legal in 31 states, yet "legal unions" between Blacks and Whites "remained a rarity" and by 1970 they accounted for only 2 percent of all marriages involving Black Americans ("With This" 26). The rate of Black-White marriages began to increase after 1974, however, and grew to the point where "almost 6 percent of existing Black marriages in 1990 were to a White spouse" ("With This" 26).
The continuing growth of the trend is even more remarkable when the percentage of new Black marriages to a White partners is considered: in 1970 this was 2.6 percent of all Black marriages and in 1993 it had risen to 12.3 percent. The striking anomaly in these marriages, however, was the difference in the ratio of Black men and women who married White partners, overall "Black men are nearly three times more likely to intermarry than Black women" (Mills 211). In Kalmijn's 1993 study, which allowed for a regional difference between the South and the rest of the nation, it was found that outside the South the percentage of Black men who married White women rose from 3.9 percent in 1968 to over 10 percent in 1986. But for Black women outside the South who married White men the percentages were far lower. Yet they too rose considerably--going from 1.2 percent in 1968 to 3.7 percent in 1986. Kalmijn found that increases in the total number of Black-White marriages occurred both within and without South. But the Black man-White woman combination consistently outnumbered its reverse in all regions.
There were, undoubtedly, many factors that affected the increase in the number of interracial marriages in the United States. One of the major factors, aside from the removal of all laws prohibiting such unions, was the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the affirmative action programs that resulted in "a substantial movement of young, educated Blacks into the mainstream of the American economy' (Heaton and Albrecht 205). In addition, Black income began to r...