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Mildred Loving of Loving vs
Virginia Dies
By Norman Faria
Mildred Loving (1939-2008) was
an American widow who died last Friday [2 May 2008] in
the US state of Virginia. She was a black woman who in
1958 married the white man she loved. For this the
couple was arrested, convicted, and exiled to another
state. They fought the case to the Supreme Court level
and won, getting their conviction squashed and leading
to the removal of laws in other states banning
inter-racial marriages.
It all started in
the rural community of Central Point in Caroline County
in the early 1950s. It was the US South and there was
racism to be sure, encouraged by Jim Crow politicians
and ill trained preachers. But people are human
regardless of race. Teenagers Mildred Jeter and Richard
Loving went to different schools and churches but their
families, like many poor whites and blacks, knew each
other.
Mildred and Richard
fell in love. Because of the anti-miscegenation (against
inter-racial sex) laws in Virginia, they had to travel
80 miles to the north to Washington, D.C. (where such
unions were legal) to get married. Ironically, though
Mildred was of majority black race she had Amerindian
blood (that of the Rappahannock tribe, the native
"Indians" who met and welcomed the first European
colonists to the area in the 1600s). The couple returned
to Central Point, hoping to live happily as man and wife
and raise a family.
A few days after settling back in the only home town
they lived in and knew, they were awakened in their bed
in the middle of the night by Sheriff R.Garnett Brooks
and deputies and arrested. The couple pleaded guilty to
"cohabiting as man and wife against the peace and
dignity of the Commonwealth." In sentencing them and
displaying an appalling ignorance about geo-biological
historical development, Judge Leon Bazile noted in part:
"Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow,
Malay and red and placed them on separate continents . .
. the fact that he (God) separated the races shows that
he did not intend the races to mix." The law was the
Virginia Racial Integrity Act of 1924
They received a one
year sentence but this was suspended after they agreed
to leave the state and stay out for the next 25 years.
The Lovings went back to Washington where Richard worked
in his trade as a bricklayer. Mildred, undoubtedly
informed about the then civil rights campaigns to get
justice and meaningful freedom for black Americans,
wrote in 1964 to the then Attorney General Robert
Kennedy. Kennedy, brother of assassinated President John
Kennedy, contacted the American Civil Liberties Union
(ACLU) about it. Assisted by the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the case
was brought before the courts up to the Supreme Court
level. In a 1967 ruling, the highest court in the land
citing the Constitution giving freedom to persons to
marry whomever they wanted, the conviction was thrown
out.
Equally racist laws in 17 other states were soon removed
from the statute books.
The Lovings returned to Virginia where they raised their
three children Donald, Peggy, and Sidney. Sadly, they
were to enjoy their wonderful loving relationship for
only eight more years. In 1975, a drunk driver crashed
his vehicle into theirs. Richard, 41, was killed and
Mildred seriously injured. She lost her right eye and
the accident brought on arthritis. Mildred never
remarried and lived in the house Richard built until she
passed away last Friday. Though the Lovings' example
helped bring about the removal of racist, undemocratic
and cruel legislation and led to more inter-racial
unions, Mildred never saw herself as a heroine. She
rarely gave press interviews. She once said: "It wasn't
my doing —it was God's work."
Today, things have changed somewhat. There are very few
communities in the US and Canada where one doesn’t see
inter-racial couples and their children. The mixing is
still however low—only 7 per cent of the million
marriages existing last year were inter-racial. The
majority are probably black men marrying white women.
Inter-racal unions are likely higher, in relative terms,
in countries such as Guyana and Trinidad where there are
higher proportions of the two main racial groups (Indos
and Afros).
Attitudes are changing in the South said the Lovings'
daughter Peggy in an interview with the New York Times
newspaper (12 June 1992). But there were still some
die-hard reactionaries (at the time of interview).
Sheriff Brooks, also interviewed, said he still agreed
with the anti-miscegenation law he helped enforce. "I
would have thought something about it. But with the
calibre of those people (Mildred and Richard), it
didn't matter. They were both low class."
Last year, on the
40th anniversary of the Supreme Court's ruling, Mildred
gave a brief statement . Part of it is found on a
Wikipedia website "Loving vs Virginia" and for which
I am indebted for some of the information in this
article. She said she had lived long enough "to see big
changes." She continued in part: "Surrounded as I
am now by wonderful children and grandchildren, not a
day goes by that I don't think of Richard and our love,
our right to marry and how much it meant to me to have
that freedom to marry the person precious to me, even if
others thought he was the 'wrong kind of person' for me
to marry."
"I'm still not a
political person," she went on, "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." Mildred, who was 68, had been
recently hospitalised for pneumonia. Let us remember
Mildred and Richard Loving and may they rest in peace.
(Norman Faria is Guyana's Honorary Consul in
Barbados)
* * * *
*
Mildred Loving,
matriarch of interracial marriage, dies—Mildred
Jeter was 11 when she and 17-year-old Richard began
courting, according to Phyl Newbeck, a
Vermont author who detailed the case in the 2004
book, "Virginia Hasn't Always Been for Lovers." She
became pregnant a few years later, she and Loving got
married in
Washington in 1958, when she was 18. Mildred told
the AP she didn't realize it was illegal."I think my
husband knew," Mildred said. "I think he thought (if) we
were married, they couldn't bother us."
Yahoo
* * * *
*
Mildred Loving,
Who Battled Ban On Mixed-Race Marriage, Dies at 68—In his classic
study of segregation,
An American Dilemma, Gunnar Myrdal wrote that
“the whole system of segregation and discrimination is
designed to prevent eventual inbreeding of the races.”
But miscegenation laws struck deeper than other
segregation acts, and the theory behind them leads to
chaos in other facets of law. This is because they make
any affected marriage void from its inception. Thus, all
children are illegitimate; spouses have no inheritance
rights; and heirs cannot receive death benefits. “When
any society says that I cannot marry a certain person,
that society has cut off a segment of my freedom,” the
Rev. Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr. said in 1958. Virginia’s law
had been on the books since 1662, adopted a year after
Maryland enacted the first such statute. At one time or
another, 38 states had miscegenation laws. State and
federal courts consistently upheld the prohibitions,
until 1948, when the California Supreme Court overturned
California’s law. Though the Supreme Court’s 1967
decision in the Loving case struck down miscegenation
laws, Southern states were sometimes slow to change
their constitutions; Alabama became the last state to do
so, in 2000.
NYTimes
* * * *
*
Books on
Interracial Intimacy
Tell the Court I Love My Wife: Race, Marriage, and
Law—An American History (Peter Wallenstein)
Interracialism : Black-White Intermarriage in American
History, Literature, and Law (Werner Sollors)
Interracial Intimacy: The Regulation of Race and Romance
(Rachel F. Moran)
Race Mixing: Black-White Marriage in Postwar America
(Renee C. Romano)
* * * *
*
posted 6 May 2008 |
