Kathryn Schumaker

In 1865, when Black people in Mississippi first gained the legal right to marriage, so-called Black Codes outlawed interracial marriage, punishable by life in prison. Five years later, Republicans in the Mississippi state legislature repealed the Black Codes and legalized interracial marriage, but the law was reversed again ten years later when Democrats took control. In 1890, a new state Constitution, erasing all the racial progress of the 1868 one, enshrined a prohibition on interracial marria...