White and the other was classified Coloured. The Prohibition of Mixed
Marriages Act (1949) and the Immorality Act (1950) created legal bound-
aries between the races by making marriage and sexual relations illegal
across the color line. In 1953, after a court had ruled that segregation was
not lawful if public facilities for different racial groups were not equal (as in
waiting rooms at railroad stations), Parliament passed the Reservation of
Separate Amenities Act to legalize such inequality.
As mentioned above, the National party used its majority in Parliament
to eliminate the voting rights of Coloured and African people. During the
1950S, when the Nationalist party's majority in Parliament was still short
of two-thirds, it enforced its will by a stratagem that circumvented the
Constitution by packing the Senate (the upper house of Parliament) and the
Appellate Division of the Supreme Court-South
Africa's highest court. In
195 I, it passed an act by the ordinary legislative procedure (that is, by
simple majorities in each house, sitting separately) to remove Coloured
voters from the common electoral rolls. The Appellate Division ruled that
the law was invalid, because the Constitution required such an act to be