Mixed Race Studies

“We Were Married on the Second Day of June, and the Police Came After Us the 14th of July.”

The Washingtonian
2016-11-02

Hillary Kelly, Design & Style Editor

Richard and Mildred Loving. Photograph by Grey Villet.

An oral history, nearly 50 years later, of the landmark Virginia case that legalized interracial marriage—and is the subject of a talked-about movie out this month.

In June 1958, Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving drove from their home in Central Point, Virginia, to Washington, DC, to be married. Twenty-four states, including Virginia, still outlawed interracial marriage at the time. Mildred was part Native American and part African-American; Richard was white. Their union would eventually result in their banishment from the state and a nine-year legal battle.

On November 4, almost 50 years after the Supreme Court’s 1967 decision that the Lovings’ marriage was valid—and that marriage is a universal right—Hollywood is set to release Loving, already on Oscar lists. As director Jeff Nichols explained when asked why he took on the project, “We have very painful wounds in this country, and they need to be brought out into the light. And it’s gonna be an awkward, uncomfortable, painful conversation that’s going to continue for a while.”

The movie focuses on Mildred and Richard’s romance. We looked behind the scenes of the struggle itself, talking to insiders including the couple’s attorneys—then just out of law school—to revisit the case. One remarkable aspect: Unlike other civil-rights champions of their era, the Lovings never set out to change the course of history. “What happened, we real­ly didn’t intend for it to happen,” Mildred said in 1992. “What we wanted, we wanted to come home.”

This is the story of how a quiet couple from rural Virginia brought about marriage equality for themselves, and for all…

Read the entire article here.

Opinion/Commentary: The facts behind loving, law, and ‘Loving’

The Daily Progress
Charlottesville, Virginia
2016-11-13

Jeff E. Schapiro, Politics columnist
Richmond Times-Dispatch, Richmond, Virginia

Focus Features via AP Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga protray an interracial couple from Virginia whose romance and marraiage made history. The story or Richard and Mildred Loving is told, Hollywood-style in the movie “Loving.”

In 1963, Bernie Cohen, a lawyer in Alexandria, was representing Richard and Mildred Loving, a mixed-race couple from Virginia facing a predicament considered unthinkable today: They’d been banished from the state for 25 years for violating its prohibition on interracial marriage.

Living in Washington, D.C., where interracial marriage was legal and where they were wed in 1958, the Lovings wanted to return home, to rural Caroline County. To get there would require a long journey through the courts.

Having lost the initial challenge in state court, Cohen consulted with his constitutional law professor at Georgetown University, Chester Antieau. He introduced Cohen to another former student, Phil Hirschkop.

Cohen and Hirschkop were alike: Both were Jewish boys from Brooklyn who had settled in segregationist Harry Byrd’s Virginia. They also were liberals, committed to racial equality and social justice at a time when both could be scarce, especially in the American South.

It was Cohen’s and Hirschkop’s different legal backgrounds — the former was a trial lawyer; the latter, a civil rights lawyer — that would bring them together for the successful battle that concluded with a 1967 ruling by a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court voiding Virginia’s anti-miscegenation statute and those of 15 other states.

The decision allowed the Lovings — he was white; she was black — to openly live out their days in Caroline County.

Ahead of the 50th anniversary of a ruling on marriage equality that would presage the Supreme Court order legalizing same-sex marriage in 2015, a new film by Jeff Nichols, the writer-director, recounts the couple’s ordeal…

Read the entire article here.

Hollywood has long shown discomfort with interracial couples, but change is happening

The Los Angeles Times
2016-11-10

Lewis Beale

Katherine Houghton puts a flower in Sidney Poitier’s hair in a scene from the film “Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner.” (Getty Images)

In 1967, the same year the Supreme Court case Loving vs. Virginia struck down laws banning miscegenation, Sidney Poitier starred in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” as a black man romantically involved with blond Katherine Houghton.

