The lawyer who fought for marriage equality
Bernard Cohen 1934–2020
In June 1963, Bernard Cohen was volunteering as an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union when he received a heartrending letter. Written by Mildred Loving, a woman of black and Native American heritage, it explained how she and her white husband, Richard, had been exiled from Virginia for breaking the state’s law against mixed-race marriages. Believing Virginia’s law violated the Constitution’s due process and equal protection clauses, Cohen and co-counsel Philip Hirschkop took on the case, arguing Loving v. Virginia all the way to the Supreme Court. In 1967, the justices ruled unanimously in the Lovings’ favor, making interracial marriage legal across the U.S. When the ACLU lawyers called the Lovings to inform them of the win, Cohen later recalled, the couple asked what they should do next. “You just go on living,” Cohen said. “Nobody’s going to bother you anymore over this.”
Born in Brooklyn to Eastern European immigrants, Cohen was only a few years out of law school when he agreed to represent the Lovings, said The New York Times. The couple had been arrested at their home in Caroline County, Va., in 1958, five weeks after marrying in Washington, D.C. The Lovings pleaded guilty to violating the state’s Racial Integrity Act and were sentenced to a year in prison; a judge suspended the sentence on the condition that they “leave the state and not return together for 25 years.” At his first meeting with the Lovings, Cohen explained that the case would likely end up at the Supreme Court, said NPR.org. Richard, Cohen later recalled, “became wide-eyed and his jaw dropped.” The lawyer included a message from Richard in his 1967 argument before the nation’s top justices: “Mr. Cohen, tell the Court I love my wife, and it is just unfair that I can’t live with her in Virginia.”
After the Loving case, Cohen specialized in environmental and employment law and served as an “unabashedly liberal” member of Virginia’s House of Delegates from 1980 until 1996, said The Washington Post. He was delighted when Loving was cited as precedent in Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex marriage. “The right to marry is a constitutionally protected right of liberty,” Cohen said. “I think it’s that easy.”