One-drop rule

The one-drop rule was a legal principle of racial classification that was prominent in the 20th-century United States. It asserted that any person with even one ancestor of sub-Saharan African ancestry ("one drop" of "black blood") is considered black (Negro or colored in historical terms). It is an example of hypodescent, the automatic assignment of children of a mixed union between different socioeconomic or ethnic groups to the group with the lower status, regardless of proportion of ancestry in different groups.

This concept became codified into the law of some U.S. states in the early 20th century. It was associated with the principle of "invisible blackness" that developed after the long history of racial interaction in the South, which had included the hardening of slavery as a racial caste system and later segregation. Before the rule was outlawed by the Supreme Court in the Loving v. Virginia decision of 1967, it was used to prevent interracial marriages and in general to deny rights and equal opportunities and uphold white supremacy.

Antebellum conditions

Before the American Civil War, free individuals of mixed race (free people of color) were considered legally white if they had less than either one-eighth or one-quarter African ancestry (only in Virginia). Many mixed-race people were absorbed into the majority culture based simply on appearance, associations and carrying out community responsibilities. These and community acceptance were the more important factors if such a person's racial status were questioned, not their documented ancestry.