Mildred and Richard Loving were jailed and banished for marrying in 1958. Nearly a decade later, their Supreme Court case changed the meaning of marriage equality in the United States — decriminalizing their own marriage while they were at it. This is the story of Loving.
Our guests are Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui of the U.S. District Court for Washington, D.C. and Farrah Parkes and Brad Linder of The Loving Project.
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Episode Segments
Transcript
Loving v Virginia_DRAFT3.mp3
Adia Samba-Quee: [00:00:00] Civics 101 is supported in part by the Corporation For Public Broadcasting.
Mildred Loving: [00:00:05] And if if we do win we will be helping a lot of people, and I knew we have -- I knew we have some enemies, but we have some friends, too.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:16] Richard and Mildred Loving were newlyweds.
Mildred Loving: [00:00:19] I said I think that marrying who you want to is a right that no man should have anything to do with.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:24] They had known each other since they were kids. They grew up neighbors in Caroline County, Virginia.
Mildred Loving: [00:00:30] My Husband's father, he gave us a acre of land, right across the road. And that's where we're meant to build. And I'll be close to my mother and he'll be close to his family.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:40] They dated off and on for years before deciding to finally get married. In July of 1958 they'd been married for about five weeks. Mildred was pregnant with their first child together. At two a.m. on July 11th. The Lovings were asleep in their bed in their small home when they heard someone at the door and suddenly the front door was broken down. Police officers burst into their bedroom. They shined their flashlights into the Lovings' eyes
Richard Loving: [00:01:14] And they came one night and they knocked a couple of times. I remember before I could get up, you know, they just broke the door and come on in. And when we got up, they're standing beside the bed. With flashlights.
Mildred Loving: [00:01:28] They asked Richard, who was a woman he was sleeping with. I said I'm his wife and the sheriff said not here you're not.
Nick Capodice: [00:01:38] What what did the sheriff mean by not here you're not?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:42] Good question.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:43] This is Civics 101. I'm Hannah McCarthy.
Nick Capodice: [00:01:46] I'm Nick Capodice.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:47] And the answer to that is the story of Loving versus Virginia, the landmark Supreme Court case that determined whether a state could criminalize the act of marriage between a person of color and a white person, which is exactly the kind of couple Mildred and Richard Loving were.
Judge Zia Faruqui: [00:02:05] You have Richard Loving and Mildred Loving, and they can't get married in Virginia.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:02:10] This is Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui of the District Court of Washington, D.C.
Judge Zia Faruqui: [00:02:15] They secretly go right to the Las Vegas, apparently of the East Coast, Washington, D.C., and get married. I can only imagine by an Elvis impersonator. And so they get married in the quiet of night and then returned to Virginia.
Mildred Loving: [00:02:29] You know, we went to Washington to be married. And I guess that's why, you know, we went there. People had been mixing all the time. So I didn't know any different. I didn't know there was a law against it, you know, and white and colored went to school different and things like that. They couldn't go in the same restaurant. And I knew that. But I didn't realize how bad it was until we got married.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:00] By the way, that is the voice of Mildred loving herself from an interview in the late sixties.
Nick Capodice: [00:03:05] And when Mildred says she didn't know how bad it was, she means until officers burst into her home and told her she was not legally Richard's wife.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:13] Not only you're not his wife, he's not your husband, but you're arrested for committing a crime. Richard and Mildred were living in violation of the Virginia State Racial Integrity Act of 1924.
Judge Zia Faruqui: [00:03:26] The Virginia statute has said that, you know, the punishment, you know, miscegenation is the term for it, which no one obviously ever says now or probably even then because it's such a mouthful, but that the statute says punishment for marriage. If any white person intermarriages with a colored person or any colored person, intermarriage with a white person, he shall be guilty of a felony and shall be punished by confinement in the penitentiary for not less than one year and not more than five years.
Nick Capodice: [00:03:52] Hannah can I clarify something. It sounds like this law pertains specifically to people of color marrying white people, not to people of color marrying other people of color. Right. So in calling this the Racial Integrity Act, what it actually is, is a white purity act.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:04:10] Yes. The whole idea was to protect and preserve whiteness.
