Life
Today is Loving Day, a holiday that celebrates the anniversary of Loving v Virginia, the Supreme Court case which declared interracial marriage legal across the US. It's shocking to remember that the ruling — which was a blow against institutionalized racism, a step towards greater marriage equality for all, and the basis for last year's award-winning film Loving, about the couple at the center of the legal storm — is only 50 years old, and that many of our parents were alive in an era when states could uphold laws barring people of different races from marrying. But it is true; and the fact that we're only a generation removed from a time when people were locked up, fined and exiled for daring to marry or cohabit with somebody of a different race is one of the most glaring examples of the racism that runs deep throughout our country's foundations.
The story of how childhood sweethearts Mildred and Richard Loving brought about one of the most important US legal rulings of the 20th century is a long one — and one that did not begin with them and their case. "Anti-miscegenation laws" — specific laws that prohibited marriage between people of different races — have a long and brutal history in the US that reaches back to the colonial era; a history that we're still fighting today. In honor of Loving Day, let's be sure that we know our history.
In 1958, Police Jailed Richard & Mildred Loving — Just For Being Married
The Lovings just wanted to be married and live in Virginia without being thrown in jail, an incredibly simple request — but their fight for that right was an incredibly difficult one. They'd gone to Washington DC, where interracial marriages were legal, to get married in 1958 — but that sort of "marriage tourism" was seen as a problem: in the early 1910s, both Vermont and Massachusetts had passed laws saying that interracial marriages for people who didn't live in the state were null and void.
The Lovings were arrested one month after their marriage, when police raided their home based on an anonymous call; Richard Loving had his bail set for a whopping $1000 and Mildred Loving was left in jail for several days while several months pregnant. This arrest led to a sentence of exile from the state of Virginia for 25 years on pain of imprisonment. Considering that both Lovings were lifelong Virginians whose families and friends all resided there, it was a cruel judgement.
And the judge's own opinions made things worse. He noted:
"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 marriage. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix."
That judicial opinion made clear the racist thinking that had supported anti-miscegenation laws for hundreds of years. But the Lovings were still to have their day in the Supreme Court.
The 1967 Victory Took On Centuries Of Racist Law
To give you some impression of what the Lovings were up against, here's the text of the Virginia law they were fighting:
"It shall hereafter be unlawful for any white person in this State to marry any save a white person, or a person with no other admixture of blood than white and American Indian. For the purpose of this chapter, the term 'white person' shall apply only to such person as has no trace whatever of any blood other than Caucasian; but persons who have one-sixteenth or less of the blood of the American Indian and have no other non-Caucasic blood shall be deemed to be white persons. All laws heretofore passed and now in effect regarding the intermarriage of white and colored persons shall apply to marriages prohibited by this chapter."
Which is why the Supreme Court verdict was so astonishing and heartening: It was unanimously decided that interracial marriage laws were "obviously an endorsement of the doctrine of White Supremacy." Justice Warren, who wrote the judgement, disapprovingly quoted a case from 1955 in which a Virginia court said that anti-miscegenation laws were designed "to prevent "the corruption of blood," "a mongrel breed of citizens," and "the obliteration of racial pride."" The whole judgement is worth a read. "JUSTICES UPSET ALL BANS ON INTERRACIAL MARRIAGE," the New York Times trumpeted on the day, and Martin Luther King called it a "real attack on racism".
The Legacy Of Loving V Virginia Is Huge
Today, all US citizens have the right to marry a person of any race, though stories of people who still try to oppose interracial marriage are not totally unheard of — like the Justice of the Peace who, in 2009, refused to officiate a wedding between a white woman and a black man in Louisiana, and would later resign instead of facing a federal discrimination lawsuit.
However, one of the biggest legacies of the Loving v Virginia decision was in the fight for marriage equality for the LGBTQ community, in large part because of this bit written at the end of the judgement:
"Marriage is one of the 'basic civil rights of man,' fundamental to our very existence and survival. To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law."
It held what legal scholars believe is a significant role in the case that eventually made same-sex marriage legal across the country in 2015, Obergefell v Hodges. "No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were," Justice Kennedy wrote in that decision, in what was probably a deliberate echo of the landmark Loving case.
Half a century isn't that long ago. America's history of discrimination isn't just history; it's right here with us, right now. Today's a good day to remember that.