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Vol. 71/No. 27      July 9, 2007

 
Event marks court case ending
ban on interracial marriage
 
BY TAMAR ROSENFELD  
BIRMINGHAM, Alabama, June 14—A forum here tonight marked the 40th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court decision that struck down state laws preventing and punishing interracial marriages. About 75 people attended the event, which took place at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute (BCRI).

When Loving v. Virginia was argued before the Supreme Court in 1967, 17 states had what were known as “anti-miscegenation laws” prohibiting marriage between a white person and a Black person.

In 1958 Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter, a white man and an African American woman, married in Washington, D.C., because interracial marriage was illegal in Virginia, where they lived.

After the couple returned to Virginia, police broke into their home at 2:00 a.m. and dragged them from their bedroom to the county jail. The Lovings were charged with violation of the 1924 Racial Integrity Act.

On Jan. 6, 1959, the Lovings pled guilty and were sentenced to one year in jail. The judge’s opinion stated, “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”

The judge suspended the Lovings’s sentence for a period of 25 years on the condition that they leave Virginia and not return together for 25 years.

Encouraged by the massive civil rights battles of the early 1960s that challenged segregation and racist practices, the Lovings appealed their conviction on the grounds that it violated the 14th Amendment. Between 1963 and 1967, the case wended through state courts. All the while, the Lovings lived in exile in the District of Columbia.

The state courts held that Virginia had legitimate purposes “to preserve the racial integrity of its citizens,” and to prevent “the corruption of blood,” “a mongrel breed of citizens,” and “the obliteration of racial pride.” In 1967 the Supreme Court, under the impact of the mass movement for Black freedom developing in the 1960s, called the lower courts’ statements “obviously an endorsement of the doctrine of White Supremacy,” and overturned all the previous decisions upholding the ban. The couple returned to Virginia, where they lived together until Richard died in a car accident in 1975.

Tonight’s event at the BCRI featured a panel of speakers who reviewed the history of the case and the status of interracial marriage in the United States today.

Keonna Greene, an intern at the BCRI, explained that Alabama was the last state in the country to repeal its constitutional ban on interracial marriage. Although the 1967 Supreme Court ruling applied to Alabama, “the state didn’t change its constitution until the year 2000, and that was by popular vote.”
 
 
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