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The laws are still on the books in Virginia: Blacks and whites must sit in separate rail cars. They cannot use the same playgrounds, schools or mental hospitals. They can’t marry each other either. The measures have not been enforced for decades, but they remain in the state’s official legal record. A state commission on Thursday recommended that dozens of such discriminatory statutes finally be repealed, in some cases more than a century after they were adopted. (12/5)

Many of the laws, some of which are no longer enforced or have been invalidated, stem from the state’s segregationist past, including Jim Crow laws and the Virginia’s Massive Resistance policy, a coordinated effort to thwart federally mandated laws to integrate schools, transportation and neighborhoods. Other laws prohibited interracial marriage and imposed a poll tax designed to prevent black Virginians from voting. “Repeal of these outdated, unjust, and in many cases plainly racist Acts of Assembly is an important step in recognizing and correcting the sins of the past,” Cynthia Hudson, Virginia’s chief deputy attorney general and chair of the governor’s commission, said in a statement. (Rueb, 12/6)

The report groups the laws by topic, illustrating how racism reached into so many areas of daily life — voting, education, health, transportation, housing and criminal justice. “We know that in Virginia, our history is difficult and extremely complex,” Northam said. “And we know that discrimination, racism and black oppression marched on, even after slavery ended. In the form of Jim Crow laws, massive resistance [to school integration] and now among other things, mass incarceration.” (Vozzella, 12/5)