Judge Zia Faruqui: [00:04:14] You can be black and Hispanic person, and that would be totally OK. But you cannot be white and marry someone who is black or Hispanic and vice versa. And it has a criminal penalty. Right. So, you know, I think most people, when they hear this exist, they would think like, oh, they probably just invalidate your marriage license. Right. But this isn't that right? This isn't even a fine. This is we are going to put you in prison, imprison you for marrying someone if you are one of the two partners is white. And that's pretty severe.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:04:45] The act prevented intermarriage from happening in the state because it required that birth certificates, either to find someone is white or is quote unquote colored your only white. If for as far back as you could look in your family's history, your ancestry was white. The one exception, which is called the Pocahontas clause, allowed for one sixteenth or less of American Indian ancestry, everyone else was quote unquote colored. If an interracial couple that included a white person wanted a marriage license, that was not going to happen in Virginia. And even if you got married elsewhere, once back home, you better lay low. Still, Richard and Mildred knew of interracial couples in their own community who were left alone. Somebody had decided to make an example of them.
Richard Loving: [00:05:40] It's a lot of them down here but we're the only ones who have been bothered by it. It's a lot of the same down here.
Interviewer: [00:05:44] Is that right?
Richard Loving: [00:05:45] Yeah. Let's see, just it just some people that didn't like it they just talk, see, and started the dog rolling.
Interviewer: [00:05:53] Do you know any other couples who are in the same situation?
Richard Loving: [00:05:56] Yeah, I know some but I wouldn't like call them names.
Interviewer: [00:06:00] I just wondered if you did.
Richard Loving: [00:06:02] Yeah, I know a few.
Interviewer: [00:06:04] I wonder why they picked on you then?
Richard Loving: [00:06:08] I don't know, I'll never find out. Somebody talked.
Judge Zia Faruqui: [00:06:13] This was like a sting where they go and they were trying to catch them, you know, having adult relations in the middle in the law, I think to say inflagrante delicto. Right. And so they come in there, they have this sting, the raid, they go in there and in fact, they were just asleep and they wake them up and say, you know, you're under arrest.
Nick Capodice: [00:06:32] So what happened? Did the police really drag them out of their home in the middle of the night?
Mildred Loving: [00:06:36] And anyway they carried us to Bowling Green, locked us up and in January they had the trial and told us to leave the state for 25 years,
Nick Capodice: [00:06:47] So they're told to leave the state.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:06:48] The judge who sentenced them, Leon Bazile, commuted their one year prison sentence on the condition that they leave Virginia for 25 years.
Judge Zia Faruqui: [00:06:58] In effect, what happened is that they were banished to Washington, D.C., and that they just had to, you know, try to get their family to come visit them or not. So it's pretty disturbing.
Nick Capodice: [00:07:08] What did the Lovings do? Is this the moment when they decided to fight the ruling?
Judge Zia Faruqui: [00:07:12] They plead guilty because they're just like, again, this is just such a ludicrous, you know, proposition like, is this really worth fighting for? Because it just seems so silly. And so they're like, fine, we'll just leave Virginia and move to D.C., which is a D.C. resident who is in a mixed race marriage. I was very appreciative to see, you know, my forbearers from Washington, D.C. were already ahead of the curve.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:07:35] The Lovings leave behind their family and friends and move to Washington, D.C., the place where they were married. But it's expensive and it's a far cry from the expansive countryside where they had lived their whole lives.
Mildred Loving: [00:07:48] The children didn't have anywhere to play. They would like being caged. And I couldn't stand it. I couldn't take it.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:07:57] They couldn't visit their family in Virginia if they went together. In fact, they were arrested a second time during a visit home.
Judge Zia Faruqui: [00:08:05] What how do they handle this and becomes expensive and sort of living in D.C. So ultimately they decide, you know, we need help and they write to Attorney General Robert Kennedy and that he apparently responded and said, yeah, you should go to the ACLU. And you know that they maybe have some attorneys that can help you litigate this. And, you know, I was a prosecutor myself for a while. I don't think I ever got myself a little in the attorney general letters of request for assistance and they referred him out. But that's, you know, amazing that and to credit to Attorney General Robert Kennedy.
