Cohen, lawyer who took on mixed marriage laws, dies
FALLS CHURCH, Va. (AP) — Bernard S. Cohen, who won a landmark case that led to the US 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 v. Virginia ruling, which declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional.
Cohen died Monday of complications from Parkinson’s disease at his home in Fredericksburg, said his son, Bennett Cohen.
Bernard Cohen had a great sense of humor and liked to ride motorcycles and fly 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 then-Attorney General 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 a documentary about the case that aired on HBO in 2012.
The biggest challenge, Cohen always said of the case, was not the Supreme Court argument, but getting the case back in state court so it could be appealed.
After devising a strategy to do so, the judge who sentenced the Lovings roundly rejected the request to set aside the conviction, giving the lawyers a ruling that could be appealed.