{"id":50097,"date":"2016-11-21T21:44:10","date_gmt":"2016-11-21T21:44:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=50097"},"modified":"2016-11-22T01:30:43","modified_gmt":"2016-11-22T01:30:43","slug":"an-unsung-hero-in-the-story-of-interracial-marriage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=50097","title":{"rendered":"An Unsung Hero in the Story of Interracial Marriage"},"content":{"rendered":"

An Unsung Hero in the Story of Interracial Marriage<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The New Yorker<\/a>
\n2016-11-17<\/p>\n

David Muto<\/strong><\/a>, Copy Editor\/Senior Web Producer<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
\nBill and Carol Muto on their wedding day, eight years after the U.S. Supreme Court, in <\/em>Loving v. Virginia<\/a>, struck down interracial-marriage bans.<\/em>
\nCOURTESY BILL AND CAROL MUTO<\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

At my parents\u2019 wedding, in Blacksburg, Virginia<\/a>, my mom wore a floppy, wide-brimmed hat atop her feathered hair. My dad wore\u00a0lightly flared pants and had sideburns that almost reached his jaw. Peter, Paul and Mary<\/a> music played at their ceremony, and at the reception afterward they drank sherbet punch alongside friends and family members dressed in plaid and platform shoes. It was a fairly ordinary American wedding in 1975, save for one distinction: the bride was white, and the groom was Asian.<\/p>\n

My dad, a third-generation Japanese-American from Los Angeles<\/a>, and my mom, from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania<\/a>, had met in Michigan<\/a>, in 1970, while he was in the Air Force and she was in college studying nursing. They eventually settled in Texas<\/a>, where they raised my three siblings and me. As a gay man, I\u2019ve often thought about how my parents\u2019 timing was fortuitous. Just a few years earlier, their marriage may\u00a0not have been legal in the state where they wed, Virginia<\/a>. The new film \u201cLoving<\/a>,\u201d directed by Jeff Nichols<\/a>, tells the story of the couple who changed that: Mildred and Richard Loving, a black woman and a white man who were arrested in Virginia in 1958 and sentenced to prison there after marrying in Washington, D.C.<\/a> The couple, played by Ruth Negga<\/a> and Joel Edgerton<\/a>, toiled silently for years, unable to live openly together in their home state, until their case reached the Supreme Court\u2014which, in a unanimous decision in 1967<\/a>, struck down all interracial-marriage bans throughout the U.S.<\/p>\n

The Lovings are the couple whose names we rightfully remember from the case, and they\u2019re indeed the stars of the film. But, buried in the footnotes of the Lovings\u2019 story, a little-known name caught my attention\u2014that of a Japanese-American lawyer who gave Asian-Americans, and families like mine, a voice at a pivotal moment in constitutional history…<\/p>\n

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

An Unsung Hero in the Story of Interracial Marriage The New Yorker 2016-11-17 David Muto, Copy Editor\/Senior Web Producer Bill and Carol Muto on their wedding day, eight years after the U.S. Supreme Court, in Loving v. Virginia, struck down interracial-marriage bans. COURTESY BILL AND CAROL MUTO At my parents\u2019 wedding, in Blacksburg, Virginia, my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,16,459,1467,8,20,693],"tags":[25472,25473,25471,70,3886,25474],"class_list":["post-50097","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-asia","category-history","category-law","category-media-archive","category-usa","category-virginia","tag-bill-muto","tag-carol-muto","tag-david-muto","tag-loving-v-virginia","tag-the-new-yorker","tag-william-marutani"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50097","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=50097"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50097\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50114,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50097\/revisions\/50114"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50097"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50097"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50097"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}