Today is the anniversary of the Supreme Court decision in 1967 in Loving v. Virginia. By unanimous decision the court ruled that Virginia’s law banning interracial marriage violate the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
The case involved Richard Loving, a white man, and his wife Mildred Loving, a woman of color. In 1959, the Lovings were convicted of violating Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which criminalized marriage between people classified as “white” and people classified as “colored”. Caroline County circuit court judge Leon M. Bazile sentenced them to prison but suspended the sentence on the condition that they leave Virginia and not return. The Lovings filed a motion to vacate their convictions on the ground that the Racial Integrity Act was unconstitutional, but Bazile denied it. After unsuccessfully appealing to the Supreme Court of Virginia, the Lovings appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which agreed to hear their case.
According to the Supreme Court:
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.
Coping…
I was saddened to read of the death of Brian Wilson – we all loved his music with the Beach Boys. Here is one of the first songs he wrote to the tune of Chuck Berry’s ‘Sweet Little Sixteeen’. Brian is on the far right in the video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2s4slliAtQU
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