This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court Case that ruled prohibitions on interracial marriages unconstitutional. The decision and the brave couple, Richard and Mildred Loving, who challenged the Virginia statute denying their union because he was deemed a white man and she, a black woman, deserve celebration. The couple had grown up together in a small rural town where racial tensions and segregation persisted, but were faded by familiarity. As adults, Richard and Mildred fell in love and chose to formalize their relationship. They took a trip to nearby Washington, DC. where they secured a marriage license. However, soon after returning to Virginia, one of 16 states, mostly in the American South, which held firm to its anti-miscegenation statute, an overly enthusiastic sheriff barged into the couple’s bedroom in the middle of the night and arrested them. After an uncomfortable stay in jail—a then-pregnant Mildred was detained longer than Richard—the couple were released. Ordered to depart the state for 25 years, the Lovings reluctantly relocated to Washington, DC where they would raise their children. Mildred, in particular, regretted city life and wished to return to rural Virginia. As much as their longing for home and family, the arguments and energy of the era’s black freedom struggle, and faith in the rightness of their course, persuaded the couple to seek the legal support of the ACLU and file a lawsuit. In 1967, a unanimous court ruled in favor of the Lovings, determining that anti-miscegenation statutes violated the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment.
The victory marked the end of anti-miscegenation statutes that had proliferated and persisted in the United States because Americans regularly romanced across color lines and those who depended upon those lines to protect their authority worked feverishly to reinforce them wherever and whenever possible.