The draft took Sylvester Davis to war in 1944, but when he returned from Europe he was determined to marry Andrea Perez. Andrea agreed to this proposal, over the objections of her father, and the couple applied for a marriage license on August 1st, 1947. They were denied the license by an employee in the marriage bureau of the county clerk, who cited California’s antimiscegenation law, which forbade “all marriages of white persons with negroes, Mongolians, members of the Malay race, or mulattoes.”
This law was one of many written in the 19th century by representatives of “the great hegira of the land-hungry Anglo-Saxon” (as Jack London described California’s early white leadership) that regulated land ownership, political participation, and social relationships. California’s first code of criminal procedure prohibited legal testimony against whites by blacks, mulattos, and Indians. The legislature barred “Mongolians, Indians, and Negroes” from public schools in 1860 and prohibited the employment of Chinese laborers on public works projects in 1879.
Ever-evolving and frequently contradictory laws of racial identity constricted the lives of wave after wave of immigrants to the state. Were Armenians Asians, and therefore ineligible to become citizens? They were, briefly, in 1909, before a federal court admitted them into the Caucasian club for immigration purposes by virtue of their appearance, religion, and history (“the outlook of their civilization has been toward Europe”).
Encouraged by federal legislation prohibiting Chinese from becoming naturalized citizens because of their supposed racial inferiority, and by a string of federal court rulings that extended this “logic” to Japanese immigrants, California’s Alien Land Acts of 1913 and 1920 prohibited agricultural land ownership by Asians and their American-born children.
California’s anti-immigrant stance protected more than white men’s jobs and political power; it protected their blood. Restrictive immigration policies were part of a broader governmental effort to preserve white racial fitness and hierarchy, as exhorted by prominent eugenicists like Charles B. Davenport, who insisted that states must “take positive measures to increase the density of socially desirable traits in the next generation—by education, segregation, sterilization, and by keeping out immigrants who belong to defective strains.”
Following venerable horticulturalist Luther Burbank’s exhortations, California became the model eugenic state in the 1910s. In addition to limiting immigration, the state managed its population through sterilization of those deemed unfit to reproduce. Four-fifths of the people sterilized in the United States between 1910 and 1920 were sterilized in the state of California, which led the nation in the number of annual eugenic sterilizations until 1950.
African Americans and foreign immigrants were sterilized at nearly twice the rate as the general population. Given this energetic dedication to preserving the quality of the white race in California and the state’s official hostility towards nonwhites, it is not surprising that as late as 1948 the Golden State boasted racially restrictive marriage laws that rivaled those of the Deep South.