Mildred Loving, R.I.P.

Richard and Mildred Loving, a very loving couple
R.I.P.

Mildred Loving dies at 68.

This article is from The Independent concerning the legacy of Richard and Mildred Loving:

Mildred Loving: Civil rights pioneer
At 2am on 11 July 1958, Mildred Loving and her husband were woken up by the local Virginia sheriff and two deputies who, acting on a tip-off, had broken into their bedroom, shining flashlights into their faces. "Who is this woman you're sleeping with?" the sheriff brusquely asked. That Mildred was Richard Loving's wife made no difference. The couple were arrested. For she was black and he was white, at a time when two dozen states across America banned such unions under anti-miscegenation laws, in Virginia's case dating back to the 17th century.
Mildred Loving was a soft-spoken, gentle woman who never intended to be an activist. She simply wanted to live a normal married life in the Virginia countryside just north of the state capital, Richmond, where she and Richard had known each other as children, and where they had grown up.
But circumstances dictated otherwise. Her battle to secure a normal life led ultimately to a US Supreme Court decision of 1967, ending the bar on mixed marriages in Virginia and elsewhere. In essence, her case removed the last brick of the legal edifice of slavery and segregation, after the groundbreaking civil rights legislation earlier in the decade.
"I think marrying who you want is a right no man should have anything to do with, it's a God-given right," she declared shortly after her historic victory.
That, however, had not been the opinion back in 1958 of Leon Bazile, the local Circuit Court judge, as he sentenced the couple to a one-year jail term, to be suspended if they left the state for the next 25 years, and never returned together.
"Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents," Judge Bazile declared. "And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix."
The Lovings pleaded guilty, paid $72 in court costs and moved back north to Washington DC where they had been married a few months before – he a construction worker of 23, she an 18-year-old girl already pregnant with the first of their three children.
But they missed their family and old friends in the country too much. Taking heart from the burgeoning civil rights movement, Mildred wrote in 1963 to the then Attorney General, Robert Kennedy, protesting her plight. The Justice Department put her in touch with the American Civil Liberties Union, which accepted the case. After a three-year journey through lower appeal courts, Loving vs Virginia arrived at the highest jurisdiction in the land.
The ruling of the nine-member Supreme Court was unanimous, and the final opinion was written by Chief Justice Earl Warren, who had written the Court's Brown vs Board of Education judgment in 1954 that ended segregation in US schools, and set in motion the civil rights era. Marriage, said Warren, "is one of the basic civil rights of man, fundamental to our very existence and survival." To deny it "on so unsupportable a basis as racial classification" was to deprive every American citizen of freedom.
But the Lovings did not enjoy their new freedom for very long. They moved back to Virginia but in 1975, just eight years later, Richard died in a car accident.
Rupert Cornwell
Mildred Delores Jeter: born 22 July 1939; married 1958 Richard Loving (died 1975; two sons, one daughter); died Central Point, Virginia 2 May 2008.

___________________________________________________

Loving Decision: 40 Years of Legal Interracial Unions
Listen Now [12 min 42 sec] add to playlist


Enlarge
Richard and Mildred Loving gave their name to the landmark Supreme Court ruling that struck down anti-miscegenation laws in more than a dozen states. Bettmann/Corbis




Follow a timeline of the Lovings' legal battle
Lindsay Mangum, NPR



The Movies and 'Loving'
June 15, 2007'Dinner' and a Show: Race, Romance in Pop Culture




Enlarge
Grey Villet
Richard Loving poses with his son, Donald, in 1965. Time Life Pictures/Getty Images




Enlarge
Melissa Gray, NPR
Bernard Cohen and Michele Norris examine a scrapbook of newspaper clippings about the case. Cohen, now retired, was one of two lawyers who argued the Loving case before the Supreme Court.
Listen: Attorney Bernard Cohen Argues the Lovings' Case Before the Supreme Court
add




Enlarge
Melissa Gray. NPR
The Lovings made front-page news around the country and were featured in magazines such as Newsweek and Life.




Enlarge
Courtesy of Anna Blazer
Bryan Walker, Anna Blazer and their two children, Brianna and Brandon, live just miles from the Caroline County courthouse. They have endured sneers, taunts and even violence from strangers.


