Summer of Loving

"Intermarriage bans arose in the late 1600s, when tobacco planters in Virginia needed to shore up their new institution of slavery. In previous decades, before slavery took hold, interracial sex was more prevalent than at any other time in American history. White and black laborers lived and worked side by side and naturally became intimate. Even interracial marriage, though uncommon, was allowed. But as race slavery replaced servitude as the South's labor force, interracial sex threatened to blur the distinctions between white and black--and thus between free and slave."

As today marks the fortieth anniversary of Loving v. Virginia, David Greenberg traces, in a 1999 Slate article, the history of laws banning interracial marriage.