Loving Vs Virginia Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, 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.    -- Virginia Judge Leon Bazile, 1965 In 1958, Richard and Mildred Loving drove from their small Virginia hometown to Washington, D.C. and got married. Virginia's Racial Integrity Act made it impossible for them to marry in Virginia, but after the short ceremony they returned home to Caroline County. Several weeks later, they were in bed when the county sheriff and two deputies, acting on an anonymous tip, burst into their bedroom and shined flashlights in their eyes. A threatening voice demanded, “Who is this woman you’re sleeping with?” The officers were hoping to of find them in the act of sex which would be an additional crime. Mrs. Loving had pointed to a marriage certificate on the wall in their bedroom; rather than defending them, it became the evidence the police needed for a criminal charge, because it proved they had been married in another state. Specifically, they were charged under Section 20-58 of the Virginia Code, which prohibited interracial couples from being married out of state and then returning to Virginia. The judge suspended their sentence on the condition that the Lovings would leave Virginia and not return for 25 years. In 1963, the Lovings, who had moved to Washington, D.C, decided to appeal this judgment. The Lovings then took their case to the Supreme Court of Virginia, which invalidated the original sentence but upheld the state's Racial Integrity Act. Finally, the Lovings turned to the U.S Supreme Court. The court, which had previously avoided taking miscegenation cases, agreed to hear an appeal. In 1967, 84 years after the 1883 Pace v. Alabama allowed laws against interracial marriage, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Loving v. Virginia that:
Marriage is one of the 'basic civil rights of man,' fundamental to our very existence and survival.... To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law. In 1967, 17 Southern states (all the former slave states plus Oklahoma) still enforced laws prohibiting marriage between whites and people of color. Some states had laws concerning marriage between many different races. Many western states laws concerned marriage between whites, Filipinos, Indians, Asians, and Native Americans. In Arizona, if you followed the law strictly, a person of mixed racial heritage could not legally marry anyone! Maryland repealed its law in response to the start of the proceedings at the Supreme Court. After the ruling of the Supreme Court, the remaining laws were no longer in effect. Nonetheless, it took South Carolina until 1998 and Alabama until 2000 to officially amend their states' constitutions to remove language prohibiting miscegenation. In the respective referendums, 62% of voters in South Carolina and 59% of voters in Alabama voted to remove these laws. In 2009, Keith Bardwell, a justice of the peace in Robert, Louisiana, refused to officiate a civil wedding for an interracial couple. A nearby justice of the peace, on Bardwell's referral, officiated the wedding; the interracial couple sued Keith Bardwell in federal court. Bardwell was forced to resign soon after. Questions 1. Why did Richard and Mildred Loving have to go to Washington DC to get married? 2. How did their marriage certificate actually help the police’s case? 3. What was the judge’s sentence in their case?
4. What was the basis for the Supreme Court’s decision in 1967? 5. Why do you think laws concerning marriage of Asians and Indians existed more in Western states? 6. How could it be in Arizona that a mixed race person could not marry anyone? 7. What was the last state to remove anti-miscegenation laws? 8. Do you think there is still apprehension about interracial marriage in America or not? Explain your answer.