Not all that long ago, a construction worker named Richard Loving fell in love with a girl named Mildred Jeter of African and Indian descent. Mr. Loving made an honest woman of her and they moved to Virginia. Except Mr. Loving was white, and mixed marriages were a crime. They were indicted by a grand jury and each sentenced to a year in prison for being married (yes that’s right—a year in jail for being married), or in the alternative agree to move out of the state.
The criminal statute that they violated said:
Punishment for marriage. If any white person intermarry with a colored person, or any colored person intermarry with a white person, he shall be guilty of a felony and shall be punished by confinement in the penitentiary for not less than one nor more than five years.
From the trial court’s opinion:
Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.
It wasn’t until the highest court in the land ruled in their favor that interracial marriage was decriminalized and antimiscegenation laws overturned. From The Daily Perspective (http://www. DailyPerspective.com), on this date:
1967: Interracial marriages declared constitutional
"The Supreme Court today barred Virginia - and by implication other states - from making interracial marriage a crime," reported the Indiana Evening Gazette on June 12, 1967. "Chief Justice Earl Warren, speaking for a unanimous court, said 'the freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.'"
The famous opinion in Loving v. Virginia is found here. http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/loving.html.
How quickly we’ve come along, folks. We think nothing today of “interracial marriage,” though the fact that some people were turned away from the marriage license office only two years before I was born gives me pause to consider. My sister Michelle married a fellow of Puerto Rican descent. My sister Jamie eloped with a member of the Ojibway tribe. I was married (for a while) to a card-carrying member of the Lumbee tribe. Aunt Vicki married a black man, and so did my college roommate. Our lives would be much different if our county clerks and courts sat in judgment of who should marry whom.
Today, June 12, has been declared Loving Day. The official website for the organization behind it includes all kinds of mushy stories of love affairs that were curiously not all that long ago a criminal offense.
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