Loving v. Virginia: They Just Wanted to Go Home
Virginia
Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving were married in Washington DC in June of nineteen fifty-eight. She was Black and Rappahannock Native American. He was white. They drove home to Caroline County, Virginia, because that was where they were from, where their families were, where they had always lived. They were arrested in their bedroom before the summer was out.
Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of nineteen twenty-four made it a felony for people of different races to marry. A judge sentenced them to one year in prison, then suspended the sentence on the condition that they leave Virginia and not return together for twenty-five years. The judge offered what he apparently considered a theological clarification: Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay, and red, and he placed them on separate continents. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.
The Lovings moved to Washington. Mildred wrote a letter to Attorney General Robert Kennedy in nineteen sixty-three. Kennedy referred her to the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU took the case. Nine years after their wedding, on June twelfth, nineteen sixty-seven, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in their favor. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote that 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 ruling struck down anti-miscegenation laws in sixteen states.
Mildred and Richard Loving were not civil rights strategists. They did not want to be famous. Mildred gave an interview once where she said: we are not marrying the state. We just want to get married. After the ruling, they went home to Caroline County. Richard Loving died in a car accident in nineteen seventy-five. Mildred Loving lived until two thousand and eight, and when advocates for same-sex marriage asked to invoke the Loving precedent, she gave them her blessing. They are buried here, in the county the state once tried to expel them from.
