Maryland: Colorless Conjugality

Maryland (the “Free State”), which adopted the nation’s first antimiscegenation statute in 1661 to keep white women servants from marrying Negro slaves, also passed one of the nation’s last such laws in 1935. Aimed at preventing Filipino mess boys at the Naval Academy in Annapolis from taking all-too-willing local brides, it bars marriage of either whites or Negroes with “a member of the Malay race.” So, when Jo Ann Kovacs, 25, a white Baltimore nurse, and Meki Toalepai, 26, a handsome singer-dancer-musician from Western Samoa, applied for a marriage license in Baltimore this month, they were refused. Maryland, the unhappy couple quickly discovered, would allow Jo Ann to marry anyone whose skin was red, yellow or white, while Meki could legally take a wife whose skin was red, yellow or brown. But brown and white (or white, brown and black) are not a permissible permutation.

Democratic Senator Daniel Inouye, a Hawaiian of Japanese descent who lives in Maryland when Congress is in session, protested that half of the population of Hawaii would be considered “impure” in the eyes of Maryland. The law, he added, would make “interesting reading in many parts of Southeast Asia where we talk about democracy.”

State Senator Verda Welcome, the only Negro in Maryland’s upper house, immediately introduced a bill to abolish the miscegenation statute, but her repealer was given little chance in a legislature still dominated by rural, Dixie-oriented lawmakers. The Maryland law and similar statutes in 17 other states (all Southern or border states except Wyoming) may be killed only when miscegenation is considered squarely by the Supreme Court, which has thus far avoided the constitutional question involved. As for Meki and Jo Ann, they were married last week in the Washington (Episcopal) Cathedral before driving to their new home in California. “Who,” asked Meki before leaving Maryland, “would want to live here?”