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One night in July 1958, two newlyweds suddenly awoke at their home in Caroline County, Virginia, startled by the sound of men in their room and the glare of flashlights on their faces. One of the three intruders demanded to know who they were and what they were doing in bed together. Mildred Loving murmured, “I’m his wife,” and Richard Loving pointed to a marriage certificate hanging on the wall. “That’s no good here,” retorted the trio’s leader, Sheriff R. Garnett Brooks. The young couple were arrested and jailed.1 Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving had been seeing each other for several years, and during the spring of 1958 they determined that the time had come for them to marry. They had the impression that they could not have their wedding in Virginia, but he thought they would be all right if they went to the District of Columbia. They drove the hundred miles north to the nation’s capital, where they had their ceremony; returned to the community where they had lived all their lives; and moved in with her parents. The issue that had given him pause and led to their trip to the big city—and the problem that led to their arrest that summer night—was that Richard Loving was Caucasian, and Mildred Jeter was not. It was no crime in Virginia to be white or black, male or female. But it was a crime for two people to marry if one of them was white and the other not. Marrying in violation of Virginia’s law against interracial marriage could bring a term in the state penitentiary for at least one year and for as long as five years. Other Virginians had spent years in prison for breaking that law, and now it looked like two more people would join their ranks. The Lovings were terrified at the prospect. They were free while awaiting their trial, but a trial nonetheless loomed. Not only was there no way to turn the 6 Racial Identity and the Crime of Marriage The View from Twentieth-Century Virginia clock back to May, they would not have wanted to. They wanted to be married, and they wanted to live together in peace in their rural community . Richard Loving had thought they could do both if they went out of state to marry, but they discovered that the same law banning their getting married in Virginia also outlawed their living together there as an interracial married couple, expressly so if they had briefly left the state to evade the law that prevented their marrying each other in Virginia. Virginia was by no means alone in maintaining a law—termed a “miscegenation ” law—against marriages between people identified as white and other people, especially African Americans but sometimes also Asian Americans and Native Americans. From 1913 to 1948 thirty states had miscegenation laws on the books (map 1), and as late as 1958, when the Lovings were arrested, twenty-four of the forty-eight states retained such laws. The last of those states outside the South dropped theirs in 1965.2 Retaining such laws were all seventeen states of the Deep South, the Upper South, and the Border South (map 2): all eleven states of the former Confederacy plus Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, Oklahoma, and West Virginia. The prospect of successfully challenging the Virginia law’s constitutionality was not bright, though court challenges had occasionally succeeded in other states. In the history of the Republic, four state supreme courts ruled against the constitutionality of a miscegenation law. During Reconstruction, in the 1870s, three states did so—Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas—before reversing themselves, restoring such statutes, and leaving them in place, where they remained until 1967. In 1948, by a 4–3 vote, the California Supreme Court did so, but no other state supreme court followed , in or out of the South.3 Before the Twentieth Century The law under which the Lovings were charged in 1958 was called the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, but its antecedents reached back into Virginia ’s early years. As a colony Virginia enacted a law in 1691 that called for banishing any European American who married a Native American or an African American. The law was changed over the years, but penalties for black-white marriage persisted beyond the American Revolution, beyond the Civil War, and, indeed, as the Lovings found out, well into the twentieth century. The...

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