Chapter One

In November 2000, as Americans were voting for president in a hotly contested and highly controversial election, Alabamans were also voting on a proposed amendment to their state constitution. State representative Alvin Holmes, a black Democrat from Montgomery, had initiated the legislative process to refer the amendment to the people. The amendment sought to eliminate Alabama's constitutional provision barring the state legislature from ever permitting interracial marriage (Sznajderman 1999a: 4B).

In a certain sense, the amendment was pointless. In the landmark case of Loving v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court had invalidated criminal bans on interracial marriage in 1967. Even more to the point, a federal district court judge had specifically instructed the state of Alabama in 1970 that it could not persist in enforcing its rule against cross-racial intimacy. The amendment would thus have a purely symbolic effect, as the mechanism for preventing interracial marriage had been judicially dismantled thirty years earlier. The amendment received little discussion in the press in an election that featured more controversial issues like the presidential campaign and a statewide measure to use oil and gas royalties to fund capital improvements. While Holmes had begun the process, he did little other than to provide interviews to newspapers about the need for the amendment, and no significant public campaign was mounted for it. One vocal opponent, Michael Chappell, campaigned against it on the behalf of his Con