[Vision2020] From Where We Have Come

[jeanlivingston]

Please recall the story of Mildred Loving.  She died yesterday.  In
my opinion, this story helps place in context the different
perspectives on race relations that may inform the views of different
generations of Americans.   A short brief that was printed in
today's Lewiston Tribune is copied below, followed by a more in-depth
story.  The last sentence of the longer second story, offering Mrs.
Loving's view of gay marriage (saying it should be allowed), comes
from one who understands more than anyone, the angst of the State
forbidding one to marry someone that you love.


Bruce Livingston

Mildred Loving, matriarch of interracial marriage, dies
By DIONNE WALKER – 23 hours ago 

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Mildred Loving, a black woman whose challenge
to Virginia's ban on interracial marriage led to a landmark Supreme
Court ruling striking down such laws nationwide, has died, her
daughter saidMonday.

Peggy Fortune said Loving, 68, died Friday at her home in rural
Milford. She did not disclose the cause of death.

"I want (people) to remember her as being strong and brave yet humble
— and believed in love," Fortune told The Associated Press.

Loving and her white husband, Richard, changed history in 1967 when
the U.S. Supreme Court upheld their right to marry. The ruling struck
down laws banning racially mixed marriages in at least 17 states.

"There can be no doubt that restricting the freedom to marry solely
because of racial classifications violates the central meaning of the
equal protection clause," the court ruled in a unanimous decision.

Her husband died in 1975. Shy and soft-spoken, Loving shunned
publicity and in a rare interview with The Associated Press last June,
insisted she never wanted to be a hero — just a bride.

"It wasn't my doing," Loving said. "It was God's work."


Mildred Loving, Who Fought Ban on Mixed Marriage, Dies at 86

By DOUGLAS MARTIN Published: May 6, 2008


Mildred Loving, a black woman whose anger over being banished from
Virginia for marrying a white man led to a landmark Supreme Court
ruling overturning state miscegenation laws, died on May 2 at her home
in Central Point, Va. She was 68.  Peggy Fortune, her daughter, said
the cause was pneumonia.





 
Bettmann/Corbis

Mildred and Richard Loving, in 1967, were arrested in Virginia. 





The Supreme Court ruling, in 1967, struck down the last group of
segregation laws to remain on the books — those requiring separation
of the races in marriage. The rulingwas unanimous, its opinion written
by Chief Justice Earl Warren, who in 1954 wrote the court’s opinion
in Brown v. Board of Education, declaring segregated public schools
unconstitutional.

In Loving v. Virginia, Warren wrote that miscegenation laws violated
the Constitution’s equal protection clause. “We have consistently
denied the constitutionality of measures which restrict the rights of
citizens on account of race,” he said.

By their own widely reported accounts, Mrs. Loving and her husband,
Richard, were in bed in their modest house in Central Point in the
early morning of July 11, 1958, five weeks after their wedding, 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?”

Mrs. Loving answered, “I’m his wife.”

Mr. Loving pointed to the couple’s marriage certificate hung on the
bedroomwall. The sheriff responded, “That’s no good here.”

The certificate was from Washington, D.C., and under Virginia law, a
marriage between people of different races performed outside Virginia
was as invalid as one done in Virginia. At the time, it was one of 16
states that barred marriages between races. 

After Mr. Loving spent a night in jail and his wife several more, the
couple pleaded guilty to violating the Virginia law, the Racial
Integrity Act. Under a plea bargain, their one-year prison sentences
were suspended on the condition that they leave Virginia and not
return together or at the same time for 25 years.

Judge Leon M. Bazile, in language Chief Justice Warren would recall,
said that if God had meant for whites and blacks to mix, he would have
not placed them on different continents. Judge Bazile reminded the
defendants that “as long as you live you will be known as a
felon.”

They paid court fees of $36.29 each, moved to Washington and hadthree
children. They returned home occasionally, never together. But times
were tough financially, and the Lovings missed family, friends and
their easy country lifestyle in the rolling Virginia hills.

By 1963, Mrs. Loving could stand the ostracism no longer. Inspired by
the civil rights movement and its march on Washington, she wrote
Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and asked for help. He wrote her
back, and referred her to the American Civil Liberties Union.

The A.C.L.U. took the case. Its lawyers, Bernard S. Cohen and Philip
J.Hirschkop, faced an immediate problem: the Lovings had pleaded
guilty and had no right to appeal. So they asked Judge Bazile to set
aside his original verdict. When he refused, they appealed. The
Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals upheld the lower court, and the case
went to the United States Supreme Court.

Mr. Cohen recounted telling Mr. Loving about various legal theories
applying to the case. Mr. Loving replied, “Mr. Cohen, tell the court
I love my wife, and it is just unfair that I can’t live with her in
Virginia.”

Mildred Delores Jeter’s family had lived in Caroline County, Va.,
for generations, as had the family of Richard Perry Loving. The area
was known for friendly relations between races, even though marriages
were forbidden. Many people were visibly ofmixed race, with Ebony
magazine reporting in 1967 that black “youngsters easily passed for
white in neighboring towns.”

Mildred’s mother was part Rappahannock Indian, and her father was
part Cherokee. She preferred to think of herself as Indian rather than
black.

Mildred and Richard began spending time together when he was a
rugged-looking 17 and she was a skinny 11-year-old known as Bean. He
attended an all-white high school for a year, and she reached 11th
grade at an all-black school.

When Mildred became pregnant at 18, they decided to do what was
elsewhere deemed the right thing and get married. They both said their
initial motive was not to challenge Virginia law. 

“We have thought about other people,” Mr. Loving said in an
interview with Life magazine in 1966, “but we are not doing it just
because somebody had to do it and we wanted to be the ones. We are
doing it for us.”

In his classic study ofsegregation, “An American Dilemma,” Gunnar
Myrdal wrote that “the whole system of segregation and
discrimination is designed to prevent eventual inbreeding of the
races.”

But miscegenation laws struck deeper than other segregation acts, and
the theory behind them leads to chaos in other facets of law. This is
because they make any affected marriage void from its inception. Thus,
all children are illegitimate; spouses have no inheritance rights; and
heirs cannot receive death benefits.

“When any society says that I cannot marry a certain person, that
society has cut off a segment of my freedom,” the Rev. Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr. said in 1958.

Virginia’s law had been on the books since 1662, adopted a year
after Maryland enacted the first such statute.At one time or another,
38 states had miscegenation laws. State and federal courts
consistently upheld the prohibitions, until 1948, when the California
Supreme Court overturned California’s law.

Though the Supreme Court’s 1967 decision in the Loving case struck
down miscegenation laws, Southern states were sometimes slow to change
their constitutions; Alabama became the last state to do so, in 2000.

Mr. Loving died in a car accident in 1975, and the Lovings’ son
Donald died in 2000. In addition to her daughter, Peggy Fortune, who
lives in Milford, Va., Mrs. Loving is survived by her son, Sidney, of
Tappahannock, Va.; eight grandchildren; and 11 great-grandchildren.

Mrs. Loving stopped giving interviews, but last year issued a
statement on the 40th anniversary of the announcement of the Supreme
Court ruling, urging that gay men and lesbians be allowed to marry. 
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