apply to all persons of African descent. The term 'white' shall include all other persons."
Taking up these definitions in the various States—many of them included within broader statutes—one finds that Alabama,[5] Kentucky,[6] Maryland,[7] Mississippi,[8] North Carolina,[9] Tennessee,[10] and Texas[11] define as a person of color one who is descended from a Negro to the third generation inclusive, though one ancestor in each generation may have been white. The Code Committee of Alabama of 1903 substituted "fifth" for "third," so that at present in that State one is a person of color who has had any Negro blood in his ancestry in five generations.[12] The laws of Florida,[13] Georgia,[14] Indiana,[15] Missouri,[16] and South Carolina[17] declare that one is a person of color who has as much as one-eighth Negro blood: the laws of Nebraska[18] and Oregon[19] say that one must have as much as one-fourth Negro blood in order to be classed with that race. Virginia[20] and Michigan apparently draw the line in a similar way. In Virginia, a marriage between a white man and a woman who is of less than one-fourth Negro blood, "if it be but one drop less," is legal. A woman whose father was white, and whose mother's father was white, and whose great-grandmother was of a brown complexion, is not a Negro in the sense of the statute.[21] In 1866, the court of Michigan, under a law limiting the suffrage to "white male citizens," held that all persons should be considered white who had less than one-fourth of African blood.[22] That State gave the right to vote also to male inhabitants of Indian descent, but its court held that a person having one-eighth Indian blood, one-fourth or three-eighths African, and the rest white was not in-
