Abstract:
In 1948, the California Supreme Court declared the state’s anti-miscegenation statute unconstitutional. Twenty years before the U.S. Supreme Court came to the same conclusion in Loving v. Virginia, Daniel Marshall argued that his clients deserved the right to marry in California in part based on the fact that their church had no objections. Andrea Perez and Sylvester Davis were Catholics, and their attorney was a leading member of the Los Angeles chapter of the Catholic Interracial Council. The story of their efforts to overturn the anti-miscegenation statute sheds light on Catholic thinking about religious and racial differences with respect to marriage and the ways that that thinking interfaces with contemporary attitudes about race in a pluralistic American culture.
