, specifying miscegenation as a felony in many cases. We can talk motives, means, etc. for years on these laws. I want to look at some simple data. Many sources that discuss American anti-miscegenation laws present some sort of table or map indicating when individual states had or didn’t have such laws, ending in 1967. Fair enough, I say. But I’ve not found a source (so far) that lays out the “arc” of these laws in terms of time and percentage of states having them. The data isn’t hard to find, I think nobody bothered to assemble it. It’s remarkably informative when you do, so here we go: <a href="https://towardsdatascience.com/loving-day-looking-back-3187515d85c4">Read More</a>