This post was sent to me via email but I felt the need to share with others...Racism in this century is still very present in our society....Sad but true.
The whole truth...
3/20/12
Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving entered holy matrimony in June of 1958, an event that was not unusual as better than 70 percent of Americans at the time married---a far cry from the fewer than 30 percent who do so today. What was unusual about their marriage was that it occurred in Virginia, whose state capitol, Richmond, once served as the capitol of the Confederacy and whose state law, specifically Section 20-59 of the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, held in pertinent part that “If any white person intermarry with a colored person, or any colored person intermarry with a white person, he shall be guilty of a felony and shall be punished by confinement in the penitentiary for not less than one nor more than five years.”
Virginia’s 1924 Act was not the first anti-miscegenation act or measure to forbid interracial marriage, as some form of the same existed in many colonies as far back at the 17th Century. The Lovings, cognizant of Virginia’s law, recited their nuptials in Washington, DC but upon returning home to Caroline County, Virginia, they were indicted under the Racial Integrity Act and later convicted and sentenced to one year in prison under the same. The Lovings’ sentence was suspended, however, when they entered a deal to leave Virginia and not return for 25 years. To comply with the deal, the couple moved to Washington DC.
Dissatisfied with their treatment under the law, the Lovings, with the assistance of the American Civil Liberties Union, soon appealed the court’s decision, thus beginning a legal odyssey that eventually ended with the United States Supreme Court’s “Loving vs. Virginia” decision of 1967. During oral argument before the Supreme Court in October of 1967, counsel for the Lovings argued that Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection and Due Process clauses. Counsel for the Commonwelath of Virginia argued that the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution reserved the right to regulate marriage exclusively to the individual states and that since the law punished whites and blacks equally, that the same did not violate the equal protection clause.
Chief Justice Earl Warren, writing for the majority ruling that struck down Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law reasoned that “at the very least, the Equal Protection Clause demands that racial classifications, especially suspect in criminal statutes, be subjected to ‘the most rigid scrutiny’…There can be no doubt that restricting the freedom to marry solely because of racial classifications violates the central meaning of the Equal Protection Clause.” While the Supreme Court’s landmark decision eliminated one of the last vestiges of Jim Crow, many states were slow to implement its dicta with the last, Alabama, finally eliminating its anti-miscegenation law in the year 2000.
As for the Lovings, Richard died in a horrific car accident that blinded his wife, Mildred, in 1975.
