Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.
My racial composition and my position in the world are realities which I alone may determine… I do not expect to be told what I should consider myself to be.
A Virginia couple fights to overturn an old law against miscegenation
She is Negro, he is white, and they are married. This puts them in a kind of legal purgatory in their home state of Virginia, which specifically forbids interracial marriage.
Last week Mildred and Richard Loving lost one more round in a seven-year legal battle, when the Virginia Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the state’s antimiscegenation law. Once again they and their three children were faced with the loss of home and livelihood…
In June 2, 1958, a white man named Richard Loving and his part-black, part-Cherokee fiancée Mildred Jeter travelled from Caroline County, VA to Washington, D.C. to be married. At the time, interracial marriage was illegal in 21 states, including Virginia. Back home two weeks later, the newlyweds were arrested, tried and convicted of the felony crime of “miscegenation.” To avoid a one-year jail sentence, the Lovings agreed to leave the state; they could return to Virginia, but only separately. Living in exile in D.C. with their children, the Lovings missed their families and dearly wanted to return to their rural home. At the advice of her cousin, Mildred wrote a letter to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, who wrote her back suggesting she get in touch with the American Civil Liberties Union.
Two young ACLU lawyers, Bernard S. Cohen and Philip J. Hirschkop, took on the Lovings’ case, fully aware of the challenges posed at a time when many Americans were vehement about segregation and maintaining the “purity of the races.” In interviews filmed at the time, the two lawyers dissect the absurdities of the laws and the difficulties of trying a case over five years old. Today, Hirschkop recalls that Mildred was quiet and articulate, while joking that his initial impression of Richard was that he looked like a crew-cut “redneck.” As they came to know them, however, it became apparent that the couple was deeply committed to each other. With an eye towards taking their case to the highest possible court, Cohen filed a motion to vacate the judgment on the Lovings’ original conviction and set aside the sentence. Local Judge Leon Bazile denied the motion, stating that God had separated people by continents and did not “intend for the races to mix.” After the Virginia Supreme Court responded with similarly antiquated and racist sentiments, Cohen and Hirschkop seized the opportunity to take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Although the odds of getting a case heard by the Court were slim, Cohen and Hirschkop learned that Loving v. Virginia would be heard on April 10, 1967. Aware that their case had the potential to set a landmark precedent, the two green lawyers (Hirschkop was only two years out of law school and had never argued before the Supreme Court) prepped in New York before heading to the famous Supreme Court building in D.C. In oral arguments heard on audiotape, the State compared anti-miscegenation statutes to the right to prohibit incest, polygamy, and underage marriage, claiming that children are victims in an interracial marriage. The plaintiff’s lawyers, by contrast, included legal arguments interspersed with references to sociology and anthropology. And though the Lovings chose not to attend, Cohen may have made the most compelling case by relaying to Chief Justice Warren and his fellow judges Richard’s simple message: “Tell the court that I love my wife, and it is unfair that I can’t live with her in Virginia.”
After a two-month wait, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of the Lovings on June 12, 1967. This precedent-setting decision resulted in 16 states being ordered to overturn their bans on interracial marriage. Alabama was the last holdout, finally repealing its anti-miscegenation law in 2000.
Mildred Loving, law-changer, died on May 2nd, aged 68
The loved each other. That must have been why they decided to get their marriage certificate framed and to hang it up in the bedroom of their house. There was little else in the bedroom, save the bed. Certainly nothing worth locking the front door for on a warm July night in 1958 in Central Point, Virginia. No one came this way, ten miles off the Richmond Turnpike into the dipping hills and the small, poor, scattered farmhouses, unless they had to. But Mildred Loving was suddenly woken to the crash of a door and a torch levelled in her eyes.
All the law enforcement of Caroline county stood round the bed: Sheriff Garnett Brooks, his deputy and the jailer, with guns at their belts. They might have caught them in the act. But as it was, the Lovings were asleep. All the men saw was her black head on the pillow, next to his.
She didn’t even think of it as a Negro head, especially. Her hair could easily set straight or wavy. That was because she had Indian blood, Cherokee from her father and Rappahannock from her mother, as well as black. All colours of people lived in Central Point, blacks with milky skin and whites with tight brown curls, who all passed the same days feeding chickens or smelling tobacco leaves drying, and who all had to use different counters from pure whites when they ate lunch in Bowling Green. They got along. If there was any race Mrs Loving considered herself, it was Indian, like Princess Pocahontas. And Pocahontas had married a white man…
On May 2, Mildred Loving died from complications of pneumonia at the age of 68. The unassuming Mrs. Loving would have scoffed at the notion that she was a hero of the Civil Rights Movement. But for millions of Americans the Loving v. Virginia (1967) case—which outlawed bans on interracial marriage—has resonated to the present as their declaration of independence.
