Loving v. Virginia was a landmark Supreme Court case in 1967 but it was also the story of Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving. Mildred was a black woman of African and Rappahannock ( Native American ) decent and Richard was a white man. They fell in love and traveled to Washington DC to be wed and return to Virgina to live, however, there were laws that forbade people of different races to marry each other. One such law was the Racial Integrity Act, a law banning marriage between a white person and a non-white person. This law remained true in many states, including Mildred and Richard's home state of Virginia. However, interracial marriage was legal in Washington, DC at that time.
The law in Virginia not only forbade interracial marriage ceremonies, but it also forbade interracial couples from getting married elsewhere and returning to Virginia.
One night, while they were Richard and Mildred were asleep, the newly-married Lovings were awakened by the police in their bedroom.They were arrested and taken to jail for evading the Racial Integrity Act.
The Lovings were sentenced to one year in prison, with the scentence suspended for 25 years on the condition they leave the state of Virginia.
The trial judge in the case, Leon Bazile, echoing Johann Friedrich Blumenbach's 18th-century interpretation of race, proclaimed that
| “ | 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 Lovings left the district of columbia, and on November, 6th 1963 filed a motion on their behalf in the state trial court to vacate the judgement and set aside the sentence on the grounds that the violated statues ran counter to the Fourteenth Amendment.
Loving vs. Virginia.
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