Attorney won landmark case
Bernard S. Cohen, who successfully fought laws against interracial marriage and became a lawmaker, was 86.
Bernard S. Cohen, who won a landmark case that led to the U. S. Supreme Court’s rejection of laws forbidding interracial marriage and later went on to a successful political career as a state legislator, has died. He was 86.
Cohen and legal colleague Phil Hirschkop represented Richard and Mildred Loving, a white man and Black woman who were convicted in Virginia in 1959 of illegally cohabiting as man and wife and ordered to leave the state for 25 years.
Cohen and Hirschkop represented the Lovings as they sought to have their conviction overturned. It resulted in the Supreme Court’s unanimous 1967 Loving vs. Virginia ruling, which declared anti- miscegenation laws unconstitutional.
Cohen died Monday of complications from Parkinson’s disease at his home in Fredericksburg, Va., his son, Bennett Cohen, said.
Bernard Cohen had a great sense of humor and liked to ride motorcycles and f ly planes, his son said.
“He was a bit of a risk taker, and I guess that’s in line with the risks he took in his younger professional life,” Bennett Cohen said.
Bernard Cohen and Hirschkop were ACLU volunteer attorneys only a few years out of law school when they took on the case. Mildred Loving was referred to the ACLU by Atty. Gen. Robert Kennedy, to whom she had written seeking assistance.
“We would pinch ourselves and say, ‘ Do we realize what we’re doing?’ We’re handling one of the most important constitutional law cases ever to come before the court,” Cohen said in an HBO documentary.
After the landmark case, Cohen continued a legal career and veered into politics. He was elected to the House of Delegates in Virginia in 1979, representing the Alexandria area and serving eight terms.
During a 16- year career in the state House of Delegates, Cohen ran as “an unabashed liberal” and reveled in introducing controversial legislation. In 1983, he sponsored a resolution in favor of a nuclear freeze that won passage in the House but stalled in the Senate after a Reagan administration official testified against it.
He successfully advocated legislation banning smoking in public places in an era when the tobacco industry was a political powerhouse in Richmond.
Brian Moran, who succeeded Cohen in the legislature and is now Virginia’s secretary of public safety and homeland security, said Cohen retired in 1995 because he had grown weary of campaigning — arthritis made shaking hands painful, and he’d come to loathe door- knocking after getting attacked by a dog.
The Loving case had a resurgence in public interest in the last decade. People saw parallels between the case and the debate over same- sex marriages.
Bennett Cohen noted that on Monday, vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris talked about the Loving case during the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Amy Coney Barrett.