All Things Considered, June 11, 2007 · This week marks the 40th anniversary of a seminal moment in the civil rights movement: the legalization of interracial marriage. But the couple at the heart of the landmark Supreme Court case of Loving v. Virginia never intended to be in the spotlight.
On June 12, 1967, the nation's highest court voted unanimously to overturn the conviction of Richard and Mildred Loving, a young interracial couple from rural Caroline County, Va.
That decision struck down the anti-miscegenation laws — written to prevent the mixing of the races — that were on the books at the time in more than a dozen states, including Virginia.
'They Just Were in Love'
Richard Loving was white; his wife, Mildred, was black. In 1958, they went to Washington, D.C. — where interracial marriage was legal — to get married. But when they returned home, they were arrested, jailed and banished from the state for 25 years for violating the state's Racial Integrity Act.
To avoid jail, the Lovings agreed to leave Virginia and relocate to Washington.
For five years, the Lovings lived in Washington, where Richard worked as a bricklayer. The couple had three children. Yet they longed to return home to their family and friends in Caroline County.
That's when the couple contacted Bernard Cohen, a young attorney who was volunteering at the ACLU. They requested that Cohen ask the Caroline County judge to reconsider his decision.
"They were very simple people, who were not interested in winning any civil rights principle," Cohen, now retired, tells Michele Norris.
"They just were in love with one another and wanted the right to live together as husband and wife in Virginia, without any interference from officialdom. When I told Richard that this case was, in all likelihood, going to go to the Supreme Court of the United States, he became wide-eyed and his jaw dropped," Cohen recalls.
Road to the High Court
Cohen and another lawyer challenged the Lovings' conviction, but the original judge in the case upheld his decision. Judge Leon Bazile wrote: "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."
As Cohen predicted, the case moved all the way up to the Supreme Court, where the young ACLU attorney made a vivid and personal argument:
"The Lovings have the right to go to sleep at night knowing that if should they not wake in the morning, their children would have the right to inherit from them. They have the right to be secure in knowing that, if they go to sleep and do not wake in the morning, that one of them, a survivor of them, has the right to Social Security benefits. All of these are denied to them, and they will not be denied to them if the whole anti-miscegenistic scheme of Virginia... [is] found unconstitutional."
After the ruling — now known as the "Loving Decision" — the family, which had already quietly moved back to Virginia, finally returned home to Caroline County.
But their time together was cut short: Richard Loving died in a car crash in 1975. Mildred Loving, who never remarried, still lives in Caroline County in the house that Richard built. She politely refuses to give interviews.
Interracial Couples Today
Since that ruling 40 years ago, interracial marriage has become more common, but remains relatively rare. Sociologists estimate that 7 percent of the nation's 59 million marriages are mixed-race couplings.
And even now, interracial marriage remains a source of quiet debate over questions of identity, assimilation and acceptance.
Take Anna Blazer and Bryan Walker, for instance. The white woman and her black husband, with their two young children, live just miles from the Caroline County courthouse. Donald Loving, a grandson of Richard and Mildred Loving, introduced the couple when they were teenagers.
Blazer, now 23, says her family was initially wary of her then-boyfriend because of his race.
"My mom was a little weird with it, because he used to wear this really long — they call it bling-bling — he used to wear a bling-bling cross around his neck and baggy pants. And I don't know, she just kind of looked at him kind of funny when she first met him," Blazer remembers.
But over the years her mother has warmed to Walker, 21.
Blazer says that although many things have changed since the days of anti-miscegenation laws, life is still difficult for them in Caroline County. The couple endures sneers, sideways glances and more from strangers.
"Just a couple of months ago... Bryan got beat up in the Wal-Mart parking lot because he was with me and my sister, and these white men came up to him and they were yelling. The guy ripped off his shirt. He had racial slurs all over him...and they just started going at it," Blazer says.
"I think my life would be a whole lot easier if I was with a white man. And Bryan feels the same way, but he loves me. He really does. And we are meant to be together," Blazer says.

Related NPR Stories
June 12, 2007'Loving' Turns 40
May 15, 2007White Mothers, Black Sons
April 26, 2007Multiracial Identity in America Today
April 15, 2007White Youngsters Gather to Talk About Race
Jan. 30, 2007A Return Home Leads to New Questions on Race
Jan. 25, 2007Race, Still Our Most Divisive Force
Jan. 24, 2007A Racial Convergence, via Religion