The racist laws in every state
Every state in the union wrote discriminatory law. Not the same laws, and not always about the same people, but every one. Black exclusion clauses that barred settlement outright. Anti-miscegenation statutes. Alien land laws barring Asian immigrants from owning property. Compulsory sterilization programs, including the first one in the world. Racial classification laws with fractional blood thresholds. Territorial Black Codes. Grandfather clauses. All-white primaries.
The map below is a record of how widely distributed this was, and — the part that tends to land hardest — how recently much of it fell.
Exhibit — Interactive
Select any state to read the law it wrote, the years it stood, and when it was struck down or repealed. The map is shaded by that last date — the deeper the ember, the more recent the repeal. Watch how much of the country only changed within living memory.
An explicitly race-based law or policy from every state, and the year it finally fell.
Working draft — twelve states are source-verified; the rest are drafted from the historical record and being verified.
Select any state, or switch to List & dates to see them ordered by year.
Several of these were live law within our lifetime. A handful were removed from state constitutions in the 2000s, decades after they stopped being enforced, because removing them required a ballot measure.
The perinatal health institutions that operate in these states were built while these laws were in force. Hospitals, medical boards, licensing bodies, insurance structures, and school systems did not appear after the repeal and start fresh. They carried forward.
Exhibit — Plate
How one of those laws was sold to the people who would vote on it.
“Negro Rule” — a cartoon run in the campaign to ratify North Carolina’s disfranchising constitution, which introduced a literacy test and a grandfather clause. The law was written after the fear was manufactured, not before. Norman E. Jennett, Raleigh News and Observer, 4 July 1900. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
This was not a regional problem that the rest of the country solved. It was a national design that the whole country wrote.
Sources 1 entry
- PENDING — each state entry names a specific statute, the years it stood, and the date it fell. Per-state citations are being compiled and are not yet on the page.