Marriage in the United States is largely governed by state laws. Miscegenation, or interracial marriage, was governed by a hodgepodge of laws from every state since the formation. During this time, different states had different races which could be barred from certain activities, and there were various tests to determine race.

In California, for example, Hispanic people were considered white in many instances, but discriminated against in others. There is the famous brown bag rule used by many private entities, in which anyone darker than a brown bag is barred or offered substandard service.

In other areas there were rules related to blood ranging from 1/4 black as being white and the one drop rule, in which any non white ancestry barred being classified as white.

With regard to miscegenation, all such laws were deemed unconditional by the supreme court in Loving v. Virginia (1967), in which a brave white and black couple openly flouted the law and provoked arrest after many warnings to leave Virginia. By doing so, they could challenge the arrest on conditional grounds under equal protection of the fourteenth amendment, and they won. Thereafter, miscegenation was unconstitutional. Before, however, laws varied from state to state. And, while it is easy to pick on the south for having many of these laws rather uniformly, these laws existed everywhere for far too long.