In 1607 the first legal stricture prohibiting miscegenation passed, many more followed in an attempt to undermine interracial relations. It took over 300 years until the Supreme Court decreed all state legislature unconstitutional in the case of Loving v. Virginia. While many states chose to legalise interracial relations prior to the Supreme Court decision there were sixteen states which only had their anti-miscegenation laws repealed in 1967. Most of these states are former confederate states and former slave-holding states with a large population of African Americans. One of these states is Tennessee, not only a state which clung to its racist legislature, but it is also the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan. Ensuring the Civil War, the Ku Klux Klan violently persecuted black men as well as white women who engaged in interracial sexual relations. This form of white backlash during the Reconstruction period represented the white anxiety of Southerners, especially less affluent men who wished to maintain a racial hierarchy.