50 Years of Loving #ACLUTimeMachine
Page Media
It was 50 years ago today that the Supreme Court ruled in Loving v Virginia that the Racial Integrity Act, which banned interracial marriage, was an instrument of white supremacy and violated the Constitution.
The court’s unanimous decision came nearly 10 years after Mildred Jeter, a black and Native American woman, and Richard Loving, a white man, traveled to Washington D.C. because they couldn’t marry in their home state of Virginia. It was 1958 and 24 states had anti-miscegenation laws. Shortly after the couple returned to their home Virginia, the county sheriff and two deputies broke in while they were sleeping and arrested them.
The Lovings were indicted on January 6, 1959, by Judge Leon Bazile, who declared in a disturbing ruling that interracial marriage was against God’s will.
"Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay, and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And, but for the interference with his arrangement, there would be no cause for such marriage. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix."
The judge sentenced the Lovings each to a year in jail but suspended the sentence when they pleaded guilty and agreed to leave the state.
But the couple wasn’t happy living with Mildred's cousin in Washington DC. They missed their home, country life, family, and friends. So Mildred wrote a letter to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. He referred her to the ACLU and then we joined the fight. Although the Virginia courts continued to uphold the constitutionality of the Racial Integrity Act, the case eventually made it to the highest court.
Listen to the oral arguments in Loving v Virginia.
In a unanimous decision on June 12, 1967, the Supreme Court struck down the Racial Integrity Act as a violation of the 14th Amendment’s due process and equal protection clauses.
“Under our Constitution,” wrote Chief Justice Earl Warren, “the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual, and cannot be infringed by the State.
"The fact that Virginia prohibits only interracial marriages involving white persons demonstrates that the racial classifications must stand on their own justification, as measures designed to maintain White Supremacy."
Associate Justice Potter Stewart added: “It is simply not possible for a state law to be valid under our Constitution which makes the criminality of an act depend upon the race of the actor.”
After the ruling, states were unable to enforce laws banning interracial marriage. Shockingly, it still took South Carolina until 1998 and Alabama until 2000 to amend their state constitutions.
Here in California, the anti-miscegenation law was overturned in 1948 in a case decided by the Supreme Court of California. In Perez v Sharp, a Mexican-American woman and a black man were refused a license by the county clerk based on a civil code that said interracial marraiges were illegal. In a 4-3 ruling, the court ruled that ban was unconstitutional.
