How Interracial Marriage Bans Ended | Loving v. Virginia

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Corrections:

In episode 23 of Supreme Court Briefs, a woman with darker skin and a man with lighter skin get married and get arrested and kicked out of the state of Virginia. For several years, they fight for their marriage all the way to the Supreme Court.

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Mildred Jeter, a woman of both African American and Native American ancestry, discovers she is pregnant, and Richard Loving, a Caucasian, is the father. The two decide to get married, and they live happily ever after. The end.

Except wait. Nope, in the state of Virginia, interracial marriages are illegal. So Jeter and Loving go up to Washington, D.C., where interracial marriages are legal, tie the knot on June 2, 1958, and return home to live with each other back in Virginia. Well somehow word must got out about the couple, because shortly thereafter, the local sheriff ordered a late night raid of their home.

So yeah, in the middle of the night, police not only burst into their home but also into their bedroom, hoping to catch them having sex, which also was illegal. The Lovings were actually sleeping, and awoke to being arrested for violating Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act, the law that said whites and non-whites could not marry each other.

The Lovings pled guilty, and the judge sentenced them to one year in prison. However, their sentence was suspended as long as they moved out of Virginia and never returned as a married couple for 25 years.

So the Lovings moved up to the same city where they got married, Washington D.C. The Lovings did occasionally sneak back down to Virginia, but for five years they lived in DC and basically hated it. As Mildred and Richard’s family grew in DC, they missed their family back home, and probably the clean country air. In 1964, tired of living as an exile, Mildred wrote Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Kennedy referred her letter to the American Civil Liberties Union, or ACLU, who then reached out to the Lovings.

The ACLU’s two volunteer cooperating attorneys, Bernie Cohen and Philip Hirschkop, filed a motion on behalf of the Lovings to the Virginia Caroline County Circuit Court, requesting it to allow the marriage since denying it broke the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. The County Circuit Court didn’t respond, so Cohen and Hirschkop sued the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. After no luck there, the ACLU helped the Lovings appeal to the Virginia Supreme Court. While the Virginia Supreme Court also upheld the constitutionality of the interracial marriage ban, it did get rid of the sentence banning the Lovings from the state of Virginia.

It’s important to note that during all of this, Mildred and Richard Loving got a lot of national media attention. They absolutely were not looking for all of this attention, but it obviously did help raise awareness of their struggle, especially after Life Magazine came out and took pictures of them.

Anyway, the ACLU pretty much expected all the pushback from the state of Virginia, so they were well prepared to appeal to the Supreme Court. The Lovings decided to stay home on April 10, 1967, when the Court heard oral arguments. By that time, nine years had passed since they got married.

On June 12, 1967, the Court announced it had unanimously sided with the Lovings, overturning their convictions and ruling Virginia’s interracial marriage ban as unconstitutional. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote the opinion, which stated that Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act went against both the Due Process Clause and Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Said Warren: “The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discrimination. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.”