In Memory of Mildred Loving

By all accounts Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving were madly in love. They had grown up near each other and fallen in love at an early age. First comes love, then comes marriage, so the saying goes, and that's what followed for them. Nothing particularly unusual about that--just an old-fashioned love story. Except that their union was illegal.

Until 1967, the Commonwealth of Virginia had the audacity to criminalize interracial marriages. The so-called Racial Integrity Act made it a felony for blacks and whites to marry, as Mildred and Richard discovered. Mildred, black, and Richard, white, had married in Washington D.C., but returned to Virginia, and the Commonwealth just wasn't going to have any of that race mixing. Police officers invaded the Lovings' home in the dead of night and upon finding them in bed, arrested and convicted them. They were sentenced to 1 year in prison, suspended, if they would leave the Commonwealth. The U. S. Supreme Court overturned their convictions, finding the statute unconstitutional.

The Virginia miscegenation statute had been on the books since 1924. The trial judge that convicted the Lovings 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."

The Commonwealth of Virginia argued before the Supreme Court that the original intent of the framers of the 14th amendment was that its provisions did not apply to interracial marriage. Original intent. The Commonwealth also relied on another familiar argument: states' rights, i.e. marriage is a matter to be determined within the realm of a state's police power.

If there is ever a time one doubts the importance of the Supreme Court, it is cases like Loving that should remind that person of the important role the Court plays in checking the power of the State. How different this country would have been had Virginia and the other Southern states had their way.

Mildred and Richard didn't set out to make history or even to make new law. They just wanted to be married and to live in the community in which they had grown up. That's not much to ask.Mildred died several days ago. Richard has been dead since 1975, killed in a car accident caused by a drunk driver.