Bernard Cohen: [00:08:36] Who's the date. So we can be sure that was June 20th, 1963, and they were living in Washington, D.C. at the time.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:08:42] This is Bernard Cohen, one of the ACLU lawyers who ended up taking Mildred in Richard's case. This is from footage taken the same year that the case went to court. He's reading Mildred's letter to Bobby Kennedy.
Bernard Cohen: [00:08:53] Dear sir, I am writing to you concerning a problem we have. Five years ago, my husband and I were married here in the district. We then returned to Virginia to live. My husband is white, I am part Negro and part Indian. At the time, we did not know there was a law in Virginia against mixed marriages. Therefore we were jailed and tried in a little town of Bowling Green. We were to leave the state to make our home. We have three children and cannot afford an attorney. We wrote to the attorney general. He suggested that we get in touch with you for advice. Please help us if you can hope to hear from your real soon. Yours truly, Mr. and Mrs. Richard Loving. And it was that simple letter that got us into this not so simple case.
Nick Capodice: [00:09:38] I would imagine that every Supreme Court case is not so simple. So is the Loving's case somehow more so?
Judge Zia Faruqui: [00:09:45] It's a kind of a hard position to go back and vacate something that someone does that was knowing intelligent and voluntary. Right. Like they chose to plead guilty. And so withdrawing your guilty plea are trying to essentially vacated. That is procedurally pretty difficult.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:10:01] It's a lot of effort on the part of the ACLU lawyers, but they eventually figure out a way to get the Lovings case moving through the courts. They ask the original judge, Judge Bazile, to vacate, basically undo the conviction that ordered the Lovings to leave the state for 25 years. But Bazile doesn't do that.
Judge Zia Faruqui: [00:10:20] Pretty you know, disturbingly, he issues his opinion and he says the judge Bazile says that, quote, Almighty God created the races, white, black, yellow, Malay and red. And he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with this arrangement, there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to end quote. And so obviously, this judge was not sympathetic to the Loving's claims. And so they then appeal their case. And it goes to the Virginia Supreme Court.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:10:55] The Lovings lawyers Philip Hirschkop and Bernard Cohen brainstorm a game plan. Are they going for irreparable injury, for denial of basic rights?
Bernard Cohen: [00:11:06] What are the things that can only be done together by man and wife that they can do in Virginia? They can't come visit her parents together.
Law team: [00:11:14] or their friends.
Phillip Hirschkop: [00:11:16] Children, can't live with them and go to school.
Law team: [00:11:18] Breaking up the family ought to be irreparable injury, if anything.
Phillip Hirschkop: [00:11:21] This is strictly a segregation problem. And the Supreme Supreme Court has said time and again the federal courts have the right to protect federal rights, but it's a federal right to talk about that.
Bernard Cohen: [00:11:33] Let's go back to the office and get thing on paper.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:11:35] Ultimately, the Lovings lawyers argue that because Plessy versus Ferguson and separate but equal has been overturned in Brown vs. Board of Education, because due process of law and equal protection under the 14th Amendment in race cases has been upheld. The Virginia statute banning interracial marriage between white people and people of color is unconstitutional.
Judge Zia Faruqui: [00:11:56] So you would think in this instance you're going to get a good decision from the Virginia Supreme Court, but certainly that is not what happened. The Virginia Supreme Court says the ban is still appropriate.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:12:06] Basically, the court says that regardless of Plessy vs. Ferguson being overturned, the state can still use its powers to protect its citizens. Now, just because it can't use those powers to enforce school segregation, that doesn't mean it can't use them against interracial marriage because interracial marriage is considered bad for certain states citizens.
Judge Zia Faruqui: [00:12:29] There was the underpinnings of the question in terms of banning interracial marriage came from a, quote, legislative determination that there was a great deal of evidence. Now, on the podcast, people can't see, but I'm super passive aggressively putting evidence and air quotes, but quote unquote, evidence to support that intermarriage between people of color and white people is, quote, incompatible with the general welfare and therefore a proper subject for regulation under police power. And so this is the way they came to and said, yeah, Plessy said you couldn't use police power to separate students in a school. But that doesn't mean that you can't use police power to still do things to protect the community, to make sure that on racial lines it just means you can't do it for school.
