At Fountain of Life Covenant Church, we have a large number of multiethnic families and nearly all of the married, engaged, and dating couples are interracial. I'd list them all, but there are already three examples within the Sato family. (And I'm not biased when I say that FOL has some of the cutest kids around!)
It's almost easy to take interracial families within a multiethnic church for granted, but this morning I heard a story on NPR and read a blog post by Edward Gilbreath, an author and editor at Christianity Today. (Read the post here and follow his links to other coverage.) Forty-one years ago today, anti-miscegenation laws were struck down by the Supreme Court's decision in Loving v. Virginia. Richard Loving, a white man, and his wife, Mildred, a black woman, were banished from Virginia and threatened with imprisonment for violating the Virginia Racial Integrity Act of 1924. Here's a quote from the act:
"It shall hereafter be unlawful for any white person in this State to marry any save a white person, or a person with no other admixture of blood than white and American Indian. For the purpose of this act, the term "white person" shall apply only to the person who has no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian; but persons who have one-sixteenth or less of the blood of the American Indian and have no other non-Caucasic blood shall be deemed to be white persons. All laws heretofore passed and now in effect regarding the intermarriage of white and colored persons shall apply to marriages prohibited by this act."
It's hard to believe, but California's own miscegenation laws were struck down by the California Supreme Court in 1948. Read a brief summary. It's harder to believe that Charleston High School in Mississippi held its first ever interracial prom just a few days ago.
