Virginia honors 2 challengers of ban on interracial marriage
RICHMOND, Va. — When Richard and Mildred Loving had the audacity to marry, Virginia law officers jailed them.
The state’s highest court later agreed it was right to outlaw their marriage because he was white and she was black.
Now, half a century after the Lovings won a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling that legalized interracial marriage nationwide, the couple has been honored with a historical marker outside the old Virginia Supreme Court building where they suffered a legal defeat.
Courage celebrated
“We honor their courage to stand up for the right to love unconditionally, their strength to endure the struggle against all odds and their tenacity to prove that loving is really what it’s all about,” Claire Guthrie Gastanaga, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia, said Monday during a dedication ceremony.
It fell on the 50th anniversary of the high court decision dismantling Virginia’s anti-interracial marriage law and similar ones in about one-third of the states.
Weeks after the Lovings were married in Washington, D.C., in 1958, sheriff ’s deputies burst into their Virginia home and jailed them for unlawful cohabitation.
“They were convicted of the high crime of loving each other,” Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe said.
The couple agreed to leave Virginia for 25 years to avoid a one-year jail sentence, but after several years in Washington decided they wanted to come home. Mildred wrote to then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and was referred to the ACLU, which took on the case.
The marker stands outside the former Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals, which ruled against the Lovings. In the Virginia Supreme Court’s 1966 opinion, Chief Justice Harry Carrico cited a previous case upholding the state’s prohibition on interracial marriage and said the issue should be left to lawmakers. But in the unanimous 1967 U.S. Supreme Court opinion, Chief Justice Earl Warren said the state’s argument — that the policy was necessary to preserve racial integrity — was “obviously an endorsement of the doctrine of White Supremacy.”
Warren’s opinion
“Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State,” Warren wrote.
Mildred Loving died at her home in rural Milford in 2008. Her husband was killed by a drunken driver in 1975.