Mildred Jeter Loving, 68, a black woman whose refusal to accept Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage led to a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1967 that struck down similar laws across the country, died of pneumonia Friday at her home in Milford, Va.
The Loving vs. Virginia decision overturned long-standing legal and social prohibitions against miscegenation in the United States. Celebrated at the time, the landmark case sunk to obscurity until a 1996 made-for-television movie and a 2004 book revived interest in how the young couple changed history.
A modest homemaker, Mrs. Loving never thought she had done anything extraordinary.
The Census Bureau says there are now 4.3 million interracial couples in the U.S.
In 1958, then-17-year-old Mildred Jeter and her childhood sweetheart, Richard Loving, a 23-year-old white construction worker, drove 90 miles north to marry in the District of Columbia. She was already pregnant with the first of their three children.
Mrs. Loving later said she didn’t realize that it was illegal for a black woman and a white man to wed, although her husband might have. “I think he thought [if] we were married, they couldn’t bother us,” she said.
Nevertheless, when they returned to Central Point, Va., to set up their home, someone called the law.
Caroline County Sheriff Garnett Brooks rousted them from their bed at 2 a.m. in July 1958 and told them the marriage certificate was no good in Virginia. He took them to jail and charged them with unlawful cohabitation. They pleaded guilty, and Caroline County Circuit Court Judge Leon Bazile sentenced them to a year’s imprisonment, to be suspended if they left the state for 25 years.
“Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. …The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix,” Bazile ruled.
The Lovings moved to Washington in 1959 and lived with one of her cousins. They didn’t like urban life and yearned to return to home.
Five years later, while visiting her mother, they were arrested again for traveling together. Mrs. Loving, who had been following the 1964 civil rights legislation, wrote to Atty. Gen. Robert Kennedy to find out if the new law would allow the couple to travel freely. The couple was referred to the American Civil Liberties Union and assigned an attorney, Bernard Cohen.
With fellow attorney Philip Hirschkop, Cohen took the case to the high court
On June 12, 1967, the Supreme Court unanimously declared: “There is patently no legitimate overriding purpose independent of invidious racial discrimination which justifies this classification.”
