Contents -- Chapter 1: The Criminal Ban on Miscegenation as a Contested Site -- Regulating Interracial Intimacy and Building the State: Ninety Years of Bounded Development -- Antebellum Regulation of Interracial Intimacy -- State-Level Political Development and the Construction of Identity -- Alabama as a Significant Site -- Regulating Interracial Intimacy and the Development of the Supremacist State -- Chapter 2: Creating a Constitutional Order: 1865-82 -- Political and Social Upheaval -- The Threat of Interracial Relationships -- Ellis v. State and the Initiation of the Struggle -- Burns v. State and the Interpretive Challenge -- Ford, Green, and Hoover: Chipping Away at Burns -- Pace and Cox v. State and Pace v. Alabama: Constituting the State -- The New Constitutional Order and the Cornerstones of White Supremacy -- Chapter 3: The Elements of Miscegenation and Its Threat to the Family: 1883-1917 -- Political Consolidation, the Constitution of 1901, and Supremacist Ideology -- Racial Mixing, White Supremacy, and Violence -- Evidentiary Considerations and the Elements of Miscegenation -- The Relationship between Interracial Intimacy and Adultery or Fornication -- Confessing Miscegenation -- Establishing Female and Male -- Establishing Black and White -- Interracial Rape -- The Constitutionalization and Formalization of White Supremacy -- Chapter 4: Litigating Race: 1918-28 -- Democratic Hegemony in Alabama's Politics -- The Birth of a Nation and the Rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan -- The Triumph of Eugenics and the Threat of Racial Mixing -- Eugenics as an Opportunity for Black Defendants -- Metcalf and Rollins: Establishing Whiteness -- Reed and Wilson: The Debate Expands -- Weaver v. State and the Effort to Achieve Judicial Resolution -- The Statutory Redefinition of Race.

The Battle over Racial Definition: Resolving Heredity with Common Understandings -- Chapter 5: Consolidating and Embedding White Supremacy: 1928-40 -- Politics and Society in Alabama during the Depression -- Politics and Race in the Late 1920s and 1930s -- Alabama's National Scandals: Scottsboro and Hugo Black -- Jesse Williams and the Continued Struggle over Racial Definition -- Legitimately Proving the Sexual Act and the Intention behind It: Jackson, Fields, and Murphy -- Bailey and Rogers and the Question of Parallel Outcomes -- Depression-Era Evidentiary Refinements and the Rationalization of Prejudice -- Chapter 6: White Power and Public Policy in Testamentary Disputes: 1914-44 -- Earlier Doctrine Regarding Interracial Transfers of Wealth -- Background Legal Principles Governing Challenges to Wills -- Allen v. Scruggs: Providing for the Children -- Mathews v. Stroud: The Primacy of the Testator's Intentions -- Dees v. Metts: Does Public Policy Prohibit Interracial Inheritance? -- What about Black Property Owners? -- Legitimation and White Male Control over Property -- Chapter 7: Portraying the Static State: 1941-54 -- Politics and the Hesitant New Progressivism -- War and Its Implications -- Early Stirrings of the Civil Rights Movement -- Framing Relationships and Avoiding Racialized Debate: Jordan, Brewer, and Gilbert -- The Necessity of Proving Intercourse: Griffith -- Agnew and the Court's Final Word on the Problem of Prejudice and Racial Definition -- Constitutional Challenges Arise Again: Jackson and Rogers -- The State Courts' Final Words on Miscegenation -- Chapter 8: Race and the Legacy of the Supremacist State -- The Demise of Criminal Sanctions against Interracial Intimacy -- Alabama's Final Repudiation of the Formal Ban on Interracial Marriage -- The Ban on Interracial Intimacy and the Construction of Race and Gender.

The Ban on Interracial Intimacy and the Process of State Building -- The Law and Its Agents -- Afterword: The Analogy between Bans on Interracial Marriage and Same-Sex Marriage-A Usable Past? -- What Work Can the Analogy Do? -- Bibliography -- Index.