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A few weeks after their June 1958 wedding, Richard and Mildred Loving awoke in the middle of the night to law enforcement officers invading their bedroom with flashlights. Police had come to arrest the couple. What felony had they committed to warrant such action?
“They asked Richard who was that woman he was sleeping with? I say, I’m his wife, and the sheriff said, not here you’re not. And they said, come on, let’s go,” Mildred Loving recalled that night in The Loving Story HBO documentary. Mildred had pointed out their marriage certificate on the bedroom wall, but the officers told her the certificate was not valid in Virginia.
The Lovings committed what Virginia deemed “unlawful cohabitation.” Their marriage violated Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which criminalized marriage between people classified as "white" and "colored" as Mildred was Native American with black and Portuguese ancestry and Richard was white. The penalty for violating this law was one to five years in prison.
After they were arrested, the Lovings pleaded guilty to “cohabiting as man and wife, against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth.” The judge offered them a choice: banishment from the state of Virginia for 25 years or one year in prison. The couple chose to leave Virginia at the time, but after several years missing their hometown and family, the Lovings asked the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to take their case with the encouragement of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.
In the case Loving v. Virginia, the criminal conviction was upheld by the Supreme Court of Virginia. However, the couple appealed their case, going all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court. On June 12, 1967, the Lovings won in a unanimous decision.
Now each June 12th, we celebrate “Loving Day” and the historic ruling which declared Virginia’s law prohibiting mixed-race marriage unconstitutional, ultimately legalizing interracial marriage in every state. This landmark decision would pave the way for Obergefell v. Hodges which upheld the equality of same-sex marriages across the country in 2015.
With its debut platform in 1972, the Libertarian Party was the first political party to endorse gay rights. The 1976 presidential nominee, Roger MacBride, bravely called for marriage equality and a party pamphlet printed that same year demanded the end to anti-gay laws and endorsed full marriage rights.
The Libertarian Party continues to be the country’s fiercest political advocate for all Constitutional rights including equal protection and the right to marriage. The Lancaster County Libertarian Party celebrates every person’s freedom to live and love through Loving Day, Juneteenth, and Pride Month.
When Was Interracial Marriage Illegal?
Anti-miscegenation laws in America had been in place since the colonial period. During the Reconstruction era in 1865, the Black Codes made interracial marriage illegal across seven states of the lower South. Some repeals were made by several state legislatures, however by 1894, restrictions were reimposed. In 1967 when Loving v. Virginia was decided, 16 states mainly in the American South still retained anti-miscegenation laws.
The families of Mildred and Richard both lived in Caroline County, Virginia, which adhered to strict Jim Crow segregation laws, but their town of Central Point had been a visibly mixed-race community since the 19th century. The couple had met in high school and fell in love. Mildred became pregnant, and in June 1958, the couple traveled to Washington, D.C. to marry, thereby evading Virginia's marriage ban. A few weeks after they returned to Central Point, local police raided their home in the early morning hours of July 11, 1958 hoping to find them having sex, given that interracial sex was also illegal in Virginia and would have increased their criminal penalty.
The Lovings Argue for Equality Before the Law
The legal debate hinged on the 14th Amendment of the Constitution: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
The State of Virginia argued before the Court that its law was not a violation of the Equal Protection Clause because the punishment was the same regardless of the offender's race, and thus it "equally burdened" both Caucasians and non-Caucasians. The ACLU argued: "The language [of the 14th Amendment] was broad, the language was sweeping. The language meant to include equal protection for Negroes that was at the very heart of it and that equal protection included the right to marry as any other human being had the right to marry subject to only the same limitations."
The Lovings and their children, just like any other family, had the right to feel protected under the law. The ACLU further expressed: "And that is the right of Richard and Mildred Loving to wake up in the morning or to go to sleep at night knowing that the sheriff will not be knocking on their door or shining a light in their face in the privacy of their bedroom for illicit co-habitation."
Richard’s message was conveyed by the ACLU attorney in oral arguments to the Supreme Court: “tell the Court I love my wife, and it is just unfair that I can't live with her in Virginia.”
Love Wins the Day!
In June 1967, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous 9-0 decision in favor of Richard and Mildred Loving, overturning their criminal convictions and ending all race-based legal restrictions on marriages in the United States.
The Court found that the law violated the Equal Protection Clause because it was based solely on "distinctions drawn according to race" and outlawed conduct— namely, getting married— that was otherwise generally accepted and which citizens were free to do. In addition to these types of laws violating Equal Protection, the Court decided that the freedom to marry is also a fundamental Constitutional right, and held that depriving Americans of it on an arbitrary basis such as race was unconstitutional.
Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote the opinion for the court, stating that marriage is a basic civil right and to deny this right on the basis of color is “directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment” and seizes all citizens’ “liberty without due process of law.”
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Learn more about how you can advocate with the Lancaster County Libertarian Party and defend every person’s inherent freedoms in Nebraska!
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