The History Of Interracial Marriage: Tell the Court I Love My Wife

It's Friday, June twelfth. Fifty nine years ago today, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that laws banning interracial marriage were unconstitutional. The case was called Loving v. Virginia, and yes, that was the couple's real name. Richard Loving was white. Mildred Jeter was Black and Native American. They grew up together in Central Point, Virginia, a rural community where Black and white families lived side by side and nobody seemed to mind, fell in love, drove to Washington DC to get married in 1958, came home, and were arrested in their bedroom at 2 AM by the county sheriff, who had received an anonymous tip. They were charged with violating Virginia's Racial Integrity Act. The judge who sentenced them wrote that "Almighty God created the races and placed them on separate continents, and the fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix." That was 1959. The questions I kept coming back to while researching this are the ones that matter more than the case itself: where did laws like this come from? Was it religion? Was it something else? And what incentive does anyone in power ever have to get rid of a law that the majority of voters support? The first anti-miscegenation law in America was passed in Maryland in 1661. It wasn't about God or morality. It was about property.

The colonies ran on slavery, and slavery ran on a legal fiction: that one category of people could be owned by another. For that system to work, the categories had to be rigid. You needed to be able to look at a person and know whether they were property or not. Interracial marriage threatened that clarity. If a white woman married an enslaved Black man, what was the legal status of their children? Free, because the mother was free? Or enslaved, because the father was property? The ambiguity was intolerable to a system that depended on certainty about who was human and who was merchandise.

Maryland's 1661 law solved the problem by banning the marriage entirely. Virginia followed in 1662 with a law declaring that a child's status, free or enslaved, would follow the mother, which reversed English common law where status followed the father. This meant that slaveholders who fathered children with enslaved women produced children who were born into slavery, adding to the slaveholder's property. The law turned reproduction into an economic engine for the slaveholding class, while white women who married Black men could be fined, banished, or forced into indentured servitude. The laws weren't protecting the sanctity of marriage. They were protecting the economic system that needed racial categories to stay fixed.

Here's a detail that puts it in perspective: there was no ban on interracial marriage in England at the time. These laws were an American invention. By the time of the Civil War, most states had some version of them. After Reconstruction, when southern states regained political control, the laws came roaring back with new intensity.

Religion entered the picture later, mostly as justification for a system that was already in place. The eugenics movement of the early twentieth century added pseudo-scientific arguments about racial purity. Virginia's 1924 Racial Integrity Act, the law the Lovings were charged under, was explicitly tied to the eugenics movement and required every Virginian to be classified as either "white" or "colored" at birth. The religious language that Judge Leon Bazile (bah-ZEEL) used in sentencing the Lovings, the stuff about God separating the races on different continents, was a moral veneer painted over an economic and political structure that had been running for three hundred years. Richard and Mildred weren't activists. They weren't trying to make a political statement. They were a couple from a small town who wanted to be married and couldn't understand why the state had an opinion about it. Central Point, where they grew up, was actually a mixed-race community where interracial couples were common and accepted. The Lovings weren't unusual in their own town. The state was the one with the problem, not their neighbors.

They got married in DC on June 2, 1958, because DC had no anti-miscegenation law. They returned home to Caroline County, Virginia, and five weeks later the sheriff showed up at their bedroom door at 2 AM, acting on a tip. Richard pointed to the marriage certificate on the wall. The sheriff told him it wasn't valid in Virginia. They were arrested, charged with violating the Racial Integrity Act, and each pleaded guilty to "cohabiting as man and wife, against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth." Judge Bazile sentenced them to one year in prison, suspended on the condition that they leave Virginia and not return together for twenty five years.

They moved to DC and were miserable. They missed their families. They missed their home. They had three children in a small apartment in a city they hadn't chosen. In 1963, Mildred wrote a letter to Attorney General Robert Kennedy asking for help. Kennedy referred her to the American Civil Liberties Union, which took the case. Two young ACLU lawyers, Bernard Cohen and Philip Hirschkop (HIRSH-cop), argued the case through the Virginia courts and eventually to the Supreme Court.

