Loving v. Virginia facts for kids
Quick facts for kids Loving v. Virginia |
|
|---|---|
|
|
| Argued April 10, 1967 Decided June 12, 1967 |
|
| Full case name | Richard Perry Loving, Mildred Jeter Loving v. Virginia |
| Citations | 388 U.S. 1 (more)
87 S. Ct. 1817; 18 L. Ed. 2d 1010; 1967 U.S. LEXIS 1082
|
| Prior history | Defendants convicted, Caroline County Circuit Court (January 6, 1959); motion to vacate judgment denied, Caroline County Circuit Court (January 22, 1959); affirmed in part, reversed and remanded, 147 S.E.2d 78 (Va. 1966); cert. granted, 385 U.S. 986 (1966). |
| Argument | Oral argument |
| Holding | |
| Bans on interracial marriage violate the Equal Protection Clause and Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. | |
| Court membership | |
| Case opinions | |
| Majority | Warren, joined by unanimous |
| Concurrence | Stewart |
| Laws applied | |
| U.S. Const. amend. XIV; Va. Code §§ 20–58, 20–59 | |
|
This case overturned a previous ruling or rulings
|
|
| Pace v. Alabama (1883) | |
Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967), was a landmark civil rights decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that laws banning interracial marriage violate the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Beginning in 2013, it was cited as precedent in U.S. federal court decisions holding restrictions on same-sex marriage in the United States unconstitutional, including in the 2015 Supreme Court decision Obergefell v. Hodges.
The case involved Mildred Loving, a woman of color, and her white husband Richard Loving, who in 1958 were sentenced to a year in prison for marrying each other. Their marriage violated Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which criminalized marriage between people classified as "white" and people classified as "colored". The Lovings appealed their conviction to the Supreme Court of Virginia, which upheld it. They then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which agreed to hear their case.
In June 1967, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision in the Lovings' favor and overturned their convictions. Its decision struck down Virginia's anti-miscegenation law and ended all race-based legal restrictions on marriage in the United States. Virginia had argued that its law was not a violation of the Equal Protection Clause because the punishment was the same regardless of the offender's race, and thus it "equally burdened" both whites and non-whites. The Court found that the law nonetheless violated the Equal Protection Clause because it was based solely on "distinctions drawn according to race" and outlawed conduct—namely, getting married—that was otherwise generally accepted and which citizens were free to do.
Contents
Background
Anti-miscegenation laws in the United States
Anti-miscegenation laws had been in place in certain states since colonial days. In the Reconstruction Era in 1865, the Black Codes across the seven states of the lower South made interracial marriage illegal. The new Republican legislatures in six states repealed the restrictive laws. By 1894, when the Democratic Party in the South returned to power, restrictions were reimposed.
A major concern was how to draw the line between black and white in a society in which white men had many children with enslaved black women. On the one hand, a person's reputation as black or white was usually what mattered in practice. On the other hand, most laws used a "one drop of blood" rule, which meant that one black ancestor made a person black in the view of the law. In 1967, 16 states still retained anti-miscegenation laws, mainly in the American South.
Plaintiffs
Mildred Delores Loving was the daughter of Musial (Byrd) Jeter and Theoliver Jeter. She self-identified as Indian-Rappahannock, but was also reported as being of Cherokee, Portuguese, and African American ancestry. During the trial, it seemed clear that she identified herself as black, especially as far as her own lawyer was concerned. However, upon her arrest, the police report identified her as "Indian".
Richard Perry Loving was a white man, the son of Lola (Allen) Loving and Twillie Loving. Their families both lived in Caroline County, Virginia, which adhered to strict Jim Crow segregation laws, but their town of Central Point had been a visible mixed-race community since the 19th century. The couple met in high school and fell in love.
Mildred became pregnant, and in June 1958, the couple traveled to Washington, D.C. to marry, thereby evading Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which made marriage between whites and non-whites a crime. A few weeks after they returned to Central Point, local police raided their home in the early morning hours of July 11, 1958. When the officers entered the building, Mildred pointed out their marriage certificate on the bedroom wall. They were told the certificate was not valid in Virginia.