Yet in both real and reel life, black-white romantic relationships were problematic, fraught with legal and social taboos. In the case of Loving, that meant rural Virginia couple Richard and Mildred Loving, who married in Washington, D.C., in 1958, were arrested in their home state, forced to move away or be jailed, and spent years fighting the racist law that affected them until the Supreme Court unanimously overturned it.

“The fact any miscegenation laws even existed, these are vestiges of slavery,” says Jeff Nichols, director of “Loving,” a new film based on the famous case starring Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga. “All of this speaks to the institutionalized racism in the South.”

“Guess,” which was released six months after the Loving decision, was, in its own way, meant to be a liberal antidote to situations like this. In director Stanley Kramer’s film,  parents and friends of the romantic couple discuss the pros and cons of their romance in a civilized manner until the woman’s father (played by Spencer Tracy) gives his blessing to the relationship…

Read the entire article here.

The African American Museum chooses ‘Loving’ for its first film screening

The Washington Post
2016-10-25

Helena Andrews-Dyer

Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga, stars of “Loving,” attend the premiere of the film on Thursday in Beverly Hills. (Chris Pizzello/Invision via Associated Press)

Just one month after opening its doors, the National Museum of African American History and Culture is establishing itself as a permanent stop on the Washington social circuit. There have been cocktail parties, galas, private dinners and now one of D.C.’s favorite after-work pastimes — the movie screening.

But not just any movie screening. On Monday, the museum hosted a sneak peek of “Loving” in the 350-seat Oprah Winfrey Theater–one of many for the new institution. The choice wasn’t coincidental, said Rhea L. Combs, the museum’s photography and film curator and head of its Earl W. and Amanda Stafford Center for African American Media Arts.

“Showing this film at the museum is important because the story is symbolic of the mission of the museum,” Combs said. “It demonstrates the link between people of all backgrounds and culture.”

“Loving” tells the true story of Mildred and Richard Loving, an interracial couple from Virginia who fought for nearly a decade to have their marriage recognized as legal. Their historic case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which eventually struck down laws against interracial marriage.

Almost 50 years later the movie’s stars, Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton, walked the red carpet at the museum that houses artifacts from the couple they play on screen. Everyone involved bowed to the movie’s role as An Important Film…

Read the entire article here.

Behind the Scenes of Loving, the Most Beautiful Love Story Ever Told

Vogue
2016-10-17 (November 2016)

Danzy Senna
photographed by Mario Testino

Photographed by Mario Testino, Vogue, November 2016

Meet Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton, the brilliant stars of Loving, Jeff Nichols’s sweeping portrait of an interracial couple fıghting for their right to marry in 1950s Vırginia.

We enter the story in 1958, in rural Virginia. A woman and a man stand in an open field of grass; she is telling him she is pregnant. There is a hint of worry in her luminous dark eyes, but the man assures her that they will get married and build a home together. The opening scene of Loving, Jeff Nichols’s quietly devastating new film, feels less like a beginning and more like a happily-ever-after ending. But because this is 1950s Virginia, and the woman is black and the man is white, the story does not unfold in the way of fairy tales. For Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving—a real-life couple played in the film by Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton—the seemingly straightforward act of getting married becomes a dangerous and transgressive act.

With its lush cinematography, Loving is a visual paean to the 1950s, but it is also a fierce interrogation of the hypocrisies of that era. It traces the arc of the Lovings’ struggle to live as husband and wife at a time not so long ago when it was illegal in sixteen states to marry someone of a different race. As the Lovings are forced to leave their tight-knit, working-class community and live in Washington, D.C., around them swirls language that evokes the present debate on gay marriage. “It’s God’s law,” the sheriff tells the couple after their harrowing middle-of-the-night arrest. “A robin’s a robin, a sparrow is a sparrow.” As Edgerton says, “That’s the double beauty of the film. It’s a racial period piece, but it also echoes very loudly today.”…

Read the entire review here.

