Chief Justice Joseph Brown of the Supreme Court of Georgia issued a monumental decision. The former rebel governor ruled that the courts had the right to dissolve all interracial marriages. “Amalgamation” was classed with incestuous unions and marriages between idiots, which the state already proscribed. By generating “sickly and effeminate” children, Brown insisted, such abhorrent marriages threatened to “drag down the superior race to the level of the inferior.” He was repeating the established definition used by animal breeders to categorize a mongrel. Even more telling is Brown’s eugenic
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