Fifty years ago, on June 12, 1967, the United States Supreme Court declared unconstitutional all state laws that prohibited interracial marriage. The case was called Loving v. Virginia. Mildred Jeter (who was black and Native American) and Richard Loving (who was white) were married in 1958 in Washington, D.C. When they returned to their hometown of Richmond, Virginia, they were arrested. They pled guilty to “cohabiting as man and wife, against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth.” To avoid jail, they moved back to Washington.
They wrote to Attorney General Robert Kennedy to start a legal action against their conviction. He referred the case to the American Civil Liberties Union. The original judge, Leon Bazile, who had handed down the conviction, refused to reconsider his earlier decision. He argued,
Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay, and red, and 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 the races to mix.
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Image: Flickr/CC – Kelsey Hughes
