Tell the Court I Love My Wife: Race, Marriage, and Law—An American History. By Peter Wallenstein and Race Mixing: Black-White Marriage in Postwar America. By Renee C. Romano

Abstract

Taken together, Peter Wallenstein's Tell the Court I Love My Wife and Renee C. Romano's Race Mixing provide a comprehensive account of intermarriage from the 1600s through contemporary times. Wallenstein chronicles the regulation of race and marriage from colonial times until 1967, when the United States Supreme Court declared antimiscegenation laws unconstitutional in Loving v. Virginia. Romano focuses on black-white unions from the post—World War II era until the present. The love of law appears to be Wallenstein's primary passion in his meticulously researched and painstakingly detailed narrative about the legislation and lawsuits that shaped intermarriage. In this law-centered story, the lived experiences of individuals figure at most peripherally as facts to “tell the court” or perhaps legislators. Wallenstein traces the roots of regulation of interracial marriage to colonial America, and he shows how this system adapted to meet the challenges of policing racial boundaries in an increasingly complicated...