Alabama's Ban On Interracial Marriage

This is an old legal story, but one I followed closely at the time.
In Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1, the United States Supreme Court ruled that laws banning interracial marriage were unconstitutional. The decision came out on June 12 1967, and Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote the Court’s short opinion.
The State of Alabama’s Constitution prohibited interracial marriage, but, given the decision in Loving, the law was not enforced (and even in the several years before 1967 it probably wasn’t being enforced). In 2000, a proposition was placed on the Alabama ballot to repeal the law and erase discrimination from Alabama’s constitution. Alabama was the last state to still have such a law.
I don’t know the final tally (except that, thankfully, the proposition passed), but come election night, with 58 percent of the vote counted, 41 percent of the voters wanted the law to remain on the books!! When I followed this story in 2000 I found it, at first, humorous. Pretty quickly, though, I found it shocking instead.