Mixed Race Studies

“We Were Married on the Second Day of June, and the Police Came After Us the 14th of July.”

The Washingtonian
2016-11-02

Hillary Kelly, Design & Style Editor

Richard and Mildred Loving. Photograph by Grey Villet.

An oral history, nearly 50 years later, of the landmark Virginia case that legalized interracial marriage—and is the subject of a talked-about movie out this month.

In June 1958, Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving drove from their home in Central Point, Virginia, to Washington, DC, to be married. Twenty-four states, including Virginia, still outlawed interracial marriage at the time. Mildred was part Native American and part African-American; Richard was white. Their union would eventually result in their banishment from the state and a nine-year legal battle.

On November 4, almost 50 years after the Supreme Court’s 1967 decision that the Lovings’ marriage was valid—and that marriage is a universal right—Hollywood is set to release Loving, already on Oscar lists. As director Jeff Nichols explained when asked why he took on the project, “We have very painful wounds in this country, and they need to be brought out into the light. And it’s gonna be an awkward, uncomfortable, painful conversation that’s going to continue for a while.”

The movie focuses on Mildred and Richard’s romance. We looked behind the scenes of the struggle itself, talking to insiders including the couple’s attorneys—then just out of law school—to revisit the case. One remarkable aspect: Unlike other civil-rights champions of their era, the Lovings never set out to change the course of history. “What happened, we real­ly didn’t intend for it to happen,” Mildred said in 1992. “What we wanted, we wanted to come home.”

This is the story of how a quiet couple from rural Virginia brought about marriage equality for themselves, and for all…

Read the entire article here.

I find it quite ironic—and perhaps a bit amusing—that after all of the debate surrounding multiracial identity and the United States Census, the most famous son of an interracial couple and the daughter of the most famous interracial couple, checked only one racial identity on their census form.  It would appear that the heralding of an era of multiraciality via Loving v. Virginia and an era of post-raciality via the election of President Obama leaves much to ponder.  The truth is that our rose-colored view of a landmark court case and a landmark election tends to obscure the fact that America has been multiracial since its inception.

Steven F. Riley. Commenting (02/13/2012) on the singular racial census choice of President Barack Obama and Peggy Loving Fortune (daughter of Richard Mildred Loving) in Carol Morello’s article “Virginia’s Caroline County, ‘Symbolic of Main Street USA’,” The Washington Post, February 10, 2012. http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginias-caroline-county-symbolic-of-main-street-usa/2012/01/26/gIQAKH0z2Q_story.html.

Virginia’s Caroline County, ‘Symbolic of Main Street USA’

The Washington Post
2012-02-10

Carol Morello

Bowling Green, Va. — Only a few easily overlooked markers note the importance of Mildred and Richard Loving in Caroline County, where five decades ago the sheriff rousted the white man and his black bride from their bed and carted them off to jail.

A small brass plaque in the county courthouse credits their landmark 1967 U.S. Supreme Court case, Loving v. Virginia, with overturning laws prohibiting interracial marriage. Their names are engraved on a granite obelisk, at the end of a list of prominent local African Americans. The county Web site devotes a page to their case.

Yet their legacy is everywhere in the small Tidewater towns and family farms that make up Caroline County, where a soaring number of people identify themselves as multiracial.

In the 2010 Census, 3 percent of Caroline County’s 28,500 residents were counted as of two or more races. Most are younger than 20. The phenomenon is both old and new.

Historical records show multiracial children in the county going back to slave-holding Colonial times. Today, their increasing ranks are part of a national trend that is changing the way people think and talk about race.

…Even in 1958, Caroline County was an unlikely place for an interracial couple to be arrested. An area known as Central Point had so many multiracial residents of white, black and Native American heritage that during segregation, their children all attended the county’s all-black high school. A major feature of Central Point is Passing Road — a name attributed in local lore to the many residents who could “pass” as white. Elderly residents of Central Point say they recall other interracial couples who had married out of state and lived quietly in the area….

…It’s not known how Mildred Loving, with her black and Native American heritage, identified herself in the 2000 Census. She died in 2008, 33 years after her husband died in a car crash. But in the 2010 Census, their daughter decided to check only one box when faced, like so many millions of other Americans, with boiling down a complex ancestry on a bureaucratic form.

“Native American,” said Peggy Loving Fortune, who is 52. “Just Native American.”…

Read the entire article here.

Film retells Lovings’ love story

The Free Lance-Star
Fredericksburg, Virginia
2012-02-06

Jonas Beals

Mildred and Richard Loving were probably the last people you would expect to make legal history, but in 1967 they won a U.S. Supreme Court case that nullified laws against interracial marriage in Virginia and the 15 other states that still banned miscegenation. And it happened in Caroline County.

Their story has become legend in certain legal and civil rights circles, but their historic ordeal is less well known to younger generations and people in other areas of the country. That’s about to change.

HBO will première “The Loving Story” on Valentine’s Day—Feb. 14.

The producers have been screening the film across the country, and on Saturday they brought it home. Friends, family and admirers packed the auditorium of the Caroline County Community Services Center. The screening ended with a standing ovation.

The documentary, directed by Nancy Buirski, is mostly made up of black-and-white footage shot by Hope Ryden in 1965 and black-and-white photos taken by Life magazine photographer Grey Villet, also in 1965…

Read the entire article here.

‘The Loving Story’ to premiere in Caroline County

The Free Lance-Star
Fredericksburg, Virginia
2012-02-04

Jonas Beals

Caroline County will get the red-carpet treatment Saturday evening.

HBO, Comcast and the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia are hosting an invitation-only screening of the new HBO documentary “The Loving Story” at the Caroline County Community Services Center.

The film tells the story of Mildred and Richard Loving, an interracial couple from Caroline County who married in 1958, only to be arrested and convicted of violating Virginia’s anti-miscegenation laws. Their case eventually made it to the U.S. Supreme Court, where their victory ended laws against interracial marriage across the country…

Read the entire article here.