Precedents
Before Loving v. Virginia, there had been several cases on the subject of interracial relations. Within the state of Virginia, on October 3, 1878, in Kinney v. The Commonwealth, the Supreme Court of Virginia ruled that the marriage legalized in Washington, D.C. between Andrew Kinney, a black man, and Mahala Miller, a white woman, was "invalid" in Virginia.
In Kirby v. Kirby (1921), Mr. Kirby asked the state of Arizona for an annulment of his marriage. He charged that his marriage was invalid because his wife was of "negro" descent, thus violating the state's anti-miscegenation law. The Arizona Supreme Court judged Mrs. Kirby's race by observing her physical characteristics and determined that she was of mixed race, therefore granting Mr. Kirby's annulment.
In the Monks case (Estate of Monks, 4. Civ. 2835, Records of California Court of Appeals, Fourth district), the Superior Court of San Diego County in 1939 decided to invalidate the marriage of Marie Antoinette and Allan Monks because she was deemed to have "one eighth negro blood". The court case involved a legal challenge over the conflicting wills that had been left by the late Allan Monks; an old one in favor of a friend named Ida Lee, and a newer one in favor of his wife. Lee's lawyers charged that the marriage of the Monkses, which had taken place in Arizona, was invalid under Arizona state law because Marie Antoinette was "a Negro" and Alan had been white. Despite conflicting testimony by various expert witnesses, the judge defined Mrs. Monks' race by relying on the anatomical "expertise" of a surgeon. The judge ignored the arguments of an anthropologist and a biologist that it was impossible to tell a person's race from physical characteristics.
Monks then challenged the Arizona anti-miscegenation law itself, taking her case to the California Court of Appeals, Fourth District. Monks' lawyers pointed out that the anti-miscegenation law effectively prohibited Monks as a mixed-race person from marrying anyone: "As such, she is prohibited from marrying a negro or any descendant of a negro, a Mongolian or an Indian, a Malay or a Hindu, or any descendants of any of them. Likewise ... as a descendant of a negro she is prohibited from marrying a Caucasian or a descendant of a Caucasian." The Arizona anti-miscegenation statute thus prohibited Monks from contracting a valid marriage in Arizona, and was therefore an unconstitutional constraint on her liberty. However, the court dismissed this argument as inapplicable, because the case presented involved not two mixed-race spouses but a mixed-race and a white spouse: "Under the facts presented the appellant does not have the benefit of assailing the validity of the statute." Dismissing Monks' appeal in 1942, the United States Supreme Court refused to reopen the issue.
The turning point came with Perez v. Sharp (1948), also known as Perez v. Lippold. In Perez, the Supreme Court of California recognized that bans on interracial marriage violated the Fourteenth Amendment of the Federal Constitution.
Supreme Court decision
On June 12, 1967, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous 9–0 decision in favor of the Lovings that overturned their criminal convictions and struck down Virginia's anti-miscegenation law. The Court's opinion was written by chief justice Earl Warren, and all the justices joined it.
The Court first addressed whether Virginia's Racial Integrity Act violated the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause, which reads: "nor shall any State ... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." Virginia officials had argued that the Act did not violate the Equal Protection Clause because it "equally burdened" both whites and non-whites, since the punishment for violating the statute was the same regardless of the offender's race; for example, a white person who married a black person was subject to the same penalties as a black person who married a white person.
The Court had accepted this "equal burden" argument 84 years earlier in its 1883 decision Pace v. Alabama. But in Loving, the Court rejected the argument.
[W]e reject the notion that the mere "equal application" of a statute containing racial classifications is enough to remove the classifications from the Fourteenth Amendment's proscription of all invidious racial discriminations ....
...
The State [of Virginia] finds support for its "equal application" theory in the decision of the Court in Pace v. Alabama. ... However, as recently as the 1964 Term, in rejecting the reasoning of that case, we stated "Pace represents a limited view of the Equal Protection Clause which has not withstood analysis in the subsequent decisions of this Court."
The Court said that because the Virginia Racial Integrity Act used racial classification as a basis for imposing criminal culpability, the Equal Protection Clause required the Court to strictly scrutinize the Act's provisions.
