The Lovings: A Case Study

In Virginia 1958, five weeks after the marriage of Richard Loving and Mildred Loving, two deputies stormed into their house in the middle of the night to arrest the newlyweds (Rothman 2). The Lovings were guilty of breaking the Racial Integrity Act (Rothman 2). Despite their lawfully union in Washington D.C their marriage was not recognized in Virginia, one of the twenty-four states that banned interracial marriage (Rothman 2). The couple spent multiple nights in jail before pleading guilty (Rothman 3). The state judge told the couple that if God had meant whites and blacks to mix, he would not have placed them on different continents (Rothman 3). Consequently the Lovings spent the next five years in exile raising their children until Mildred Loving wrote to U.S Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy,who referred her to the American Civil Liberties Union (Rothman 3).The Lovings would eventually take the case to the supreme court in 1967 where the judges unanimously ruled in the couples favor a ruling that erased the last remaining segregation laws in the country (Rothman 3).Richard Loving stated “[We] are not doing it just because

, I was planning on visiting them in Ohio for Christmas, but unable to wait any longer they decided they would come to Chicago for Thanksgiving. When I had first started dating Tony I decided not to tell them because I was afraid of the possible repercussions, but now we were living together and I was no longer willing to hide it. I wrote a letter telling them everything and they decided they no longer needed to see or talk to me. I had hoped they would be as accepting as his family,who had welcomed me with open arms, but being from an all white neighborhood that was not the case. It was not until 1976, after we were married and I had lost my first child at six months pregnant that my mom realized how serious about Tony I was and she and my father started talking to me