Cannes: Interracial Marriage Drama ‘Loving’ Throws Hat in Oscar Ring

The Hollywood Reporter
2016-05-16

Gregg Kilday

Director Jeff Nichols and stars Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga make a strong first-impression as their new film about the landmark Supreme Court case is unveiled.

Loving, writer/director Jeff Nichols’ new film about Richard and Mildred Loving — the interracial couple whose 1958 marriage violated Virginia’s anti-miscegenation laws, which were eventually overturned by the Supreme Court’s landmark Loving vs. Virginia ruling in 1967 — held its first press screening Monday morning in Cannes. And it immediately made the case why the film has to be considered one of this year’s first major awards contenders.

Given the material, Nichols could have delivered a standard-issue courtroom drama, culminating with soaring oratory before the nation’s highest court. But he chose to take a different route — the American Civil Liberties Union, agreeing to take on the case, doesn’t enter the picture until more than half-way through the two-hour-three-minute movie. Instead, the film is centered around the Lovings themselves: Richard, played by Australian actor Joel Edgerton, and Mildred, played by the Ethiopia-born Ruth Negga…

Read the entire article here.

First Look at Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton in ‘The Loving Story’ (Based on Anti-Miscegenation Case)

Shadow and Act: On Cinema Of The African Diaspora
2015-11-20

Tambay A. Obenson

Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton as Mildred and Richard Loving, on the set of the movie “Loving,” being shot in Richmond, Va. (Ben Rothstein/Big Beach Films via AP)

Three years ago, director Nancy Buirski’s feature documentary, “The Loving Story,” was released. It follows the real-life story of Richard and Mildred Loving, an interracial couple living in the state of Virginia where interracial coupling was illegal, and their struggles, including the US Supreme Court case named after them – Loving vs Virginia (1967); the landmark civil rights case in which the United States Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision, declared Virginia’s anti-miscegenation statute, unconstitutional, overturning existing laws and bringing an official end to all race-based restrictions on marriage in the United States.

Persecuted by a local sheriff, the Lovings were found guilty of violating Virginia’s law against interracial marriage and forced to leave the state. But Mildred Loving chose to fight. She wrote a letter to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy asking for help. He referred her to the ACLU and two young attorneys took the case.

Richard and Mildred Loving

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 so-called Racial Integrity Act…

Read the entire article here.

Virginia Ban on Interracial Marriages Goes to Federal Court This Week

The New York Times
1965-01-24
page 43

RICHMOND, Jan. 23—A constitutional test of Virginia laws that make it a crime for a white person to marry a Negro will begin here next week. The case is regarded as certain to go to the United States Supreme Court and may become a landmark. Eighteen other states have similar laws that would be affected by a Supreme Court decision in the Virginia case.

In a unanimous opinion last month, the Court struck down a Florida statute punishing extramarital cohabitation by whites and Negroes. It avoided a ruling on state laws against interracial marriage, but the decision raised new doubts about the continuing validity of such laws.

Knew About Law

On Wednesday, lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union will argue before a three-judge Federal court here that the state’s enforcement of Virginia’s antimiscegenation laws has grossly violated the constitutional rights of Mr. and Mrs. Richard P. Loving, both life-long residents of Virginia.

Mr. Loving, 31 years old, is a big, silent construction worker. He is white. His wife, Mildred, 25, is colored—part Indian and part Negro. Both had spent their lives in Caroline County, just south of Fredericksburg, until January, 1959, when they were banished from the state by County Circuit Judge Leon M. Bazile. They moved to Washington with their three children. Aware of the Virginia law, they had been married in Washington on June 2, 1958.

The charge brought against them five weeks after their marriage was violation of Title 20, Sections 53 and 59 of the Virginia Code:

“If any white person and colored person shall go out of this state for the purpose of being married and with the intention of returning … they shall be punished — by confinement in the penitentiary for not less than one nor more than five years.”

Other sections of the code provide for the annulment of interracial marriages “without any decree of divorce” and for a fine of $200 for performing an interracial marriage ceremony, “of which the informer shall have one-half.”…

Read or purchase the article here.

