Saturday, June 12th is Loving Day, a great American holiday. I have written about it before, but feel so strongly about it that I write about it again.
Loving Day is the annual celebration of Loving v. the Commonwealth of Virginia, a 1967 Supreme Court Decision decision that struck down laws in 18 states banning interracial marriages. The day is not named for love, but for a real married couple, Richard and Mildred Jeter Loving, who petitioned for a marriage license in 1958 in Caroline County, Virginia. They were denied, because Mildred was black and Richard was white.
The couple went to Washington, DC, where there were no miscegenation laws, and were married that same year. They returned to Virginia to live, only to be awakened by police officers at 2 am in their own bedroom and arrested for violation of Virginia marriage laws. In court, they were found guilty of the high crime of being married, and avoided a jail sentence when the judge agreed to release them in exchange for a pledge to leave Virginia for the next 25 years.
The Lovings moved to DC, where, despite their legal status, they were harassed repeatedly. Landlords would not allow them to sign leases, and they were victims of racial taunting. After the couple decided they would be happiest if they could return to the state they were legally banished from, Mildred wrote a letter to then Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who forwarded the complaint to the New York chapter of the ACLU.
The ACLU took the case. In court, the Lovings lost every appeal, but in 1967 the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court. In the majority opinion, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote, “Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not to marry, a person of another race resides within the individual and cannot be infringed on by the State.” The decision struck down the VIrginia law, and ended anti-miscegenation laws in the U.S. forever.
After the decision, the Lovings returned to their home in Caroline County. They lived together until Richard’s death in a car accident in 1975. Mildred lived until 2007, and never remarried.
The Lovings’s story is deeply compelling, in no small part because they were such ordinary people. Not civil rights advocates spoiling for a fight, but common citizens who accidentally found that the law prevented them from doing what they wanted to do and eventually found a way to defeat it.
In a larger way, the Loving decision was a bookend to the civil rights era. Laws banning mixed marriages remained on the books, and were enforced, years after Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Civil Rights Act (1964), or the Voting Rights Act (1965). By 1967, separate but equal, Jim Crow laws, and race-based voting restrictions were all consigned to the rubbish heap of history, and yet it was still constitutional for states to prevent two people of different races to marry. Interracial marriage, even in a reform-minded period, was ignored or considered too volatile an issue for even the most vocal civil rights advocates. Instead, we had to rely on the determination of two people most Americans have never heard of to topple that last racial barrier.
The problem with miscegenation, from the racist’s point of view, is that it produces children. Children who are neither white nor black, who do not fall neatly into any definition of race or racial stereotypes. Mixed marriages create families that, in violation of the racist's most dearly held values, are nonetheless happy. Joy without a caste system.
Although only about 7% of U.S. marriages are considered “mixed,” mixed marriages are the most powerful testimony to racial harmony, and a dagger pointed at the racist's heart. Most racists these days use the phrase “racial purity” to disguise their intentions, and with good reason. Two people who can live together, love one another, produce children, and live in happiness are by far the most potent rebuke of racial hatred. To love someone of another skin color with all your heart and soul is to value that person as a human being above any value society tries to assign to him. Every person who has ever done this rejects racism in the most personal way possible.
I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge my own small personal stake in Loving Day. Though I am not married to an African-American, my wife is not of white European descent. In some states before 1967, my own marriage would be illegal.
Now coming up on a decade of what I would call a mixed-cultural marriage, I think about all the joys I have gotten from it (and I hope my wife has too) and marvel that such a relationship could ever be illegal, let alone considered immoral. Every successful marriage has unique characteristics that make it successful, but in my own much of the joy has come from our differences. Through the years I have found that our different backgrounds have forced me to grow in unexpected ways, and brought both of us to places we never thought we would go.
For me, marrying a person very like me (what some people might call a “soulmate”) would be boring. This may may not be true for everyone, but it is true for me.
Happy Loving Day. Even if your marriage is not mixed, or cross-cultural -- even if you are not married at all -- celebrate it anyway. Thanks to the Lovings, you are free to love anyone you want.