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Steps Back and Forward

Laws defining race and the rules surrounding it have deep roots in the nation's history.

Laws defining race and the rules surrounding it have deep roots in the nation's history.

1661: Maryland bans miscegenation, defined as marriage, cohabitation or sexual relations between whites and nonwhites.

1662: The Virginia legislature rules mulatto children (the offspring of interracial couples) take the status of their mothers, ensuring they cannot claim the freedom of their white fathers.

1790: In the first census to include a race question, the categories are free white male, free white female, any other free person, and slave.

1854: Types of Mankind, by Josiah Nott and George Glidden, published in Philadelphia, contends blacks are not the same species as whites.

1863: President Abraham Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation.

1883: In Pace v. Alabama, the U.S. Supreme Court upholds Alabama's anti-miscegenation law.

1890: Census takers must visually confirm a subject's race, lest people try to "pass."

1896: In Plessy v. Ferguson, the U.S. Supreme Court backs separate-but-equal public facilities for blacks and establishes a precedent for the "one drop" rule.

1920: The term mulatto is dropped from the census; mixed-race individuals are considered black.

1923: The American Eugenics Society is formed. It holds that race determines behavior and intelligence, with some groups being inferior.

1924: Virginia enacts "racial integrity" laws making interracial marriage a felony and providing for sterilization of "unfit" individuals.

1948: In Perez v. Sharp, the California Supreme Court rules that anti-miscegenation laws violate the 14th Amendment (the equal protection clause) of the Constitution. Oregon repeals its law in 1951; 13 states follow, but 16 others retain their statutes.

1964: The Civil Rights Act is signed. It prohibits discrimination in public places, provides for integration of schools and other public facilities, and makes employment discrimination illegal.

1967: In Loving v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court throws out anti-miscegenation law in Virginia and 15 remaining states.

1983: In Jane Doe vs. State of Louisiana, a state Supreme Court won't let Susie Guillory Phipps, who is 1/32 black, have "colored" removed from her birth certificate.

1997: Golfer Tiger Woods, speaking on Oprah, describes himself as "Cablinasian" - Caucasian, black, Native American and Asian.

2000: For the first time, the U.S. census lets respondents check more than one race. It also defines Hispanic as an ethnicity, not a race.

2004: The Human Genome Project, identifying all the genes in human DNA, is completed, showing there are no subspecies or inferior races.

SOURCE: Compiled by Inquirer staff writer Dianna Marder and Kelly Jackson of the MAVIN Foundation (www.mavin.net)