There can be no question but that Virginia's miscegenation statutes rest solely upon distinctions drawn according to race. The statutes proscribe generally accepted conduct if engaged in by members of different races. Over the years, this Court has consistently repudiated "[d]istinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry" as being "odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality." At the very least, the Equal Protection Clause demands that racial classifications, especially suspect in criminal statutes, be subjected to the "most rigid scrutiny."
Applying the strict scrutiny standard of review, the Court determined that the Act had no discernible purpose other than "invidious racial discrimination" designed to "maintain White Supremacy", and it therefore ruled that the Act violated the Equal Protection Clause.
There is patently no legitimate overriding purpose independent of invidious racial discrimination which justifies this classification. The fact that Virginia prohibits only interracial marriages involving white persons demonstrates that the racial classifications must stand on their own justification, as measures designed to maintain White Supremacy. We have consistently denied the constitutionality of measures which restrict the rights of citizens on account of race. There can be no doubt that restricting the freedom to marry solely because of racial classifications violates the central meaning of the Equal Protection Clause.
The Court ended its opinion with a short section holding that Virginia's anti-miscegenation law also violated the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause. The Court said that the freedom to marry is a fundamental constitutional right, and it held that depriving Americans of it on an arbitrary basis such as race was unconstitutional.
These statutes also deprive the Lovings of liberty without due process of law in violation of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.
Marriage is one of the "basic civil rights of man," fundamental to our very existence and survival. To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law.
Effects
For interracial marriage
- Further information: Interracial marriage in the United States
Despite the Supreme Court's decision, anti-miscegenation laws remained on the books in several states, although the decision had made them unenforceable. State judges in Alabama continued to enforce its anti-miscegenation statute until 1970, when the Nixon administration obtained a ruling from a U.S. District Court in United States v. Brittain. In 2000, Alabama became the last state to adapt its laws to the Supreme Court's decision, when 60% of voters endorsed a constitutional amendment, Amendment 2, that removed anti-miscegenation language from the state constitution.
After Loving v. Virginia, the number of interracial marriages continued to increase across the United States and in the South. In Georgia, for instance, the number of interracial marriages increased from 21 in 1967 to 115 in 1970. At the national level, 0.4% of marriages were interracial in 1960, 2.0% in 1980, 12% in 2013, and 16% in 2015, almost 50 years after Loving.
In popular culture
In the United States, June 12, the date of the decision, has become known as Loving Day, an annual unofficial celebration of interracial marriages. In 2014, Mildred Loving was honored as one of the Library of Virginia's "Virginia Women in History". In 2017, the Virginia Department of Historic Resources dedicated a state historical marker, which tells the story of the Lovings, outside the Patrick Henry Building in Richmond – the former site of the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals.
The story of the Lovings became the basis of several films:
- The first, Mr. and Mrs. Loving (1996), was written and directed by Richard Friedenberg and starred Lela Rochon, Timothy Hutton, and Ruby Dee. According to Mildred Loving, "not much of it was very true. The only part of it right was I had three children."
- Nancy Buirski's documentary The Loving Story, premiered on HBO in February 2012 and won a Peabody Award that year.
- Loving, a dramatized telling of the story based on Buirski's documentary, was released in 2016. It was directed by Jeff Nichols and starred Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton as the Lovings. Negga received an Academy Award nomination for her performance.
- A four-part film, The Loving Generation, premiered on Topic.com in February 2018. Directed and produced by Lacey Schwartz Delgado and Mehret Mandefro, it explores the lives of biracial children born after the Loving decision.
In music, Nanci Griffith's 2009 album The Loving Kind is named for the Lovings and includes a song about them. Satirist Roy Zimmerman's 2009 song "The Summer of Loving" is about the Lovings and their 1967 case. The title is a reference to the Summer of Love.
A 2015 novel by the French journalist Gilles Biassette, L'amour des Loving ("The Love of the Lovings", ISBN: 978-2917559598), recounts the life of the Lovings and their case. A photo-essay about the couple by Grey Villet, created just before the case, was republished in 2017.
See also
In Spanish: Caso Loving contra Virginia para niños
