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Loving v. Virginia
Loving v. Virginia, is a landmark civil rights decision of the United States Supreme Court,
which invalidated laws prohibiting interracial marriage. The case was brought by Mildred Loving, a woman of color, and Richard Loving,
a white man, who had been sentenced to a year in prison in Virginia for marrying each other.
Their marriage violated the state's anti-miscegenation statute, the Racial Integrity Act of 1924,
which prohibited marriage between people classified as "white" and people classified as "colored".
The Supreme Court's unanimous decision determined that this prohibition was unconstitutional, overruling Pace v. Alabama
and ending all race-based legal restrictions on marriage in the United States. The decision was followed
by an increase in interracial marriages in the U.S., and is remembered annually on Loving Day, June 12. It has been the subject of several songs
and three movies, including the 2016 film Loving. Beginning in 2013, it was cited as precedent in U.S.
federal court decisions holding restrictions on same-sex marriage in the United States unconstitutional,
including in the 2015 Supreme Court decision Obergefell v. Hodges.
Anti-miscegenation laws in the United States
Anti-miscegenation laws in the United States had been in place in certain states since colonial days. Marriage to a slave was never legal.
In the Reconstruction Era in 1865, the Black Codes across the seven states of the lower South made intermarriage illegal.
The new Republican legislatures in six states repealed the restrictive laws. After the Democrats returned to power, the restriction was reimposed.
A major concern was how to draw the line between black and white in a society in which white men had many children with black slave women.
On the one hand, a person's reputation as black or white was usually decisive in practical matters. On the other hand, most laws used a
"one drop of blood" rule, which meant that one black ancestor made a person black in the view of the law. In 1967, 16 states, mainly Southern,
still had anti-miscegenation laws.
Plaintiffs
 [^]  Mildred Delores Loving was the daughter of Musial Jeter and Theoliver Jeter. Mildred's racial identity has been a point of confusion.
She has been noted as self-identifying as Indian-Rappahannock, but was also reported as being of Cherokee, Portuguese,
and African American ancestry. During the trial, it seemed clear that she identified herself as black,
especially as far as her own lawyer was concerned. However, upon her arrest, the police report identifies her as "Indian."
She said in a 2004 interview, "I have no black ancestry. I am Indian-Rappahannock.". A possible contributing factor is that it was seen
at the time of her arrest as advantageous to be "anything, but black."
There was an ingrained history in the state of the denial of African ancestry. Additionally, the frequent racial mixing of Central Point,
where she lived, could have contributed to this idea of fluid racial identity. Mildred was known as a quiet and humble woman. She was born
and raised in the same rural Virginia community as her husband, Richard. Richard Perry Loving was a white man, and the son of Lola Loving
and Twillie Loving. He was a construction worker. The 1830 census marks Lewis Loving, Richard’s paternal ancestor, as having owned seven slaves.
Richard’s grandfather, T.P. Farmer, fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War. Their families both lived in Caroline County, Virginia.
The county adhered to strict Jim Crow segregation laws, but Central Point had been a visible mixed-race community since the 19th century.
Richard’s father worked for one of the wealthiest black men in the county for 25 years. Richard’s closest companions were black,
including those he drag-raced with and Mildred’s older brothers. The couple met in high school and fell in love.
Richard moved into the Jeter household when Mildred became pregnant. After the Supreme Court case, the couple moved back to Central Point,
where Richard built them a house. The couple had three children: Donald, Peggy, and Sidney. Richard Loving died aged 41 in 1975,
when a drunk driver struck his car in Caroline County, Virginia. Mildred Loving lost her right eye in the same accident.
She died of pneumonia on May 2, 2008, in her home in Central Point, aged 68.
Criminal proceedings
At the age of 18, Mildred became pregnant. In June 1958, the couple traveled to Washington, D.C. to marry,
thereby evading Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which made marriage between whites and non-whites a crime. They returned
to the small town of Central Point, Virginia. Based on an anonymous tip, local police raided their home in the early morning hours of July 11, 1958,
hoping to find them having sex, given that interracial sex was then also illegal in Virginia.
When the officers found the Lovings sleeping in their bed, Mildred pointed out their marriage certificate on the bedroom wall.
They were told the certificate was not valid in the Commonwealth. The Lovings were charged under Section 20-58 of the Virginia Code,
which prohibited interracial couples from being married out of state and then returning to Virginia, and Section 20-59,
which classified miscegenation as a felony, punishable by a prison sentence of between one and five years. On January 6, 1959,
the Lovings pled guilty to "cohabiting as man and wife, against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth." They were sentenced
to one year in prison, with the sentence suspended on condition that the couple leave Virginia and not return together for at least 25 years.
After their conviction, the couple moved to the District of Columbia.
Appellate proceedings
In 1964, frustrated by their inability to travel together to visit their families in Virginia, as well as their social isolation
and financial difficulties in Washington, Mildred Loving wrote in protest to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. Kennedy referred her
to the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU assigned volunteer cooperating attorneys Bernard S. Cohen and Philip J. Hirschkop,
who filed a motion on behalf of the Lovings in the Virginia Caroline County Circuit Court, that requested the court to vacate the criminal judgments
and set aside the Lovings' sentences on the grounds that the Virginia miscegenation statutes ran counter
to the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. On October 28, 1964, after waiting almost a year for a response to their motion,
the ACLU attorneys brought a class action suit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.
