Werner Sollors, a professor of Afro-American studies at Harvard, was born in Germany and came to the United States in 1978. He has been studying and writing about the history of American interracial relationships since 1986. Sollors is the editor of the recently published "Interracialism: Black-White Intermarriage in American History, Literature, and Law," a fascinating survey of legal decisions, literary criticism and essays by writers and scholars including Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois and Randall Kennedy. Salon spoke with Sollors by phone from his office in Cambridge about the mixed-race origins -- and multiracial future -- of the nation.

What took Alabama so long to overturn its anti-miscegenation law?

In the years after the Civil War, most of the Southern states made miscegenation bans part of their constitutions. And part of the constitutional provision was that no legislation should ever change them. These were not just ordinary laws that you could modify with a simple majority; they called for very complicated processes and very large majorities to be overturned.

In 1967, the Supreme Court invalidated these anti-miscegenation provisions with the Loving vs. Virginia case, and the Southern states began to adjust. But not right away. In the first 10 or 15 years, there wasn't a lot of activism or popular support for having the laws changed -- no politician wanted to be caught trying to remove those statutes. I think Mississippi did it in 1987 or 1988 -- 20 years after the Loving vs. Virginia case.

Alabama also had a law -- dating back to the 1833 Pace vs. Alabama case -- that mandated different punishment for a black-white couple who "fornicated" or committed adultery than for a same-race couple.

Isn't that amazing? It reads like Orwell. The federal Supreme Court sanctioned the states' right to mete out different punishment for the same offense depending on whether the people involved were of different races or not.

Another piece of legislation you include in the book is Virginia's Act to Preserve Racial Integrity of 1924.

They actually required people who got married to hand in authenticated racial genealogies. To get a marriage license you had to show that you and your partner were not of different races.

But all states weren't like Virginia. South Carolina took into account someone's reputation and place in society when judging whether that person was black.

Yes, South Carolina defined whiteness in a broader way than North Carolina or Virginia or Mississippi did. The assumption is that they wanted to have as many white people as possible in their community.

With state autonomy, if a general principle is agreed upon, states can take quite different routes to achieving that principle. If the principle is to have racial segregation in a hierarchical way, one state might think that it's a good idea to have as large a white population as possible. Another state might think the best thing is to have as sharp a dividing line as possible. Either of them makes sense, but they coexist in an interesting way and create a lot of drama in the United States. In the 19th century, you could move from one state to another and be reclassified racially.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"