Anti-miscegenation laws are laws that enforce racial segregation at the level of marriage and intimate relationships by criminalizing interracial marriage, sometimes also criminalizing sex between members of different races.
In the United States, interracial marriage, cohabitation and sex have been termed "miscegenation" since the term was coined in 1863. Contemporary usage of the term is infrequent, except in reference to historical laws which banned the practice. Anti-miscegenation laws were first introduced in North America by the governments of several of the Thirteen Colonies from the late seventeenth century onward, and subsequently, they were introduced by the governments of many U.S. states and U.S. territories and they remained in force in many US states until 1967. After the Second World War, an increasing number of states repealed their anti-miscegenation laws. In 1967, in the landmark case Loving v. Virginia, the remaining anti-miscegenation laws were ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren.
