[As with
everything else in this plague-ridden year, my sons and my annual summer trip
to Charlottesville unfortunately hasn’t been able to happen as planned. But this
blog will always return to my home state, this time for a series on a few
of Virginia’s pivotal historical moments!]
On two
under-remembered contexts for the 1967 decision, and why they matter.
The Virginia law
that Richard
and Mildred Loving violated with their June
1958 marriage was less than forty years old. Passed by the Virginia General
Assembly in March 1924, the Racial
Integrity Act both required racial identification of all Virginians at
birth (with only two possible categories, “white” and “colored”) and
criminalized all marriages between members of those two racial categories. It’s
easy to imagine (and I’m as guilty of this as anyone) that such
anti-miscegenation laws had existed in Virginia for centuries, and of course
they do have longer-term
antecedents and heritages. But as with many of America’s most overt
and discriminatory exclusionary laws and policies, it was in the 1920s that
Virginia truly codified these odious aspects of Jim Crow racial segregation and
opposition to interracial relationships. That more recent history doesn’t make
the Loving’s marriage (performed in Washington, DC, although they lived in
Central Point, Virginia) any less illegal in 1958, but it does at least reflect
the evolving nature of such laws and debates.
Just over a
month later, the Lovings were arrested in their home for violating that law; in
January 1959
they pled guilty to “cohabiting as man and wife, against the peace and
dignity of the Commonwealth,” and to avoid serving the one-year prison sentence
accepted a deal where they agreed to leave the state and not return together
for at least 25 years. They moved together to Washington, DC, and it was that
physical relocation that provided the origin point for their legal fight and
eventual Supreme Court victory. That is, we might assume that the Lovings were
unable to be married or together due to Virginia’s racist laws, but that wasn’t
the case; it was instead the
separation from their families (all of whom still lived in Virginia and
whom the Lovings could not visit without risking prison) and their broader
communities that by 1964 had become sufficiently intolerable that Mildred Loving wrote
in protest to Attorney General Robert Kennedy, setting in motion the events
that would lead them to the ACLU, legal appeals, and the Supreme Court’s
ground-breaking 1967 decision. Of course love and marriage were vital
components of those histories and victories, but it was really family and
community that most directly drove the Lovings to pursue legal action.
I would argue
that both of those specific historical contexts are important to remember for
at least two kinds of reasons. For one thing, they remind us that our
overarching historical narratives—interracial relationships had been illegal in
a place like Virginia forever; the Lovings just wanted to be able to be married
to one another—are often at best simplified, and at worst fundamentally
inaccurate to the details (which matter a great deal). And for another, both of
these particular details highlight the role that images and ideals of community
and place—both in exclusionary and in inclusive ways—can play in shaping other
debates and histories. Indeed, the opposition between the 1924 law and the Loving’s
goals came down in many ways to two competing visions of Virginia: an
exclusionary one that broke the state down into white and colored inhabitants
and sought to keep them separate from one another in even the most personal and
intimate ways; and an inclusive one for which the ideal Virginia community
would be not just the Loving’s and their three children, but also and perhaps
especially the extended family and community that they shared in Central Point.
In 1967, the Supreme Court sided with that inclusive vision, and helped extend
it to all American families and communities.
Last VA history tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other Virginia histories or contexts you’d share?
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