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Loving v. Virginia, , was a case in which the United States Supreme Court declared Virginia's anti-miscegenation statute, the "Racial Integrity Act of 1924", unconstitutional, thereby ending all race-based legal restriction on marriage in the United States.
Facts
The plaintiffs, Mildred Jeter (a black woman) and Richard Perry Loving (a white man), were residents of the Commonwealth of Virginia who had been married in June of 1958 in the District of Columbia, having left Virginia to evade a state law banning marriages between persons of different races. Upon their return to Virginia, they were charged with violation of the ban, pled guilty, and were sentenced to one year in prison, with the sentence suspended for 25 years on condition that the couple 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 moved to the District of Columbia, and in 1963 began a series of lawsuits seeking to overcome their conviction on Fourteenth Amendment grounds, ultimately reaching the Supreme Court.
Decision
The Supreme Court overturned the convictions in a unanimous decision, dismissing the Commonwealth of Virginia's argument that a law forbidding both white and black persons from marrying persons of another race, and providing identical penalties to white and black violators, could not be construed as racially discriminatory. In its decision, the court wrote
- 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 Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.
Despite this ruling, such laws rested unenforced in several states until 2000 when Alabama became the last state to remove its law against mixed-race marriage.
Movie
The story of the Lovings was turned into a movie in 1996 titled Mr. & Mrs. Loving, starring Lela Rochon, Timothy Hutton, and Ruby Dee. The screenplay was written and directed by Richard Friedenberg.
Trivia
Richard Loving died in an automobile accident in 1975.
External links
- Loving et ux. v. Virginia (UMKC School of Law)
- Resources at Oyez including complete audio of the oral arguments.
- Loving Day June 12 commemorating legalization of interracial couples
Equal protection cases | Substantive due process cases | Marriage | 1967 in law | United States Supreme Court cases | United States Fourteenth Amendment case law | Multiracial affairs | Loving kontraŭ Virginio | Loving v. Virginia
"Loving v. Virginia"