Mildred Loving

Mildred Loving, who was one of the plaintiffs in Loving vs. Virginia, died on May 2nd. The other plaintiff was her husband, Richard, who died in 1975. From Wikipedia:

Mildred Loving (nee Mildred Delores Jeter, a woman of African and Rappahannock Native American descent, 1939 - May 2, 2008)[2][3] and Richard Perry Loving (a white man, October 29, 1933 - June 1975), were residents of the Commonwealth of Virginia who had been married in June 1958 in the District of Columbia, having left Virginia to evade the Racial Integrity Act, a state law banning marriages between any white person and a black person (there was no law banning marriage with other ethnicities as they were not seen to represent a significant enough population to be a problem). Upon their return to Caroline County, Virginia, they were charged with violation of the ban. They were charged under Section 20-58 of the Virginia Code, which prohibited interracial couples [consisting of one white person and one black person] from being married out of state and then returning to Virginia, and Section 20-59, which defined "miscegenation" as a felony punishable by a prison sentence of between one and five years. On January 6, 1959, the Lovings pleaded guilty and were sentenced to one year in prison, with the sentence suspended for 25 years on condition that the couple leave the state of Virginia. The trial judge in the case, Leon Bazile, echoing Johann Friedrich Blumenbach's 18th-century interpretation of race, proclaimed that

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 marriages. The fact that He separated the races shows that He did not intend for the races to mix.

The Lovings moved to the District of Columbia, and on November 6, 1963 they filed a motion in the state trial court to vacate the judgment and set aside the sentence on the grounds that the violated statutes ran counter to the Fourteenth Amendment.

In the Wiki article, it is noted that several church hierarchies--from those which had centralized leadership--came forward to repudiate Bazile's ersatz race theology. Ultimately, the United States Supreme Court unanimously determined that anti-miscegenation laws violated the Fourteenth Amendment.

It would have been interesting to discover what Mrs. Loving thought of Barack Obama, Black Liberation Theology and how times and people have changed. However, she was probably just a regular woman ready to rest.

RIP, ma'am.

(Thanks to Clarence Page)

Comments

[notropis]

The Lovings have held a special place in my list of heroes. By the time I introduced my wife to my relatives, a mere 20 years after the SC decision, and 30 years after the Lovings' marriage, my old grandfather's only question was, "Is she going to become Lutheran, or are you going to become Episcopalian? Because you really should go to the same church." (On the other hand, her father's first words to me were, "I don't like white people." I came to learn later that he didn't much care for black people, either....)

And while people would still warn us that "it won't work" (it eventually didn't, but race had nothing to do with it), or worry about "how the kids would turn out" (darker'n me, lighter'n her, what did they expect???), the whole tenor of the conversation had changed, thanks in no small part to the Lovings, and other couples like them.

I have some older friends who were ethnically like the Lovings, who also got married in 1957 -- they had to move to Minnesota from (I forget where) to do it; they ended up staying in Minnesota, and gave me quite an education about what they had to go through, even up here in "Minnesota Nice." They had followed the Lovings' story quite closely (as you'd imagine), and first introduced me to the whole saga of what I'd assumed was rather ancient history.

Thank God for folks like you, Mildred and Richard, and my friends the Andersons. You deserve a lot more recognition than you usually get.

[baldilocks]

My sister and my brother-in-law had a similar experience when she brought him home. BiL says that the only two people who were nice to him were my departed grandpa--who got him drunk--and my mom. (I wasn't there.) Twenty years and four kids later that has changed dramatically. Everyone loves Mark and he loves us, but he worships my mom especially.

My BiL's older, Texan parents, however, didn't turn a hair.