Interracial romance has been a point of contention in America since the first English settlers established colonies in the seventeenth century. In 1664 Maryland banned interracial marriage due to questions over whether the offspring of a black slave and a white person would be considered a free person or property. In following years, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and South Carolina instituted antimiscegenation laws which banned interracial marriage. In 1691 Virginia outlawed interracial couples and labeled their children as “that abominable mixture and spurious issue.” When slavery was abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, many southern states instituted what were known as the “Black Codes.” In addition to stripping freed slaves of most of their newly acquired rights, these codes continued the prohibition of marriage between whites and blacks. This was based on the commonly held notion that Africans, and Native Americans as well, were inferior races and interbreeding would pollute the white gene pool. When Congress tried to override the “Black Codes” by issuing a series of laws from 1866 to 1875, the Supreme Court declared most of the legislation void and upheld the southern states’ right to outlaw interracial marriage.