Mildred Loving, Who Battled Ban on Mixed-Race Marriage, Dies at 68

The New York Times
2008-05-06

Douglas Martin

Mildred Loving, a black woman whose anger over being banished from Virginia for marrying a white man led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling overturning state miscegenation laws, died on May 2 at her home in Central Point, Va. She was 68.

Peggy Fortune, her daughter, said the cause was pneumonia.

The Supreme Court ruling, in 1967, struck down the last group of segregation laws to remain on the books — those requiring separation of the races in marriage. The ruling was unanimous, its opinion written by Chief Justice Earl Warren, who in 1954 wrote the court’s opinion in Brown v. Board of Education, declaring segregated public schools unconstitutional.

In Loving v. Virginia, Warren wrote that miscegenation laws violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause. “We have consistently denied the constitutionality of measures which restrict the rights of citizens on account of race,” he said.

By their own widely reported accounts, Mrs. Loving and her husband, Richard, were in bed in their modest house in Central Point in the early morning of July 11, 1958, five weeks after their wedding, when the county sheriff and two deputies, acting on an anonymous tip, burst into their bedroom and shined flashlights in their eyes. A threatening voice demanded, “Who is this woman you’re sleeping with?”

Mrs. Loving answered, “I’m his wife.”

Mr. Loving pointed to the couple’s marriage certificate hung on the bedroom wall. The sheriff responded, “That’s no good here.”

The certificate was from Washington, D.C., and under Virginia law, a marriage between people of different races performed outside Virginia was as invalid as one done in Virginia. At the time, it was one of 24 states that barred marriages between races…

…Mildred Delores Jeter’s family had lived in Caroline County, Va., for generations, as had the family of Richard Perry Loving. The area was known for friendly relations between races, even though marriages were forbidden. Many people were visibly of mixed race, with Ebony magazine reporting in 1967 that black “youngsters easily passed for white in neighboring towns.”

Mildred’s mother was part Rappahannock Indian, and her father was part Cherokee. She preferred to think of herself as Indian rather than black.

Mildred and Richard began spending time together when he was a rugged-looking 17 and she was a skinny 11-year-old known as Bean. He attended an all-white high school for a year, and she reached 11th grade at an all-black school.

When Mildred became pregnant at 18, they decided to do what was elsewhere deemed the right thing and get married. They both said their initial motive was not to challenge Virginia law.

“We have thought about other people,” Mr. Loving said in an interview with Life magazine in 1966, “but we are not doing it just because somebody had to do it and we wanted to be the ones. We are doing it for us.”…

Read the entire obituary here.

Loving in Virginia: A teacher’s work brings new life to an old case.

University of Virginia College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences
Newsletter
February 2013

Caroline County, Virginia, 1958. Newlyweds Richard and Mildred Loving wake at 2 a.m. to the sound of their front door being kicked in. Before they are out of bed, the sheriff and two deputies place them under arrest. Their crime: Marriage. Richard, a white man, and Mildred, a black and American Indian woman, had violated Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act, which prohibited interracial marriage. They plead guilty, are convicted on felony charges, and are banished from Virginia. The Lovings spend the next nine years trying to get home.

Most students in historian Grace Hale’s Southern History seminars find it difficult to believe that the Loving’s story is factual, and perhaps even more extraordinary that such events occurred only 55 years ago. Yet in June of 1958, 24 states, including Virginia, prohibited interracial marriage. With Hale they talk through the Voting Rights Act of 1964[5] and the Civil Rights Act of 1965[4]. But these topics, important in their own right, capture only a portion of the important history she teaches. For Hale, the history comes more alive through the story of the Lovings and their nine-year battle that resulted in the 1967 Supreme Court Decision that invalidated all state laws prohibiting interracial marriage. Though she has taught the case for some time, only recently has it carried more weight to her. Just last year, HBO premiered The Loving Story, a documentary that tells the Loving’s dramatic tale, for which Hale served as an historical advisor…

Read the entire article here.