Lovings V. Virginia - 1967

Loving vs. Virginia-1967

Jessica Simmons

Government p. 2

Frye

Rosa Parks, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and W.E.B. Du Bois all worked tirelessly for African American Civil Rights in the 1950s. They went through hardships, death threats, and even assassination. There is not a single student that can't recite at least a few lines of the famous "I Have a Dream" speech, but all of their efforts were used by an important court case of 1967. This case, which seems ridiculous to a modern day person, banned interracial marriage in the state of Virginia and ignored Civil Rights. Even after one of the greatest movements in American history, discrimination was still being widely practiced around the country.

Discrimination, which included horrific and disgusting lynching, beatings, and fire-bombing, also disguised itself in more simple forms. Colored kids were kept out of white schools until about the middle of the fifties, and some people, both whites and blacks, still refused to be anywhere near someone of another color/race. Discrimination took on yet another front in the late fifties, when a couple was brought before a court just because they were not the same color. Eventually they took their case to the Supreme Court and fought for their rights.

In June of 1958, two residents of Virginia, Mildred Jeter, a black woman, and Richard Loving, a white male, were married in the District of Columbia. They returned to Virginia shortly after their marriage to start a life together, but their plans were stopped by midnight arrests. In the middle of the night, a sheriff and two officers barged into the Loving residence and demanded that the couple go with them (Lively, 1999). Richard spent the night in jail, while Mildred spent four nights in a jail cell, while carrying the couple's first child.

A grand jury of the Circuit Court of Caroline County charged the Lovings with disobeying the ban Virginia legislations placed on interracial marriage (Johnson, 2001). They pleaded guilty and were sentenced to a year in jail. However, the judge decided to suspend the case for twenty-five years if the Lovings left Virginia and didn't return together for twenty-five years. He stated, "Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And, but for the interference with his arrangement, there would be no cause for such marriage. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix" (Warren, 1967).

Interracial relationships were incredibly dangerous due to the high level of bigotry and discrimination that still lingered in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement. Only three years prior, Emmett Till was brutally murdered by white supremacists simply for whistling at a white woman (Gold, 2008). And although this statement, while completely racist and absurd, was allowed to go uncontested and it was presented as a valid argument in court. The Lovings, who were so in love that they were willing to risk banishment from the state of Virginia, persecution by biased individuals in their community, and prosecution in the eyes of the law, could not understand why such a ruling could be made in a court system. After contemplating the limited options available to them, they decided that they would not allow the judicial system to negate their marriage.

The Lovings stated that the trial violated the Fourteenth Amendment, and pleaded with a state court to throw away the charges. The court upheld the decision, so the couple went to a higher court, the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia. Originally, the Court did not overturn the convictions, basing their verdict on two previous laws regarding people who left the state to evade the law and punishment for interracial marriage (Randall, 1997). A unanimous decision by the U.S. Supreme Court put down Virginia's law, stating that to deny the "fundamental