Nick Capodice: [00:13:15] And presumably now that it's been denied in a state supreme court, this case can finally be appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States.
SCOTUS archival: [00:13:22] Number 395, Richard Perry Loving et al versus Virginia.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:13:34] The Supreme Court takes the case.
Phillip Hirschkop: [00:13:36] Mr. Chief Justice, associate justice may please the court. We will divide the argument accordingly. I will handle the equal protection argument as we view it. Mr. Cohen argued the due process argument. You have before you today we consider the most odious of the segregation laws and the slavery laws and our view of this law. We hope to clearly show that that is slavery law.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:14:03] Cohen and Hirschkop argue that the Virginia Racial Integrity Act violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, which is made a little simpler by the fact that that is exactly what Chief Justice Earl Warren asked them to do.
Judge Zia Faruqui: [00:14:19] We like to call this in the law a quote, a leading question a little bit. And so here's what question is. Whether a statutory scheme adopted by the state of Virginia to prevent marriages between persons solely on the basis of racial classification violates the equal protection and due process clause, the 14th Amendment. Yeah, that that's pretty self-evident. So, you know, when it's teed up like that, when you get cert, you're at the Warren Court, I think you're feeling pretty good.
Nick Capodice: [00:14:45] And what's the argument coming from Virginia?
Judge Zia Faruqui: [00:14:47] So this is a book by Dr. Albert Gordon, and he talked about the negative effects of interracial marriage on society, calling him, quote, undesirable and saying that they, quote, hold no promise for a bright and happy future for mankind, unquote. And so there definitely was this idea that the marriage itself but then always right. Like this is the same thing. And always in marriage equality, it's the same thing, then the same things. Later idea ideas like, oh, the poor children who will be victimized by this, you know, what's going to happen to them. And so the Virginia lawyers talk about this in their briefs to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:15:21] Lawyer Robert McIlwaine argued for the state of Virginia and his argument swirls around the same principle that the Virginia Supreme Court insisted upon. That the state could protect its citizens and because interracial marriage resulted in negative home environments, the state ought to prevent those marriages from happening.
Robert McIlwaine: [00:15:41] Intermarried families are subjected to much greater pressures and problems. It is not infrequent that the children of intermarried parents are referred to not merely as the children of intermarried parents, but as the victims of intermarried parents and as the models of intermarriage.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:16:01] It also argued, by the way, that because both the person of color and the white person in these cases was punished, it was equal punishment and so not unequal.
Robert McIlwaine: [00:16:11] The prohibition works both ways. You say a man that is prohibited from marrying into another race feels inferior. The prohibition also prohibits a white person to marry a colored person. [unintelligible]
Hannah McCarthy: [00:16:23] And I want to point out Cohen and Hirschkop hammer home not to the fact that this is a violation of equal protection under the law, not just the fact that the Virginia law violated the due process clause of the 14th Amendment, but also the fact that Richard and Mildred Loving loved each other.
Bernard Cohen: [00:16:39] And that is the right of Richard and Mildred Loving to wake up in the morning or to go to sleep at night knowing that the sheriff will not be knocking on their door or shining a light in their face in the privacy of their bedroom or illicit cohabitation. The Lovings have the right to go to sleep at night knowing that should not should they not awake in the morning, their children would have the right to inherit from them under intestacy. They have the right to be secure in knowing that if they go to sleep and do not wake up in the morning, that one of them, a survivor of them, has the right to Social Security benefits. All of these are denied to them. As I started to say before, no matter how we articulate this, no matter which theory of the due process clause or which emphasis we attach to, no one can articulate it better than Richard Loving. When he said to me, Mr. Cohen, tell the court I love my wife and it is just unfair that I can't live with her in Virginia.
Nick Capodice: [00:17:44] I have to imagine standing before the Warren Court, the same court that had just declared racial segregation in schools unconstitutional. Virginia had its work cut out for them, and these ACLU lawyers were in pretty good shape arguing against this racist principle before Earl Warren. So what did the court end up ruling?
