But who ended up striking down nationwide laws banning interracial marriage.
Mildred Loving, a black woman whose challenge to Virginia's ban on interracial marriage led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling striking down such laws nationwide, has died, her daughter said Monday.
Loving and her white husband, Richard, changed history in 1967 when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld their right to marry. The ruling struck down laws banning racially mixed marriages in at least 17 states. They had married in Washington in 1958, when she was 18. Returning to their Virginia hometown, they were arrested within weeks and convicted on charges of "cohabiting as man and wife, against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth," according to their indictments.
Incredible. Mixing skin colour in a marriage violated peace and dignity, according to the laws less than 50 years ago.
The couple avoided a year in jail by agreeing to a sentence mandating that they immediately leave Virginia. They moved to Washington and launched a legal challenge a few years later.
Richard Loving died in 1975 in a car accident, but he is remembered as well for having the courage and love to stand up to a racist system that considered his lack of prejudice a crime.
Still more to overcome -
Not far from the courthouse where the Lovings fought and won their case 41 years ago, another couple talks about their experiences as a mixed couple. Theirs is a story of achievement mixed with pain as some people still cannot accept such marriages.
"Just a couple of months ago... Bryan got beat up in the Wal-Mart parking lot because he was with me and my sister, and these white men came up to him and they were yelling. The guy ripped off his shirt. He had racial slurs all over him...and they just started going at it," Blazer says.
At least now mixed marriages are legal, thanks to Mildred and Richard Loving.
In a rare interview with The Associated Press last June, Loving said she wasn't trying to change history -- she was just a girl who once fell in love with a boy.
3 comments:
Nice story, though if I go by some of what's been said the nutroots regarding Obama's parents, they must have been "communist/Marxists trying to destroy the social fabric of America."
You're certainly right that the prejudice still exists, on this side of the border as well. I'm sad to say I've seen it quite often, though generally not in the violent sense.
yeah, I've seen it as well, here and in the US when I lived there. Hard to grasp. "Race" was never even a concept I learned until I was fairly old. I had terrific parents. Mixed marriage, but not the same mix as the Lovings.
Seems I made a comment just yesterday at JJ's contemplating that some would wish to bring back the anti-miscegenation laws. She had to look up 'miscegenation'.
I think many, even among those of my middle-age group, forget just how recently these laws were still on the books. 1967 isn't that long ago. To me, anyway.
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