Race, Marriage and Sovereignty in the New World Order
In mid-October 1948, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, released the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This founding document of the post-World War II world order condemned bans on interracial marriage, included language safeguarding freedom of choice in marriage, and recommended that U.N. member states endeavor as soon as possible to bring their legislation into line with the principles" enunciated by the commission. That same month, the California Supreme Court exposed the constitutional soft spots of American anti-miscegenation laws and highlighted the potentially revolutionary role of the judiciary in setting the boundaries of social life when it overturned a century of state precedent and 300 years of colonial and national precedent to become the first court since Reconstruction to rule an American anti-miscegenation law unconstitutional.The South was not amused by either of these developments. Race, Marriage and Sovereignty in the New World Order" explores the tension between international law and local custom in the United States, and the interplay between domestic and international politics. In the context of early Cold War criticism of American social structures, the issue of freedom of marriage became a focal point for contests between international law and national sovereignty in the United States as well as a powerful site of contestation between individual states and the federal government. Although victorious in the long term, by 1950 both the constitutional logic of marriage as a civil right protected by the Fourteenth Amendment and the argument that international human rights norms might trump local discriminatory practices inspired strenuous resistance from the South, and a mounting defense of local sovereignty/states rights." In addition to the domestic cost of delaying the destruction of Jim Crow there was an international price to this resistance: American stigmatization of international human rights norms and treaties was rooted directly in the civil rights struggle in the United States and reflected the potential of international organizations to assault domestic racial conventions at their foundations.
Jane Dailey, University of Chicago