Loving Day: A Step Towards Inclusiveness in our Not So Distant Past

Every year on June 12, Loving Day is celebrated by interracial couples around the country. On this date in 1967, the Supreme Court of the United States made their ruling in the case of Loving v. Virginia. In this ruling, they declared that banning couples from marriage on the grounds of their race is unconstitutional, therefore eliminating all anti-miscegenation laws across the nation that had previously denied interracial couples the right to marriage.

Loving in the case of Loving v. Virginia refers to the Lovings, Richard Loving and his wife, the former Mildred Jeter. Richard, a white man, and Mildred, a black woman, wanted to get married. However, they could not do so at the time in Virginia due to anti-miscegenation laws in place. Because of this, Richard took Mildred to Washington D.C., where such miscegenation laws were not in place, and they were legally married.

One night a short time after their marriage, while the Lovings slept in their bed, police officers broke into their room and arrested both of them for being in violation of the law. Facing a year in prison, they pleaded guilty and accepted a plea deal that allowed them to avoid jail time, but forced them to leave Virginia for 25 years. The Lovings would eventually settle in Washington D.C.

In 1964, missing their family and home back in Virginia, Mrs. Loving wrote to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy for legal assistance. Kennedy sent the case to the American Civil Liberties Union, who took on the case for the Lovings. After losses at both the local and state level, the case was finally brought before the Supreme Court who, in a unanimous 9-0 decision, declared the laws unconstitutional.

Loving Day is very near and dear to me for one simple reason. Courtney, my girlfriend of over four years, is beautiful, witty, kind, and generous. On top of this, she also happens to be black. As a white man myself, the two of us getting married some time in the future would not have been legal in 16 states before the ruling in Loving v. Virginia. The case of Courtney and myself is not unique either. Interracial marriage has seen a steady rise ever since it was made fully legal nationwide, and data from the Pew Research Center in 2017 found that as many as one in six new marriages in the United States are between people of different races.

The most striking aspect of this case is just how recent it was. Throughout the country, there are people that try to make issues of state and federal racial discrimination and segregation seem longer ago than they were. Pictures of Martin Luther King Jr. and his marches, for example, are often shown in black and white, despite the fact that color photos are available, in an attempt to downplay just how recently these events occurred.

At the time that I’m writing this I am 19 years old. When this case was decided in 1967, my grandfather was 37 years old, and my grandmother was 33. Today they are 91 and 87 respectively. By the time this occurred, they had already been married for over a decade and had multiple children. Had they been of differing races and living in one of the aforementioned 16 states, their marriage would not have been allowed, and their children would’ve been considered illegitimate.

Having been born in 1933 and 1939 respectively, it would not be at all unreasonable or all that surprising if Richard or Mildred were still around today despite having since passed. Also, of the two main lawyers that took on the case, one is still alive and the other died just this past October. These events that seem like a distant memory really aren’t that long ago.

In 2016, a movie, simply titled “Loving”, was released to retell the story of Richard and Mildred Loving. The most emotional and impactful scene comes near the end, when the Lovings’ lawyer, Bernard Cohen, played by Nick Kroll, asks Richard, played by Joel Edgerton, if there is a message Loving would like Cohen to deliver to the court. Standing on his front porch and staring past his yard, Loving simply replies “Tell the judge I love my wife.”

This statement is a testament to who Richard Loving was. Mr. Loving was a quiet, humble, hard working family man who just wanted to be left alone. He wasn’t taking the case to the Supreme Court for attention or fame. On the contrary, he often tried to avoid the media attention that came with the case. He just wanted himself, his wife, and their children to be left alone, and he wanted the freedom to openly and proudly love his wife.

Of course, things would work out in the end for the Lovings, and thanks to the ruling in their favor, they were allowed to be married and live in their home state of Virginia, where Richard built Mildred a house just down the road from her childhood home. Tragically, Richard died in a car accident after being struck by a drunk driver in 1975, dying at the age of 41. Mildred, who was also in the car with her husband and lost her right eye in the accident, never remarried and lived in the house her husband built until her death in 2008 at the age of 68.

In 2007, 40 years after the Supreme Court decision, Mildred gave a rare public statement, saying “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.” Mildred granted the Associated Press a rare interview shortly before her death. In this interview, Mildred, who was very humble much like her husband, insisted that she was not a hero and that she never wanted fame. “It wasn’t my doing,” insisted Mildred. “It was God’s work.”

Despite Mildred’s humble insistence of not being a hero, myself and many others think of her and her husband as just that for having gone through all of the adversity thrown their way to allow couples like Courtney and I the opportunity to one day get married. As interracial couples celebrate another Loving Day, don’t forget the couple who went through countless trials and tribulations and suffered many wrongs and injustices to give relationships like mine and those of so many others throughout the nation the right to love one another peacefully, openly, and proudly in every state throughout the country.