Interracial Marriage in California

SINCE the second World War, the topic of interracial marriage has attracted a good deal of attention. This is for at least two reasons. First, there were a number of important developments in the general area of race relations immediately prior to, during, and after the war. For example, in June, 1941, President Roosevelt established the first Fair Employment Practices Committee. During the war, several race riots occurred in U.S. cities and shocked many Americans. After the war, the involvement of the United States in the United Nations forced Americans to pay attention to the race relations problems existing in this country. The second reason is that a large number of American soldiers married Japanese women during the occupation of Japan which followed the war; in fact, the number of such marriages has been estimated to be over 20,000.1 These two combined factors created much interest in interracial marriage, and some of this interest was manifested in research. There have been eleven studies2 on interracial marriage since the mid-1940's.