When Cohen asked Richard Loving if he had a message for the justices, Loving said: "Tell the court I love my wife." That was it. No legal theory. No political argument. Just the simplest possible statement from a man who wanted to go home with his family.

On June 12, 1967, the Court ruled unanimously. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote: "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. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State." Sixteen states had anti-miscegenation laws on the books when the ruling came down. All sixteen were struck in a single decision. The question that's harder to answer than "was this wrong" is "why did it take three hundred years to fix?"

Anti-miscegenation laws existed in some form from 1661 to 1967. That's over three centuries. For most of that time, they were popular. In 1958, the year the Lovings were arrested, a Gallup poll found that only four percent of Americans approved of interracial marriage. Four percent. The Lovings weren't a silent majority waiting for a court to speak for them. They were a tiny minority that most of the country opposed.

This is the uncomfortable reality about laws that protect civil rights: the people who need the protection are almost never the people with the political power to enact it. Lawmakers respond to majorities. They respond to donors. They respond to the voters who will show up in the next election. When ninety six percent of voters oppose interracial marriage, no state legislator is introducing a bill to legalize it. The political incentive runs entirely in the other direction: you get votes by defending the ban, not by challenging it.

That's why the Supreme Court had to do it. The democratic process, left to itself, would not have produced this outcome in 1967, and probably not for decades after. The Court's role in cases like Loving is to say that some rights aren't subject to majority approval, that the Constitution protects individuals even when the majority would prefer it didn't. That's a powerful idea and a controversial one, because it means nine unelected judges overrode the will of sixteen state legislatures and the preferences of ninety six percent of voters. Whether you think that's the Court doing its job or overstepping its authority probably depends on whether you were the one being arrested at 2 AM.

And even after the Court ruled, the resistance continued. South Carolina didn't officially remove its anti-miscegenation provision from the state constitution until 1998. Alabama didn't remove its provision until 2000, thirty three years after Loving, and forty percent of Alabama voters voted to keep it. The law was unenforceable, but four out of ten voters wanted it on the books anyway.

Today, roughly twenty percent of new marriages in the United States are interracial. Approval of interracial marriage is above ninety four percent, a near-complete reversal from the four percent in 1958. The shift didn't happen because lawmakers led. It happened because people like the Lovings lived their lives, courts protected their right to do so, and the culture slowly, generationally, caught up. Richard Loving died in a car accident in 1975. Mildred lived until 2008. She never remarried. On the fortieth anniversary of the ruling, she released a rare public statement: "I believe all Americans, no matter their race, no matter their sex, no matter their sexual orientation, should have that same freedom to marry. I am still not a political person, but I am proud that Richard's and my name is on a court case that can help reinforce the love, the commitment, the fairness, and the family that so many people, black or white, young or old, gay or straight, seek in life. I support the freedom to marry for all." So if this comes up in conversation, here's how to think about it. Fifty nine years ago today, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that banning interracial marriage was unconstitutional. The case was Loving v. Virginia, brought by a couple named Richard and Mildred Loving who had been arrested in their bedroom at 2 AM for the crime of being married to each other. Anti-miscegenation laws weren't originally religious. They were economic, designed to keep racial categories rigid so the slavery system could function. Religion and eugenics were layered on later as justification. These laws existed for over three hundred years and were supported by ninety six percent of Americans as recently as 1958. They were struck down not by lawmakers but by the Supreme Court, because no politician had an incentive to challenge a law the majority supported. Alabama didn't remove its ban from the state constitution until 2000, and forty percent voted to keep it. Today, interracial marriage approval is above ninety four percent. The culture caught up. It just took sixty years and a couple who wanted nothing more than to go home.

Stay informed, stay curious, and we'll see you Monday.