This prompted the county court judge in the case, Leon M. Bazile, to issue a ruling on the long-pending motion to vacate.
Echoing Johann Friedrich Blumenbach's 18th-century interpretation of race, the local court wrote: On January 22, 1965,
a three-judge district court panel postponed decision on the federal class-action case while the Lovings appealed Judge Bazile's decision on
constitutional grounds to the Virginia Supreme Court. Justice Harry L. Carrico wrote an opinion
for the court upholding the constitutionality of the anti-miscegenation statutes. While he upheld their criminal convictions,
he directed that their sentence be modified. Carrico cited as authority the Virginia Supreme Court's decision in Naim v. Naim
and argued that the Lovings' case was not a violation of the Equal Protection Clause, because both the white
and the non-white spouse were punished equally for the crime of miscegenation, an argument similar to that made
by the United States Supreme Court in 1883 in Pace v. Alabama. The Lovings, still supported by the ACLU, appealed the decision
to the United States Supreme Court, where Virginia was represented by Robert McIlwaine of the state's attorney general's office.
The Lovings did not attend the oral arguments in Washington, but one of their lawyers, Bernard S. Cohen, conveyed the message he had been given
by Richard Loving: "Mr. Cohen, tell the Court I love my wife, and it is just unfair that I can't live with her in Virginia."
Precedents
 [^]  Before Loving v. Virginia, there had been several cases on the subject of interracial sexual relations. Within the state of Virginia, on Oct. 3,
1878, in Kinney v. The Commonwealth, the Supreme Court of Virginia ruled that the marriage legalized in Washington, D.C. between Andrew Kinney,
a black man, and Mahala Miller, a white woman, was “invalid” in Virginia. In the national case of Pace v. Alabama,
the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the conviction of an Alabama couple for interracial sex, affirmed on appeal
by the Alabama Supreme Court, did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment. Interracial marital sex was deemed a felony,
whereas extramarital sex was only a misdemeanor. On appeal,
the United States Supreme Court ruled that the criminalization of interracial sex was not a violation of the equal protection clause, because whites
and non-whites were punished in equal measure for the offense of engaging in interracial sex. The court did not need
to affirm the constitutionality of the ban on interracial marriage that was also part of Alabama's anti-miscegenation law, since the plaintiff, Mr.
Pace, had chosen not to appeal that section of the law. After Pace v. Alabama, the constitutionality of anti-miscegenation laws banning marriage
and sex between whites and non-whites remained unchallenged until the 1920s. In Kirby v. Kirby, Mr. Kirby asked the state of Arizona
for an annulment of his marriage. He charged that his marriage was invalid, because his wife was of "negro" descent,
thus violating the state's anti-miscegenation law. The Arizona Supreme Court judged Mrs. Kirby's race by observing her physical characteristics
and determined that she was of mixed race, therefore granting Mr. Kirby's annulment. In the Monks case,
the Superior Court of San Diego County in 1939 decided to invalidate the marriage of Marie Antoinette and Allan Monks, because she was deemed
to have "one eighth negro blood". The court case involved a legal challenge over the conflicting wills that had been left by the late Allan Monks;
an old one in favor of a friend named Ida Lee, and a newer one in favor of his wife. Lee's lawyers charged that the marriage of the Monkses,
which had taken place in Arizona, was invalid under Arizona state law, because Marie Antoinette was "a Negro" and Alan had been white.
Despite conflicting testimony by various expert witnesses, the judge defined Mrs. Monks' race by relying on the anatomical "expertise"
of a surgeon. The judge ignored the arguments of an anthropologist and a biologist that it was impossible to tell a person's race
from physical characteristics. Monks then challenged the Arizona anti-miscegenation law itself, taking her case to the California Court of Appeals,
Fourth District. Monks' lawyers pointed out that the anti-miscegenation law effectively prohibited Monks as a mixed-race person
from marrying anyone: "As such, she is prohibited from marrying a negro or any descendant of a negro, a Mongolian or an Indian, a Malay or a Hindu,
or any descendants of any of them. Likewise. as a descendant of a negro she is prohibited from marrying a Caucasian
or a descendant of a Caucasian.." The Arizona anti-miscegenation statute thus prohibited Monks from contracting a valid marriage in Arizona,
and was therefore an unconstitutional constraint on her liberty. However, the court dismissed this argument as inapplicable,
because the case presented involved not two mixed-race spouses, but a mixed-race and a white spouse:
"Under the facts presented the appellant does not have the benefit of assailing the validity of the statute." Dismissing Monks' appeal in 1942,
the United States Supreme Court refused to reopen the issue. The turning point came with Perez v. Sharp, also known as Perez v. Lippold. In Perez,
the Supreme Court of California recognized that bans on interracial marriage violated the Fourteenth Amendment of the Federal Constitution.
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