Vol. 72/No. 24      June 16, 2008

Mildred was part Black and part Native American; her husband Richard, a bricklayer, was white. Together, they launched a lawsuit, Loving v. Virginia, that resulted in the U.S. Supreme Court declaring that laws banning interracial marriage were unconstitutional.

Both Mildred and Richard grew up in Central Point, a predominantly Black town. Mildred’s father was a tenant farmer; Richard drove a truck for a well-off Black farmer. They went to different schools as the Jim Crow segregation laws required. They married in 1958.

At the time of the June 12, 1967, Supreme Court decision 16 states, including Virginia, banned marriage between people of different races. Since they couldn’t get a marriage license in Virginia, they married in Washington, D.C. They returned home and hung their framed marriage certificate on the bedroom wall.

What they didn’t know was that Virginia law also forbade evading the interracial ban by marrying out of state and then returning as husband and wife. A few weeks later the county sheriff, a deputy, and the county jailer entered their unlocked home at 2 a.m., woke them by shining flashlights in their faces, and arrested the Lovings. They pled guilty to breaking Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924, a felony.

The judge sentenced each of them to a year in jail but offered to suspend the sentences if they left Virginia and did not return together or at the same time for 25 years. Mildred and Richard accepted and moved to Washington, D.C.

In 1963, as mobilizations by Black working people against segregation reached a high point, the Lovings decided to fight the reactionary law preventing them from living together as a married couple in Virginia. They filed a lawsuit that eventually reached the Supreme Court.

The court ruled, “The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.”

In addition to the blow against segregation, the decision also strengthened the right to privacy in personal decisions as against state interference. It helped lay the basis for the right of women to choose abortion with the court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade. When the California Supreme Court overturned that state’s ban on same sex marriage less than two weeks after Mildred Loving’s death it heavily relied on its 1948 decision ending California’s antimiscegenation law.

Richard Loving died in 1975. In 2007, on the 40th anniversary of the decision bearing their name, Mildred Loving issued a statement. “I believe all Americans, no matter their race, no matter their sex, no matter their sexual orientation, should have that same freedom to marry,” she said. “Government has no business imposing some people’s religious beliefs over others. Especially if it denies people’s civil rights. I am still not a political person, but I am proud that Richard’s and my name is on a court case that can help reinforce the love, the commitment, the fairness, and the family that so many people, black or white, young or old, gay or straight seek in life.”  
 
 
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