A Marriage That Was a Crime
Richard Loving, a white man, and Mildred Jeter, who was Black and of Native American descent, grew up in Caroline County, Virginia. In 1958 they travelled to Washington, D.C., to marry, because Virginia law did not permit marriages between white and Black residents. They then returned home. Some weeks later, in July 1958, local police entered their house early in the morning and arrested them. Reports describe the couple being found in bed together; the marriage certificate on their wall was not accepted as a defence, since Virginia did not recognise it.
Virginia’s laws on the subject had been tightened in the 1920s by the Racial Integrity Act, which defined race by ancestry and prohibited marriage across the colour line. Leaving the state to marry and returning was itself covered by the statute.
The Sentence and the Exile
The Lovings pleaded guilty in January 1959. The trial judge, Leon Bazile, sentenced each to one year in prison, but suspended the sentence on condition that they leave Virginia and not return together for 25 years. Judge Bazile reportedly wrote that God had placed the races on separate continents and that the arrangement showed no intention for them to mix. The couple moved to Washington.
Life in the capital was hard for them. They were separated from their families, and by the early 1960s Mildred Loving was writing to officials about their situation. In 1963 she wrote to Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who referred her to the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU assigned two young volunteer lawyers, Bernard Cohen and Philip Hirschkop.
Up Through the Courts
The lawyers first sought to set aside the 1959 sentence in the Virginia courts. The state trial judge refused, and the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals upheld the convictions in 1966, relying on earlier precedent, including the argument that the state had a legitimate interest in preserving the integrity of its races. The Lovings appealed to the United States Supreme Court, which agreed to hear the case.
Oral argument took place in April 1967. By a commonly told account, Richard Loving asked Cohen to relay a short message to the justices to the effect that he loved his wife and wanted to be able to live with her in Virginia. The wording is usually quoted in slightly different forms, so it is safest to describe it rather than quote it. Virginia’s argument was that the law applied equally to both races, since whites and Blacks alike were barred from marrying across the line, and that the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment had not intended to remove such bans.
The Decision of 12 June 1967
The Court decided the case on 12 June 1967. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote the opinion, and it was unanimous. The Court rejected the idea that equal punishment of both parties made the law neutral. It found that the statutes were drawn on racial classifications serving the purpose of white supremacy, and that such classifications were suspect under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court also held that the law deprived the Lovings of liberty without due process, because the freedom to marry was a fundamental right.
The ruling dealt directly with an older case, Pace v. Alabama, decided in 1883, which had upheld a similar law on the logic that both races were punished equally. Loving v. Virginia effectively ended that logic. It also built on cases such as Skinner v. Oklahoma, which had described marriage as a basic civil right. At the time, a number of states, reportedly sixteen, still had bans in force. All were invalidated.
Why 1967 Mattered
Interracial marriage was an uncomfortable topic even for supporters of the civil rights movement. Public opinion polling from the period, as generally reported, showed that a large majority of white Americans disapproved of such marriages. The Court did not wait for public opinion to change. The ruling is sometimes seen as a rare case where the law moved ahead of popular attitudes.
The timing also overlapped with popular culture. The film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, released in December 1967, brought the subject to mainstream audiences; the interracial marriage film is discussed elsewhere. The film was made independently of the court case, but it reached cinemas when the law had just changed.
Aftermath
Some state statutes remained on the books even after they were unenforceable. Alabama, the last state to remove such language from its constitution, did so by referendum in 2000. The Lovings returned to Virginia and lived in Caroline County. Richard Loving died in a car accident in 1975. Mildred Loving died in 2008; in her later years she reportedly spoke of the case as being about the freedom to marry whom one chose, and supported the right of same-sex couples to marry.
The case has had a long legal afterlife. It is regularly cited in discussions of the right to marry and was cited in later litigation over same-sex marriage, including the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges. Loving Day is observed each year on 12 June.
A Note on Context
Loving v. Virginia belongs to a year in which the courts, rather than the streets or the legislatures, delivered some of the clearest gains for equality. The appointment of Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court a few weeks later reinforced that impression. But the same summer brought riots in Newark and Detroit, a reminder that legal rights did not by themselves settle questions of housing, work and policing.