{"id":11823,"date":"2011-01-30T03:17:42","date_gmt":"2011-01-30T03:17:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=11823"},"modified":"2011-06-08T16:26:53","modified_gmt":"2011-06-08T16:26:53","slug":"remembering-mildred-loving-unsung-hero-of-the-civil-rights-movement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=11823","title":{"rendered":"Remembering Mildred Loving, Unsung Hero of the Civil Rights Movement"},"content":{"rendered":"

Remembering Mildred Loving, Unsung Hero of the Civil Rights Movement<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Counterpunch<\/a>
\n2008-05-09<\/p>\n

Mark A. Huddle<\/strong>, Associate Professor of History
\nGeorgia College and State University<\/em><\/p>\n

Fighting \u201cAnti-Miscegenation<\/a>\u201d Laws<\/em><\/p>\n

On May 2, Mildred Loving<\/a> died from complications of pneumonia at the age of 68.\u00a0 The unassuming Mrs. Loving would have scoffed at the notion that she was a hero of the Civil Rights Movement<\/a>.\u00a0 But for millions of Americans the Loving v. Virginia<\/a><\/em> (1967) case\u2014which outlawed bans on interracial marriage\u2014has resonated to the present as their declaration of independence<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Lovings\u2019 story began in June 1958 when they were married in Washington, DC<\/a>.\u00a0 Richard Perry Loving and Mildred Delores Jeter<\/a> of Central Point, Virginia<\/a> crossed into the District to evade their state\u2019s Racial Integrity Act<\/a>, a law that defined the marriage of a white man and African American woman as a felony.\u00a0 Five weeks later on July 11, the newly-married couple was rousted from their bed by the Caroline County, Virginia<\/a> sheriff and two deputies and arrested for violating the 1924 law<\/a>.\u00a0 In a plea agreement, they pleaded guilty in return for a one-year suspended jail sentence and an agreement not to return to the state together for twenty-five years.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The couple moved to Washington, started a family, and struggled to make ends meet.\u00a0 Eventually the isolation from family and friends proved too much.\u00a0 In 1963 Mildred Loving contacted the American Civil Liberties Union<\/a> which agreed to take the case.\u00a0 Eventually Loving v. Virginia<\/em> was argued before the Supreme Court of the United States on April 10, 1967.\u00a0 Chief Justice Earl Warren<\/a> delivered the opinion of the Court on June 12.\u00a0 Warren put the question succinctly:\u00a0 did the \u201cstatutory scheme adopted by the State of Virginia<\/a> to prevent marriages between persons solely on the basis of racial classifications\u201d violate the \u201cEqual Protection<\/a> and Due Process Clauses<\/a> of the Fourteenth Amendment<\/a>?\u201d\u00a0 The Court concluded that the Virginia law directly contradicted the \u201ccentral meaning\u201d of those constitutional safeguards and was therefore unconstitutional.<\/p>\n

The Lovings were always quick to note that while they were glad their case proved so helpful to so many people their main concern was the welfare of their own family.\u00a0 \u201cWe are doing it for us,\u201d Richard Loving told an interviewer in 1966.\u00a0 But the Loving decision eventually impacted millions.\u00a0<\/p>\n

So-called \u201canti-miscegenation laws\u201d were one of the more tenacious vestiges of Jim Crow<\/a>.\u00a0 The last state to strike anti-miscegenation statutes from its organic law was Alabama<\/a> which waited until 2000 to do so.\u00a0 In the decades since the ruling, there has been a marked increase in mixed race marriages and by the 1990s we were in the midst of an interracial baby-boom.\u00a0 Also of particular importance to the growth of the mixed-race population was the <\/strong>Immigration Act of 1965<\/strong><\/a> that eliminated many of the racist immigration restrictions from earlier legislation and contributed to the \u201cbrowning of America.\u201d<\/strong>\u00a0 Census 2000, the first to allow Americans to check more than one box for racial identity, counted 7.3 million people, about 3 percent of the population, as interracial.\u00a0 The most striking fact of all from the data is that 41 percent of that mixed race population was under the age of eighteen…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Remembering Mildred Loving, Unsung Hero of the Civil Rights Movement Counterpunch 2008-05-09 Mark A. Huddle, Associate Professor of History Georgia College and State University Fighting \u201cAnti-Miscegenation\u201d Laws On May 2, Mildred Loving died from complications of pneumonia at the age of 68.\u00a0 The unassuming Mrs. Loving would have scoffed at the notion that she was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,33,459,1467,8,26,394,20],"tags":[5347,70,5345,5346,2754],"class_list":["post-11823","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-census","category-history","category-law","category-media-archive","category-politics","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-counterpunch","tag-loving-v-virginia","tag-mark-a-huddle","tag-mark-huddle","tag-mildred-loving"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11823","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11823"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11823\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11823"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11823"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11823"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}