As an Asian man dating a Black woman, I don’t think about race 24/7 in the context of my relationship. However, I am aware that interracial relationships were not always accepted, or even legal in America, and perhaps I take my relationship more for granted than I thought.
Last night, my girlfriend and I watched Loving on Netflix, a movie about the couple in Virginia who went to the Supreme Court and tore down anti-miscegenation laws. The movie is about Mildred and Richard Loving, who got married against all odds after two were banned from Virginia after violating Virginia’s anti-miscegenation laws.
This is the story of the Loving family, their case as reluctant heroes, and the implications of Loving v. Virginia in 1967, the civil rights case that legalized interracial marriage in America.
Mildred and Richard Loving
According to Biography, Mildred Dolores Jeter was born in Central Point, Virginia, on July 22, 1939. Delores came from mixed heritage, being of African American, European, and Native American descent, with particular Cherokee and Rappahannock descent. Mildred herself identified as Indian. In Central Point, Virginia, Black people and white people regularly mixed and worked together. Even during the Jim Crow era, the era was unique for Virginia, being relatively free of racial tension in relation to the rest of the state.
According to Douglas Linder at the University of Missouri, Kansas City Law School, Richard Loving grew up in Caroline County as a farm worker, with his father. His mother was a midwife who “delivered more babies than anyone in Caroline County.” He was born on October 29, 1933, and was six years older than Mildred.
Mildred Loving would be nicknamed “Bean” after her nickname of “String Bean.” She would eventually meet Richard Loving while she was attending an all-Black school, thinking he was arrogant. Caroline County, where Central Point is located, did not have strict separation of races like other counties in Virginia, and the two would eventually fall in love and get married. Richard first met Mildred through two of his friends, Theoliver and Musiel Jeter, who were Mildred’s brothers. Richard and Mildred’s brothers would share a love of cars and music, and would drag race cars together.
According to one historian, quoting a local resident:
In 1957, Mildred had her first child from another relationship, Sidney, and the next year, Richard and Mildred had another child. But the two couldn’t get married yet, according to Linder, because Mildred was listed on her 1939 birth certificate as “colored” due to her mixed ancestry. Even though she was light-skinned, she was still classified into the category due to very stringent state laws.
Virginia has been preventing interracial sexual relationships for a very long time. The Virginia legislature declared interracial relationships “that abominable mixture and spurious issue,” which prevented white women from having sex with Black people or Native Americans. Who was white or who was not changed over time — someone who was “white” needed to have less than 25% African ancestry. In 1910, however, they changed that metric to one-sixteenth African ancestry, and in 1924, they instituted the “one-drop rule” for “white” being less than any traceable African-American ancestry. The Virginia Supreme Court also saw no problem whatsoever in the constitutionality of the law. Judge Archibald Buchanan said that the law was to prevent “a mongrel breed of citizens” and expressed much interest in preserving “racial pride” and stopping “the corruption of blood.” And they were not alone. 26 other states had anti-miscegenation laws in 1955.
To say that Richard and Mildred Loving were reluctant activists is an understatement. Richard and Mildred Loving wanted to get married, but they knew they couldn’t do so in Virginia. Linder says they thought they would get harrassed less if they got married (they weren’t), so they did so in Washington D.C., only 80 miles away from where they lived. They got a marriage license, and then got married in D.C., and then drove back to Virginia.
For a couple months, they got to live in peace. But one morning, at 2 a.m., three men broke into their house and shined their flashlights at him, and one of those men was the sheriff. They arrested the two after Richard and Mildred said they were married, and the other two men were the deputy sheriff and the county jailer, who all seemed to agree that interracial marriages shouldn’t be allowed in Virginia. To this day, no one knows who gave the anonymous tip, but the family suspected it was a member of a rival drag racing crew.
Mildred and Richard went to jail in Bowling Green, Virginia, while Mildred was five months pregnant. The jail had failing plumbing and often housed three people in a jail cell meant for one person. Richard would eventually be released on a $1,000 bond, according to Brynn Holland at History. Mildred Loving would stay in the cell for three days, pregnant and alone, before being released to her father. Richard was not allowed to pick her up due to the jail’s enforcement of Virginia’s anti-miscegenation laws.
Richard and Mildred were eventually indicted by a grand jury several months later, right after having their first son. The indictment said Richard was a man “alleged to be white” and Mildred was a woman “alleged to be colored.” Judge Leon Bazile presided over the trial, without a jury, and although they would originally plead not guilty, the Lovings would change their plea to guilty at the advice of their lawyer.
Bazile sentenced them to one year in jail, but suspended the sentence for 25 years as long as they leave Virginia and not return for the whole 25 years. They moved to Washington D.C., living with one of Mildred’s cousins. They lived in D.C., but would return frequently to Virginia, staying in an adjacent county, using several cars, and taking other measures to ensure they didn’t get caught.
But Mildred did not like life in D.C. She hated city life. She wanted to return to life in Virginia in farm life. At one point, her cousin suggested she write a letter to Robert Kennedy, and she did.
The Supreme Court case
While Kennedy himself couldn’t help, he enlisted the services of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), who was interested in taking on the case. Lawyer Bernhard Cohen at the DC chapter of the ACLU, was tasked with the case. Cohen was only out of law school for three years. He had no experience in federal court. Another lawyer who helped on the case, Phillip Hirschkop, wasn’t qualified to try a case in front of court since he was only two years out of law school.
But the two lawyers would work head over heels for the case and repeal the law. And they aimed ambitiously at the Supreme Court. First, however, they would have to get the case reconsidered by Virginia courts, and then convince the Supreme Court that the law was unconstitutional. Unfortunately, Cohen thought arguing before the Supreme Court would be easier than getting the case reconsidered — the Lovings would essentially have to get arrested again.
Cohen and Hirschkop then filed a “2283 motion,” getting a panel of three judges to look at the constitutionality of the law. Judge Bazile sat on their motion for a long time, doing nothing. The three-judge panel heard the case, and to get more exposure for the case, Cohen got the Lovings to meet with reporters at LIFE Magazine.
Bazile finally responded, and said in a 12-page decision that the right to regulate marriage rested in the states, not the federal government. He firmly defended the anti-miscegenation laws as decreed by God:
LIFE Magazine eventually published a story titled “The Crime of Being Married,” a photo essay about the family. The Virginia Supreme Court defended anti-miscegenation law, saying anti-segregation decisions like Brown v. Board of Education were not applicable — it did not surprise anyone. But once the case came before the Supreme Court, the judges came down with a unanimous decision declaring laws banning interracial marriages were unconstitutional based on the 14th amendment:
The Lovings then moved home. They lived on an acre of land Richard’s father bought them. According to Holland, Richard was killed in 1975 by a drunk driver, and Mildred never remarried — and Mildred would largely stay out of the public spotlight. However, on the 40th anniversary of Loving v. Virginia, she was questioned by Faith in America, a gay rights group, on her thoughts on same-sex marriage. She said:
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This post was previously published on Frame of Reference.
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Photo credit: Wikipedia Commons