(Cross-posted at www.fairfaxdemocrats.org)
This week, another civil rights pioneer has passed away.
In 1958, Mildred Jeter drove North to Washington, D.C. to marry her childhood sweetheart, Richard Perry Loving, and then home to Central Point in Caroline County just south of Fredericksburg. Six weeks later, Sheriff's Deputies appeared at their home at 2 A.M. with warrants charging the construction worker and his wife with felony miscegenation - violations of Virginia's "Racial Integrity Act", an act passed in 1924 along with The Sterilization Act which mandated sterilization for certain mentally ill persons as part of the national eugenics movement designed to rid society of the "feebleminded" and "undesirables."
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The Lovings pleaded guilty and were sentenced to one year in prison which was suspended conditioned upon their leaving Virginia for twenty-five years. At their sentencing, the trial judge 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 marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.
Their case was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court where they were represented by two attorneys - Alexandria's Bernie Cohen and Phil Hirschkop who was then twenty-eight years-old. In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated the Racial Integrity Act in the now famous case of Loving v. Virginia. In reaching their holding, the U.S. Supreme 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 discrimination. 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. . . . There is patently no legitimate overriding purpose independent of invidious racial discrimination which justifies this classification. The fact that Virginia prohibits only interracial marriages involving white persons demonstrates that the racial classifications must stand on their own justification, as measures designed to maintain White Supremacy.
Richard Loving was killed in an accident with a drunk driver in 1975. Mildred was a passenger in the wreck and lost sight in one eye.
Today, her former attorney said "She was a heroine who never understood why people thought she was a heroine." As they said in today's article in the Fredericksburg Free Lance Star, her only crime was "want[ing] to live her life with the man she loved in a quiet part of Caroline County."
The Lovings' case was itself symptomatic of the changes running through Virginia and Fairfax County at the time it happened. The author of the 1965 opinion upholding Virginia's miscegenation statute, Harry L. Carrico, was a former Fairfax County Circuit Court Judge before being elevated to the Supreme Court of Virginia. The attorney who successfully argued the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, Phil Hirschkop, is a Fairfax County resident who still resides in the the Mt. Vernon Magisterial District today.
Change has come, but the last law in the United States prohibiting interracial marriage was repealed in 2000 - yes, the year 2000. We have come a long way in Virginia in the last 40 years, but today we still continue to fight about what kind of love and relationships the state should bless.
In the meantime, the Lovings taught us all that two people can change a country, and that Virginia can change for the better. Rest in peace Mildred Loving.