The Case for Loving: The Supreme Court Legalized Interracial Marriage Just 50 Years Ago

Interracial marriage was banned in nearly a third of all states up until 50 years ago.

That changed overnight following the Supreme Court's June 1967 ruling in  Loving v. Virginia, a landmark case concerning  an interracial married couple living in Virginia, one of the many mostly southern states that still enforced anti-miscegenation laws. (Virginia, it turns out, hasn't always been for lovers.)

In its unanimous decision, the Court -- led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, a former California governor -- ruled that anti-miscegenation laws violated the Constitution's Equal Protection Clause. The court ruled along similar lines in 2015, when it moved to legalize same-sex marriage nationwide.

The plaintiffs

In 1958, Virginia residents Mildred Jeter, a black woman, and Richard Loving, a white man, crossed into Washington, D.C. to get legally married . Soon after returning to Virginia, police raided their home in the middle of the night, arresting the couple on felony charges for breaking the state’s anti-miscegenation law, known as the Racial Integrity Act.

The two pleaded guilty in state court in January 1959 and were  sentenced to a year in prison unless they agreed to  leave the state for 25 years. In explaining his verdict, trial judge Leon Bazile wrote:

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 marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.

The Loving's moved to Washington, D.C., where their marriage was legally recognized. A bricklayer and homemaker, the couple had little intention of becoming activists, but wanted the option of returning to Virginia.

In 1964, as Congress debated passage of the Civil Rights Act, Mildred wrote to Attorney General Robert Kennedy to see if the pending law could help them. She was referred to the American Civil Liberties Union, who filed suit in federal court against the state of Virginia. Three years later, after several appeals, the case reached the Supreme Court.

Anti-miscegenation laws

Nearly every state in the country has had an anti-miscegenation law on the book at some point in its history. By the end of World War II, roughly 40 states still had active statues, including California.

The California Supreme Court  in 1948 overturned the state’s longstanding anti-miscegenation statute. Throughout the 1950s, numerous states followed California’s lead, and by the time of the Loving case, there were 16 holdouts, located almost entirely in the South.

The High Court's Ruling

The Court unanimously overturned Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law, rejecting the state's defense that the statute applied to blacks and whites equally. The court ruled that drawing distinctions based on race were generally "odious to a free people" and should therefore be subject to "the most rigid scrutiny" under the Equal Protection Clause. The Virginia law, the Court stated, had no legitimate purpose except blatant racial discrimination as “measures designed to maintain white supremacy.”

Writing for the court, Chief Justice Warren explained:

Marriage is one of the "basic civil rights of man," fundamental to our very existence and survival. ... To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law.

The decision overturned all state laws prohibiting interracial marriage. Several states, however, maintained their anti-miscegenation statutes as a symbolic measures, though no longer legally enforceable.

In 2000,  Alabama became the last state to officially remove its anti-miscegenation provision from the state constitution, the result of a ballot measure that only passed by a 60 percent margin (more than 525,000 Alabamans people voted to keep it in place).

In 2007, a year before her death,  Mildred Loving reflected on the landmark decision that changed her life:

I believe all Americans, no matter their race, no matter their sex, no matter their sexual orientation, should have that same freedom to marry... I am still not a political person, but 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. I support the freedom to marry for all. That’s what Loving, and loving, are all about.