At the time Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter married, nearly half of U.S. states had anti-miscegenation laws on the books. Mildred was of black and Cherokee descent and Richard was a white man. In their home state of Virginia, interracial marriage was a felony, so when the couple returned to Virginia after getting married in Washington, D.C., they were convicted of violating the Virginia law and sentenced to one year in jail. They agreed to leave the state in lieu of serving their sentences, but only under the condition that they would never again enter the state together.

Not welcome back in their hometown, they lived in Washington, D.C.. Because they were homesick and struggled to make ends meet, Mildred wrote a letter to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to see if they could pursue legal remedies. He referred them to the American Civil Liberties Union. ACLU attorney Bernard Cohen filed a motion to have the original sentence vacated but Judge Don Bazile refused, stating that “God did not intend for the races to mix.” After the Virginia Supreme Court also refused to vacate the Lovings’ sentence, Cohen and fellow ACLU attorney Philip J. Hirschkop submitted the case to the United State Supreme Court. Here is what Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote:

Marriage is one of the basic civil rights of man, fundamental to our very existence and survival.

To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law.

Anti-miscegenation laws were declared unconstitutional in a unanimous decision on June 12, 1967. I find it interesting that Alabama was the last state to repeal its anti-miscegenation law. It didn’t get around to doing so until 2000. Mr. Richard Loving died in a car accident in 1975 and Mrs. Mildred Loving died in 2008 at the age of 68. They had a daughter and two sons.

And after? Here are some resources:

• About 12% of marriages were interracial in 2013; fewer than 1% were in 1970
• Loving Day is gaining momentum as a day of observance and reflection
• Photographer Grey Villet photographed the Lovings in 1965 for LIFE magazine “The Loving Story” The International Center of Photography exhibited the work, which was also featured in this 2012 London Daily Mail story
• “Mr. and Mrs. Loving” is a 1996 made-for-tv movie based on the case
• HBO produced a 2011 documentary called “The Loving Story”
• Text of the original opinion Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967)
• “Loving” is a Focus Features film scheduled for release in November 2016

Photo by Adika Suhari from Unsplash