In June, 1958, Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter were married. They were high school sweethearts. They lived in Virginia, but they got married in Washington, D.C. thinking this would make their marriage legal. Richard was white and Mildred was of mixed race, but was legally considered black. In Virginia, and most southern states, the rule of “one drop of blood” applied to her. After the wedding, they returned to Virginia. On July 11, 1958, five weeks after getting married, they were arrested in bed at 2 A.M. The police were hoping to catch them having sex because interracial sex was against the law. But there was also the 1924 Racial Integrity Act which banned interracial marriage between whites and “colored”. In the history of the U.S., only 9 of the 50 states did not at one time ban interracial marriages. In 1883, an Alabama law was declared constitutional by the Supreme Court because it treated the races equally. In 1888, the court declared that states could regulate marriages. In the 1960’s, as the country witnessed the Civil Rights Movement, there were still many states that had laws against miscegenation – sexual relations between blacks and whites.
Even though they got married in Washington, D.C., they were illegally living a married life in Virginia. They pleaded guilty in the trial and Judge Leon Bazile sentenced them to one year in prison. He 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.” However, he suspended the sentence if they promised to leave Virginia and not return together for 25 years. They moved to Washington and had three children, but they longed to return to their home town. In 1963, Mildred wrote a letter to Attorney General Robert Kennedy. He passed the case on to the ACLU. They provided Bernard Cohen and Philip Hirschkop as lawyers. When Bazile refused to vacate the decision, it was appealed to the Virginia State Court of Appeals. They lost there, but then went to the U.S. Supreme Court. On June 12, 1967, the justices found that the Virginia law violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. The court, led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, declared the state law unconstitutional in a unanimous decision. This made 16 states’ laws against mixed race marriages unconstitutional.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loving_v._Virgini
https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/loving-v-virginia
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