Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,797

This is the grave of Richard and Mildred Loving.

Richard and Mildred Loving were both born in the small town of Central Point, Virginia. Richard was born in 1933 and Mildred in 1939. Segregation was at its peak. But on the ground, Jim Crow could get weird. It wasn’t as uniform as its usually taught or popularly remembered. Central Point was one of those places. It long had a mixed-race community and relationships between the races were at least somewhat tolerated. Virginia had passed a one-drop rule back in 1924, but its enforcement really depended on the locality.

Richard Loving was a working class guy. His father was a construction worker. In fact, his father worked for a Black man, the richest Black man in the area. So even in Jim Crow, yes, a white guy could work for a person of color. Again, a lot of this stuff depended on local arrangements. It was a small town. As Richard later stated, “There’s just a few people that live in this community. A few white and a few colored. And as I grew up, and as they grew up, we all helped one another. It was all, as I say, mixed together to start with and just kept goin’ that way.”

Now, that very much does not mean that Richard being an anti-racist was a given thing. Oh no, not at all. There were lots of small communities in the South that were racially mixed. But it was always in the whites’ interests to at some point identify with white power, whether that was economic or political or through violence. But not all did. That’s important to remember. Not all did. Loving was buddies with Mildred Jeter’s older brothers and they hung out through high school, but again, that wasn’t so uncommon, not when all the power in the relationship belonged to the white. But Richard Loving was just different. He really did reject color difference.

When Mildred was in high school and Richard was hanging around the community in his early 20s, they started dating. By modern law, this would be statutory rape. I will let you all discuss the morality of these laws. She got pregnant at the age of 18. Richard, now directly rejecting any opprobrium he received from other whites, moved in with her and her parents. In 1958, they went to Washington, D.C. to apply for a marriage license. That was legal and they got married.

But Virginia did not recognize interracial marriages. In fact, it was illegal, going back to the Racial Integrity Act of 1924. Some asshole–really someone who must have been a truly terrible human being, but whom will we never likely know the name–called the county sheriff with an anonymous tip that this couple was living together as man and wife. So the sheriff came out–in the middle of the night no less–and arrested Richard and Mildred Loving for violating the Racial Integrity Act. Mildred stated, and there’s no reason to believe she was lying about this, that she had no idea that the marriage was illegal, but that Richard did know that and he had never mentioned it to her. Say what you want about a husband not telling his wife that their marriage was illegal.

The Lovings pled guilty to their “crime,” were sentenced to a year in prison, but were immediately paroled on the condition that they leave Virginia for the next 25 years. They immediately moved back to Washington. But they did not let it go. Among other things, they could not travel together to see their families. They tried to make a go of it in the city. But in 1964, one of their children was hit by car. He was OK (I think), but they decided they were going to move back to Virginia and challenge the law. The nation was changing rapidly at this point and, in what turned out to be an extremely brief period, for the better.

Mildred Loving then wrote to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to intervene in their case. Kennedy or his staff saw the letter and said to contact the American Civil Liberties Union, which she did. The ACLU filed a motion to vacate the sentence against them, arguing that it violated the Fourteenth Amendment, which of course it did. A judge for the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia denied their claim, once again showing that most judges are just political hacks who find ways to rule in favor of their politics. The Lovings appealed. In 1967, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously on behalf of the Lovings. This was an enormous blow to the racists. If anything, they held interracial mingling in any way that could be determined as sexual–from marriage to integrated swimming pools–as the greatest anathema at all. The ruling ended all race-based marriage laws in the United States. It was one of the greatest blows for democracy and justice the Supreme Court has ever decided.

After they won their case, the Lovings lived a quiet life. Tragedy struck in 1975. A drunk driver plowed into the car. Richard died. Mildred lost an eye. Richard was 41 upon his death. Mildred almost entirely stayed out of the spotlight for the rest of her long life, with one exception. In 2007, she made a statement in favor of gay rights and gay marriage. She stated:

“I am still not a political person, but I am proud that Richard’s and my name is on a court case that can help reinforce the love, the commitment, the fairness, and the family that so many people, black or white, young or old, gay or straight, seek in life. I support the freedom to marry for all. That’s what Loving, and loving, are all about.”

That was great moral support for that movement. Mildred Loving died in 2008. She was 68 years old.

I’ve long thought those “Virginia Are for Lovers” license plates should have a “Virginia Is for Loving” option, with a picture or symbol of Richard and Mildred Loving.

I await Clarence Thomas writing the opinion overturning Loving v. Virginia as his last act before leaving the Supreme Court. And I actually wonder how many votes there would be on the Court to overturn Loving today. I’d guess at least 3–Alito, Gorsuch, and, yes, Clarence Thomas.

Richard and Mildred Loving are buried in Saint Stephen’s Baptist Church Cemetery, Central Point, Virginia. I should note that this town is very poorly named. It is central to nothing.

If you would like this series to visit other named people in key Supreme Court cases, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. William Marbury is in Washington, D.C. and Ernesto Miranda is in Mesa, Arizona. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.