The Lovings’ story began in June 1958 when they were married in Washington, DC. Richard Perry Loving and Mildred Delores Jeter of Central Point, Virginia crossed into the District to evade their state’s Racial Integrity Act, a law that defined the marriage of a white man and African American woman as a felony. Five weeks later on July 11, the newly-married couple was rousted from their bed by the Caroline County, Virginia sheriff and two deputies and arrested for violating the 1924 law. In a plea agreement, they pleaded guilty in return for a one-year suspended jail sentence and an agreement not to return to the state together for twenty-five years.
The couple moved to Washington, started a family, and struggled to make ends meet. Eventually the isolation from family and friends proved too much. In 1963 Mildred Loving contacted the American Civil Liberties Union which agreed to take the case. Eventually Loving v. Virginia was argued before the Supreme Court of the United States on April 10, 1967. Chief Justice Earl Warren delivered the opinion of the Court on June 12. Warren put the question succinctly: did the “statutory scheme adopted by the State of Virginia to prevent marriages between persons solely on the basis of racial classifications” violate the “Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment?” The Court concluded that the Virginia law directly contradicted the “central meaning” of those constitutional safeguards and was therefore unconstitutional.
The Lovings were always quick to note that while they were glad their case proved so helpful to so many people their main concern was the welfare of their own family. “We are doing it for us,” Richard Loving told an interviewer in 1966. But the Loving decision eventually impacted millions.
So-called “anti-miscegenation laws” were one of the more tenacious vestiges of Jim Crow. The last state to strike anti-miscegenation statutes from its organic law was Alabama which waited until 2000 to do so. In the decades since the ruling, there has been a marked increase in mixed race marriages and by the 1990s we were in the midst of an interracial baby-boom. Also of particular importance to the growth of the mixed-race population was the Immigration Act of 1965 that eliminated many of the racist immigration restrictions from earlier legislation and contributed to the “browning of America.” Census 2000, the first to allow Americans to check more than one box for racial identity, counted 7.3 million people, about 3 percent of the population, as interracial. The most striking fact of all from the data is that 41 percent of that mixed race population was under the age of eighteen…
Director and Producer: Nancy Buirski Producer and Editor: Elisabeth Haviland James
Richard and Mildred Loving, Circa 1967
This documentary feature film, currently in production, tells the dramatic story of Mildred and Richard Loving, a black and Cherokee woman married to a white man (against the law in 1958-Virginia) and of their famous anti-miscegenation case argued in the Supreme Court in 1967. Thrown into rat-infested jails and exiled from their hometown for 25 years, the Lovings fought back and changed history. Using rare archival footage, home movies, photographs, interviews with witnesses, friends and family, and poetic visual and narrative sequences, the documentary will build a complex portrait of the couple at the heart of marriage equality in this country. It will also do something rare in storytelling—look at the story itself as it has mutated over the years, with the understanding that history is only as reliable as those who tell it.
Both of the attorneys, Bernie Cohen and Philip Hirschkop, who represented Mildred and Richard Loving in the 1967 Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia have agreed to participate in the project as consultants and as on-camera interviews. In addition, Peggy Loving Fortune and Sidney Jeter Loving, the surviving children of Mildred and Richard have agreed to be on-camera participants. This is notable because, like their mother, they have guarded their privacy and avoided media attention for most of their lives.
For more information, click here. To donate to the project, click here.
Judge Leon Bazile looked down at Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter Loving as they stood before him in 1959 in the Caroline County, Va. courtroom. “Almighty God,” he intoned, “created the races white, black, yellow, Malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.” With that, Judge Bazile sentenced the newlywed Lovings to one year in jail. Their crime: Mildred is part Negro, part Indian, and Richard is white.
In Virginia, as in 15 other states (the number was once as high as 30), there is a law barring white and colored persons from intermarrying. The Lovings could have avoided the sentence simply by leaving the state, but they eventually decided to fight the Virginia antimiscegenation law “on the ground that it was repugnant to the 14th Amendment.” In rare unanimity, all nine Supreme Court Justices agreed last week that it was repugnant indeed.
Arica L. Coleman, Assistant Professor of Black American Studies Unverisity of Delaware
The article reexamines the Loving V. Virginia case by focusing on their tri-racial community of Central Point, Virginia and Mildred Loving‘s self identity as an Indian woman. Loving’s self identity was informed by the twentieth-century politics of racial purity, which resulted in a community-wide denial of African ancestry. I argue that Mildred Loving’s marriage to a white man was not an affirmation of Black/white intermarriage, but rather adhered to the code of racial purity as defined by the state of Virginia, a legacy which continues in the post-Civil Rights era.
The 1967 case of Loving v. Virginia, in which the Supreme Court declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional, has garnered far less scholarly attention than its 1954 predecessor. Brown v. the Board of Education, which overturned legalized segregation. What little appeared in the way of scholarship has focused on analysis the history the history of anti-miscegenation legislation, the events which led up to the case presentation before the nine justices, the legal precedents regarding the arguments presented before the court, and the unanimous decision delivered by Chief Justice Earl Warren. Until recently with the exception of an article which appeared in Ebony magazine several months after the Supreme Court decision, writers have given little attention to the personal lives of the actual plaintiffs now enshrined in American history, as “the couple that rocked the courts.”…
