A Loving Story
Mildred and Richard Loving lived a simple life. They reared three beautiful children, Peggy, Donald, and Sidney. Richard worked as a construction laborer while Mildred tended to their home in rural Caroline County, Virginia. Richard and Mildred shared a passion for drag racing as Mildred often attended races in nearby Sumerduck, Virginia to cheer her husband to victory.
The couple also shared a great love, a great loving affair, although Mildred confessed once that when she first met Richard she was not at all attracted to him. She found him brash and arrogant, as one would suppose teenage girls often feel toward potential suitors full of bravado, and testosterone; however, love won out. A young 18 year-old Mildred (nee Jeter) would eventually take 24 year-old Richard’s hand and name in marriage.
Their beautiful story was a typical American love story that was anything but typical. Mildred and Richard married on June 2, 1958 in the District of Columbia as the law in their native Virginia would not permit them to join in the union of holy matrimony. Mildred was of African and Native-American descent while Richard was a down home white boy with a crew cut hair style and the look of someone who would be taken for being the tormentor, not lover of Mildred and her ilk.
The State of Virginia in 1924 passed what would be known as the Racial Integrity Act. A section of the law, which would have prohibited their union stated:
“No marriage license shall be granted until the clerk or deputy clerk has reasonable assurance that the statements as to color of both man and woman are correct.
If there is reasonable cause to disbelieve that applicants are of pure white race, when that fact is stated, the clerk or deputy clerk shall withhold the granting of the license until satisfactory proof is produced that both applicants are “white persons” as provided for in this act.
The clerk or deputy clerk shall use the same care to assure himself that both applicants are colored, when that fact is claimed.”
Persons thought to be of pure American Indian descent, without the “admixture” of the blood of any other race other than White were considered to be “white” and deemed to be exempt from any prohibition with respect to marriage to a white person. Such an exemption did not apply to Mildred and her Native American blood. The law also forbade any such couple from going outside of the state’s jurisdiction to a more enlightened state (or district in their case) to be married only to return to live as wife and husband.
Within 5 weeks of the Lovings’ marriage and matrimonial bliss, an unceremonious knock came on the door of their home in the middle of the night. Local Sheriff Garnett Brooks and his deputies brought rushing in the reality of law to an interracial couple with the audacity to challenge local mores and fall in love. Arrested for the crime of being in love and loving each other, a racist sheriff quickly rushed the couple off to jail to stand in the judgement of Caroline County and the State of Virginia.
Circuit Court Judge Leon Brazile, a segregationist steeped in the tradition of racial purity and integrity, offered the couple, in a coercive manner under the threat of a one year sentence in the penitentiary, a writ of amnesty. If the couple agreed to leave the state immediately and never return (leaving behind their friends, families, and lives they had built) they would be permitted to live their sinful lives of miscegeny elsewhere.
The Lovings left the state amidst the injustice against them and moved to Washington, D.C. They lived in exile with their children Donald, Peggy, Sydney, each representative of the different shades and hues of Mildred and Richard’s love. Remarkably beautiful children were being raised by even more beautiful parents who loved and respected one another. Their story was a love story that all Americans aspire to but also seemed to be ripped from a Euripides Greek tragedy by the way they were treated as outcasts for the simple crime of falling in love with one another.
Mildred would pen a letter to then Attorney General Robert Kennedy, requesting review of their plea to be able to visit their home state from time to time with the same manner of dignity afforded any citizen of this great nation. She wrote:
1151 Neal Street
N.E. Wash. D.C.
June 20, 1963
Dear Sir:
I am writing to you concerning a problem we have.
5 yrs. Ago my husband and I were married here in the District. We then returned to Va. to live. My husband is White, I am part negro, part indian.
At the time we did not know there was a law in Va. against mixed marriage.
Therefore we were jailed and tried in a little town of Bowling Green.
We were to leave the state to make our home.
The problem is we are not allowed to visit our families. The judge said if we enter the state within the next 30 years, that we would have to spend 1 year in jail.
We know we can’t live there, but we would like to go back once in awhile to visit our families & friends.
We have 3 children and cannot afford an attorney.
We wrote to the Attorney General, he [sic] suggested we get in touch with you for advice.
Please help us if you can. Hope to hear from you real soon.
Yours truly,
Mr. & Mrs. Richard Loving
Mr. Kennedy would forward the letter to the ACLU and a young attorney named Bernard Cohen. Cohen, along with another activist attorney of the day, Philip Hirschkop, would become the champions of equality and fairness as advocates in defense of love. The pair sought to have Judge Bazile overturn his decision, which was not going to happen. Unmoved by the pleas of the Loving attorneys, Judge Bazile doubled down on his ignorance by making the following odious pronouncement:
“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”
His statement was a blessing from above, as not only was it wrought with the fear-mongering and small-minded, racist prevailing attitude that needed to be undone, it gave Cohen and Hirschkop the ammunition they needed to appeal the Loving’s case to the United States Supreme Court. After the State of Virginia’s highest court upheld Bazile’s decision, in most predictable fashion, the Loving’s case made it to Chief Justice Earl Warren’s court.
Loving v. Virginia (1967) would be decided in unanimous fashion, with Chief Justice Warren writing on behalf of the majority:
“the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual, and cannot be infringed by the State.”
The Loving case was so aptly named because it demonstrated how the power of love conquered a wrong-headed, mean-spirited, ignorant law representative of a shameful past. The love of Mildred and Richard was beautifully and poignantly captured on a small, 16mm camera and through the photographs of freelancer Grey Villet that appeared in the May 18, 1965 edition of Life Magazine. These images show that an American family of love, respect, at play, at work or simply sitting down to a meal, is a family that cannot be defined by those trapped in a hate filled past, whose myopic lense only sees race and not beauty.
Mildred and Richard’s story would sadly end tragically in 1975, when a drunk driver plowed into the car they were riding in along with Mildred’s sister Barnett. The crash killed Richard and blinded Mildred in one eye for the remainder of her life. Barnett would receive minor injuries. The loss of her one true love was so profound that, when asked years later if she ever considered remarrying, Mildred pronounced, “I already married the only man I truly loved.” Mildred would join her sweetheart in life in death on May 6, 2008, more than four decades after their name became synonymous with marriage equality.
Although Mildred and Richard never attended the oral arguments before Chief Justice Warren’s court in 1967, Richard, when asked, gave one message for his attorney’s to deliver to the Supreme Court: “Tell the justices that I love my wife.” A loving story that is every bit a truly American loving story.
