Jonathan Milner 1/8/24 Jonathan Milner 1/8/24

What portion of Americans approve of interracial marriage?

Data Scavenger Hunt

Find answers to the following questions using the visual above:

When Gallup first asked the question in 1958, what percent of Americans approved of interracial marriage.
When Gallup asked the question again in 2021, what percent of Americans approved of marriage between Black people and White people?
Describe the trend in acceptance of interracial marriage between 1958-2021.
How do you explain this change in attitude?
Back in 1967, just 3% of married couples were interracial. Now it's 20%, according to Pew Research Center. Explain how the changes in public opinion as shown in the chart above may have impacted the expanding rate of interracial marriage.
Big Brain Questions
Answer these questions by yourself using your brain and the links below:
List one thing the chart makes you wonder:
Why do you think Gallup changed the wording of the question about interracial marriage?
In 1958, two residents of Virginia, Mildred Jeter, a black woman, and Richard Loving, a white man, were married in the District of Columbia. The Lovings returned to Virginia shortly thereafter. The couple was then charged with violating the state's antimiscegenation statute, which banned inter-racial marriages. The Lovings were found guilty and sentenced to a year in jail (the trial judge agreed to suspend the sentence if the Lovings would leave Virginia and not return for 25 years). If you were the Lovings, what would you have done?
The Loving case came after nearly 300 years of legislation in Virginia regulating interracial marriage and carefully defining which citizens could legally claim to be white. Two U.S. Supreme Court cases, Pace v. Alabama (1883) and Maynard v. Hill (1888), upheld the constitutionality of such laws. In 1924, the Act to Preserve Racial Integrity banned interracial marriage in Virginia while defining a white person as someone who had no discernible nonwhite ancestry.The Lovings took their case to the Supreme Court and in a unanimous 1967 decision, Loving v. Virgina, the Warren Court ruled that Virginia’s statute violated the 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection under the law. Explain how Virginia’s racist law banning interracial marriage violated the 14th Amendment.
Only 6 percent of Americans currently oppose “marriage between Black people and White people” But during the Civil Rights Era, interracial marriage was a contentious deeply divisive issue. Today, very few people are opposed to interracial marriage. This shift in attitude represent one of the largest transformations in public opinion in Gallup's history. What political issue that Americans are currently battling over do you think will no longer be an issue in 30 years?

Write and Discuss

Take ten minutes to write about the question at the top of the page and then discuss with your classmates.

Act on your Learning

Use this Census bureau data to compare the demographics of your state with the national data from the visual above. Share what you learn with your classmates.

Get Creative

Currently, one out of five American marriages is interracial. Imagine that the rate of interracial marriage continues to be the same or increases. Eventually, there will be more and more people who identify as being multiracial. How will this impact racism in the United States? Make a creative response to this scenario.

Learn More

Read this very short Gallup report about the dramatic changes in public opinion about interracial marriage, learn a little big more about Mildred and Richard Loving, then stream the Emmy and Peabody award winning film, The Loving Story.