166 Years Ago Yesterday

Guest Blogger: Connell O'Donovan. AKA: One of my first beloved BYU gay boyfriends. Thanks Connell.


166 years ago yesterday, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts state legislature voted to repeal the law banning civil marriage between white people and black people.

White abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison is credited with launching the campaign to repeal his state's 1705 law barring such marriages, although some Black abolitionists had certainly desired this long before Garrison began his “campaign.” One of the first issues of Garrison's abolitionist paper, The Liberator, included a call to repeal it in January 1831. John Greenleaf Whittier, the Quaker poet and abolitionist wrote in 1839, “So long as Southerners can point to it [the racist law] on her Statute Book, the anti-slavery testimony of Massachusetts is shorn of half its strength.”

A legislative committee from the Massachusetts House of Representatives in both 1840 and 1841 came to a similar conclusion, and recommended that the state legislature repeal the 136 year-old ban. Opposition from the South, from other New England states, and within the state legislature itself was fierce. Some Massachusetts legislators claimed that the ban against black and white marriages was not discriminatory because the punishment for both white and blacks was the same. Some believed that this discriminatory law recognized "natural distinctions" between the races, “which nothing but the insanity of fanaticism dares to arraign.” Religious leaders called miscegenation an unnatural abomination and an affront to God - it was God's established law that the races should be kept discrete and separate. Other people felt that the law prevented a further deterioration of the white race; mixed-race descendants were seen as examples of human de-evolutionary retrogression.

But finally on February 24, 1843, despite hysteria and promises of divine retribution, the Massachusetts state legislature voted to repeal the antiquated law. And the world did not end....