Loving v. Commonwealth of Virginia

The U.S. Bureau of the Census in 1980 counted 49,714,000 married couples in the United States. Of these, 97 percent or 48,264,000 were "same race couples." About 1.3 percent, or 651,000 couples, were designated as interracial couples, with either a black person married to a white person, a black person married to someone of another race, or a white person married to someone of another race. (In addition to same-race or interracial couples, the Census Bureau counted 799,000 in the category of "all other couples," meaning that neither partner was white or black.)

Of the 651,000 interracial couples noted by the Census Bureau in 1980, the overwhelming majority--69 percent--was composed of whites married to someone of another race. The smallest category, amounting to a little more than 5 percent, was made up of blacks married to someone of another race. Just over one-quarter of the interracial couples were black-white marriages, of which three-quarters (122,000) were couples with a black husband and a white wife, as opposed to just 45,000 couples with a white husband and black wife.

Sixteen years later, Census Bureau estimates for 1996 revealed several changes. The number of married couples nationwide had grown by almost 10 percent, to 54,664,000, but the number of interracial marriages had almost doubled, to 1,260,000.