Sixty years ago, in June 1963, a young wife and mother drafted a neatly handwritten letter about a “problem” her family was facing:
Dear Sir:
I am writing to you concerning a problem we have.
5 yrs. ago my husband and I were married here in the District. We then returned to Va. to live. My husband is White, and I am part negro, and part Indian.
At the time, we did not know there was a law in Va. against mixed marriages.
Therefore we were jailed and tried in the little town of Bowling Green.
We were to leave the state to make our home.
The problem is we are not allowed to visit our families. The judge said that if we enter the state in the next [25] yrs., we will have to spend 1 yr. in jail.
We know we can’t live there, but we would like to go back once in a while to visit our families and friends.
We have 3 children and cannot afford an attorney.
We wrote to the Attorney General. He suggested that we get in touch with you for advice.
Please help us if you can. Hope to hear from you real soon.
Yours truly, Mr. and Mrs. Richard Loving
Mrs. Mildred Loving, the letter’s author, had chosen to reach out to U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, who suggested she and her husband contact the ACLU for help. Over the next several years, dedicated ACLU lawyers took their case through the court system, and the Lovings eventually made history when their struggle to have their marriage recognized in their native Virginia led to the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Loving v. Virginia.
On June 12, 1967, the justices ruled 9-0 that Virginia’s law banning interracial marriage and all others like it was unconstitutional and that the freedom to marry was “a basic civil right.”
The Lovings, who shunned the spotlight, made it clear they never set out to be social revolutionaries. It was simple: they loved each other, wanted to marry, and beyond that, as Mrs. Loving said, “It was God’s work.” The two first met in the early 1950s in Central Point, Virginia, the small community where they both grew up. They became young sweethearts, and in 1958, when Mildred became pregnant, they decided to get married. They drove to Washington, D.C., for their marriage license, and Mrs. Loving later said she initially believed they were doing that because less paperwork was required there. But Richard may have understood something she didn’t: Getting a marriage license as a mixed-race couple would have been illegal and impossible in Virginia.
Mr. Loving may not have known how the state would treat legal interracial marriages that had been performed elsewhere; but five weeks after their wedding, they received a very literal rude awakening: acting on a “tip” sheriff’s deputies surrounded their bed with flashlights-at two in the morning, demanding to know why they were there together. Their reply that they were husband and wife made no difference. The Lovings were arrested, and Mr. Loving was held in jail overnight while the pregnant Mrs. Loving was forced to stay for several days. Both were charged with violating Virginia’s Racial
Integrity Act. Under a plea bargain, in order to avoid a year-long jail sentence, they were forced to leave the state and were prohibited from returning together for 25 years. They settled in Washington, D.C., but missed the small town where they had spent their entire lives. These were the conditions that led the Lovings, inspired by the growing Civil Rights Movement, to reach out to Attorney General Robert Kennedy, asking for change.
After the landmark 1967 victory, Mr. and Mrs. Loving returned to their hometown with their three children. Sadly, their own happiness ended in tragedy in 1975 when Mr. Loving was killed, and Mrs. Loving lost sight in one eye in a car accident caused by a drunk driver. But the Lovings, had paved the way, …
