When English teacher Angela Goodwin and her husband Dwight go out in public, they sometimes get stares from people.

 “I try to remind myself that they might be looking for different reasons. I don’t always assume the worst,” Goodwin said.

Goodwin is white and her husband is black.

Although statistics show that interracial couples are more common; some people refuse to accept them.

“I don’t like it because of the racial history behind it,” sophomore Alexis Walker said.

Sophomore Aliye Kidwell has experienced trouble with her aunt because her past relationships with boys outside her race.

“My aunt told me that I was going through a ‘phase’ and that if I got pregnant by a black boy she would send me a plane ticket to take care of it,” Kidwell said.

Despite a few people’s disagreement with interracial couples, more people are willing to accept them.

History teacher John Derge is in an interracial marriage. Neither Derge nor Goodwin received trouble from their families and friends because they married outside their race. 

 “My family always trusted who I chose for my friends and relationships,” Goodwin said.

Derge admits that he also gets stares from people when he goes out with his wife.

 Since the beginning of the sixteenth century, interracial couples have faced social exclusion and punishment. At some point in history, 41 out of 50 states had laws against interracial marriages according to encyclopedia.com. Until 1967, 17 states had laws banning interracial couples. 

“When I was young, in elementary school, many states still considered it illegal,” history teacher John Derge said.

The first law dates back to 1661 in Maryland. This law forced free born white women into slavery if they decided to marry a black man. In 1691, Virginia passed a law making interracial marriages completely illegal. 

According to the Georgia Southern Web site, white males felt that they had to protect white females. Blacks were punished if even suspected of talking to a white female. 

The tragic story of Emmit Till illustrates the type of punishment blacks faced. Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam brutally beat and murdered fourteen-year-old Till for supposedly whistling at Bryant’s wife, Carolyn.

When slavery was abolished in 1865, many southern states implemented black codes which prevented freed slaves from voting, holding office and marrying whites. Congress challenged these laws, but the Supreme Court upheld them. By 1950, 16 states banned interracial marriage.

In June of 1958, Richard Loving, a white male, and Mildred Jeter, a black female, were sentenced for a year in jail after they married in Washington D.C. and returned to their home in Virginia. The court charged Loving and Jeter for violating Virginia’s ban on interracial marrying. 

The Lovings both plead guilty to the charges, the judge agreed to suspend the sentence for 25 years if they left and never returned to Virginia together.

Lovings appealed this decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. On June 12, 1967, the court ruled “Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the state.” 

The 16 remaining states that had laws against interracial marriages were forced to repeal is also involved in an interracial marriage.