Mildred Loving, matriarch of interracial marriage, dies
She and her husband (who died before she did) were instrumental in getting one of the most bigoted laws in the country struck down. Sadly, there are still people in the United States today who think the Supreme Court made a mistake.
June 12 is “Loving Day.” Do something special to celebrate that day.
And it’s not just racists. Robery Bork’s lone vote against Loving in the Appeals Court ruling was one of the cases cited against his SCOTUS nomination. So old pro-Borkists (a lot of conservative folk) try to justify his vote to this day.
If I ever met the guy I would want to ask him: “Please give a definition of ‘race’ that is not unconstitutionally vague.”
This doesn’t sound right, on way too many levels. I think you’re mistaken.
SCOTUS decided Loving in 1967, so the appeal decision would have been sometime before 1967.
Bork was a professor at Yale Law from 1962 to 1975, and Solicitor General from 1972 to 1977 (including a stint as Acting Attorney General).
He wasn’t named to the Court of Appeal for the District of Columbia Circuit until 1982.
Plus, the Supreme Court case was on direct appeal from the Supreme Court of Virginia, not from the federal courts.
Rest in Peace and thank you, Mrs. Loving, and the predeceased Mr. Loving as well. BobPi and I celebrate “Loving Day,” every day. We celebrated our fifth wedding anniversary last Friday. I’ll be sure to mention June 12 to him.
Sometimes you’ll read an item like this about something that happened within your lifetime, and it’s really hard to conceive that there were actually laws on the books like this, and that they were vigorously enforced well into the 1960’s.
There’s another thread referencing the Lovings from earlier today here.
ETA: Well not exactly from today, but still current.
There are plenty of people on this board who were in the South (during the 1960’s) when the schools integrated. We remember all that ‘vigorous enforcement’.
The vestiges of that stuff hung on forever, to. I remember the Kream Kup had two sides, one black and one white. Even years after integration, some people refused to go to the ‘other’ side. Thankfully a tornado came along and destroyed the building.
It does all seem like a dream sometimes. A bad dream. I’m glad it’s gone.
Stupid question: Would such businesses have two sets of wait staff, too?
They had to be in color.
Oh, my goodness! I didn’t realize that she’d died (not much time lately to pay attention to the news). And, by coincidence, I was just reading up on their case last week for a term paper that I was working on.
Courageous people, the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice, and all that. Well done, you two, very well done. Now, may both of your memories be for a blessing.
I think “unevenly enforced” would be a better term than “vigorously enforced.” There always was a fair amount of racial mixing in the U.S.:
And white male - black female marriages weren’t targeted nearly as strongly as the opposite scenario.
I’ve merged these two threads. I hope a lot of people take a look at this topic: I didn’t hear about Loving v. Virginia until college, and I remember being amazed that these laws had been on the books for so long.
In that particular place (kind of like a Dairy Bar) they were all black, as I recall.
My mother used to fume about it “he’s good enough to cook your food, but not good enough to sit with you in church ??!”. Many many restaurants had an all-black kitchen staff. Any white folks you saw working were up front. You would never see a white person as wait staff to black folks. It was the same in stores, such as drug store, dry goods, etc. Very weird.
Marriage is already a challenge when you deal with money, children, jobs and inlaws.
Bringing in the freaking LAW saying you have no right to be married because of your coloror gender, just blows my mind.
Because of their courage to not put up with this kind of nonsense, I can now marry a black man. If it is ok with my husband.
Did this kinda retardedness also pertain to Asians or Hispanics? I’m just curious.
A case with a reference name like “Loving vs Virginia” is irony and history combined. Such a strange place, Virginia: This case, also the first state with a black Governor, and had the last segregated school system in the nation.
Tris. (a native Virginian)
I don’t know about the other states that had such laws (the number of which was, at one point, 35), but, if I recall correctly, Virginia’s law pertained only to white/black marriages because, at the time (the law was written, I think, in 1924) there weren’t enough non-black people of color there to pose a threat to the “sanctity” of the white race. Also, apparently, Virginia wasn’t concerned about intermarriage between blacks and other people of color–just the whole black/white combo.
Now, I’d imagine that, in those states that had substantial populations of Asians and Hispanics, and that had anti-miscegenation laws (e.g., Western states–yeah, it wasn’t just the South that was fucked up), the laws were written to bar them, too, from intermarrying with whites.
What I find funny in the ironic sense is that I see more mixed race couples and children in Virginia, one of the last holdouts of miscegenation and Jim Crow, than I ever did in Indiana, which pretty much gave up on it all during the Depression.
Didn’t Virginia also used to have the slogan “Virginia is for lovers”?
Oh, boy, here we go…
I don’t think they made a mistake in what they tried to accomplish, nor in what it did accomplish.
However, that being said, oh my…
( Deep breath) I think that if you approach the issue from an originalist approach, there is little in the text or history of the constitution that would support the Loving decision.
Anti-miscegenation laws had been around for many years and were well-known to the framers of the constitution and to the authors of the 14th amendment. It would seem that these laws would have been struck down in 1870 had that been the intent.
I think it is one more example of the philosophy that just because a law is stupid doesn’t mean it is unconstitutional…
