By all accounts Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving were madly in love. They had grown up near each other and fallen in love at an early age. First comes love, then comes marriage, so the saying goes, and that's what followed for them. Nothing particularly unusual about that--just an old-fashioned love story. Except that their union was illegal.
Until 1967, the Commonwealth of Virginia had the audacity to criminalize interracial marriages. The so-called Racial Integrity Act made it a felony for blacks and whites to marry, as Mildred and Richard discovered. Mildred, black, and Richard, white, had married in Washington D.C., but returned to Virginia, and the Commonwealth just wasn't going to have any of that race mixing. Police officers invaded the Lovings' home in the dead of night and upon finding them in bed, arrested and convicted them. They were sentenced to 1 year in prison, suspended, if they would leave the Commonwealth. The U. S. Supreme Court overturned their convictions, finding the statute unconstitutional.
Mildred and Richard didn't set out to make history or even to make new law. They just wanted to be married and to live in the community in which they had grown up. That's not much to ask.
Mildred died several days ago. Richard has been dead since 1975, killed in a car accident caused by a drunk driver.
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