Judge Zia Faruqui: [00:18:04] The Supreme Court says the Warren Court says the reasoning behind them is, quote, obviously an endorsement of the doctrine of white supremacy, close quote. Right. So there you go. You know, you could have written the opinion in like one page. And, you know, and I think Justice Warren is doing that and he's like, let's just let's call this what it is. The court ultimately says, like, look, we're not looking at this after analysis of what happens afterwards and who's harmed does not harm. We're looking at the beginning part. We don't need to get in to see who's better. This is just wrong. It's white supremacy and it's it it is against the equal protection clause.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:18:36] And that could be enough. Right. But Earl Warren doesn't stop there.
Judge Zia Faruqui: [00:18:40] But what's super interesting is that they have at the end of the session, like put a put a rainbow start asterisks next to this. They make a due process. Also, rights to the Fourteenth Amendment has is two parts. You have to have equal protection law. But there's also due process. When you think of that normally is like I have to be able to have a you know, come to court. I have to have a judge there. I need to have my, you know, a lawyer there and things like that. But the court does say very briefly, you know, hey, marriage is a civil right and the Lovings are being denied of this freedom because they are being denied of liberty without due process of law.
Nick Capodice: [00:19:12] Ok, so is the court saying antimiscegenation laws, laws banning interracial marriage are unconstitutional, full stop?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:19:19] That's right. Now, at the time this case was argued, 16 states had laws banning the marriage of a white person to a person of color. The opinion written by Warren calls these laws, quote, odious to a free people and said the Virginia Racial Integrity Act had no legitimate purpose, quote, independent of invidious racial discrimination.
Nick Capodice: [00:19:40] Hannah How long did it take for all states to eliminate antimiscegenation practices?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:19:46] The last state to eliminate antimiscegenation law from their books was Alabama in 2000. Now, law is not the same thing as practice. Still, it took over 30 years to scrub this form of white supremacy from all of the books.
Judge Zia Faruqui: [00:20:05] It is shocking that it took to the year 2000 for Alabama to become the last state to adopt that decision, and that what's even more shocking is it was a ballot initiative, right? Like that. People had to go out and vote as to whether or not it was OK for me to marry my wife.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:20:22] Judge Faruqui pointed out that antimiscegenation law probably was not enforced, even in states that still had laws like that on the books. Terms of implementation, it wasn't like eliminating segregation in schools. There were no tactical bussing questions to address, no public education funding to reappropriate. This was about a personal decision between two people
Judge Zia Faruqui: [00:20:45] Not to be cheesy, but black and white. Right. Like you just can't get married. And so it was, I think, a lot easier to implement, certainly, than Brown or something like that. But you see that it there were, you know, the the poison or the animus behind it. It's still lingered and went on.
Nick Capodice: [00:21:05] Yeah, to that point, Hannah, that the lingering on and not just the poison, but the positive legacy as well, how did Loving v. Virginia change life in the U.S.?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:21:16] Well, I feel like a testament to Loving's legacy really shines. In this podcast, I discovered it's called The Loving Project. It was made by a married couple, Farah Parks and Brad Linder, put together in twenty seventeen.
Farrah Parkes: [00:21:30] So Brad and I got married in between the summer between my two years of grad school and that fall in my family law and social policy, I learned about Loving v. Virginia and was just struck by how recent it was.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:21:45] Farrah and Brad are an interracial couple and it occurred to them that they could just interview other interracial couples about being together, that that was the best way to commemorate the decision that allowed certain interracial couples to get married in the first place. And they interviewed couples who had been married for a few months and couples who had been married for 50 years. So in terms of what life might have been like for an interracial couple immediately after loving
Farrah Parkes: [00:22:12] The couple that got married the year after, loving and, you know, met in the South, he was at Vanderbilt, she was at Fisk. And and to think of the bravery they had to have shown and Florence, you know, pretty fierce, but it's like a big teddy bear, you know. And he tells a story about the time when he bought a gun because he could see people following them on the highway. And, you know, Laura Knoy found out later and was like, we're not doing that, just the fact that they persevered through all of that and also just the fact that they were forced into these, you know, sort of hard decisions like buying and carrying a gun. You know, this really just sweet, affable guy sitting in front of you being like, well, I was going to get a gun to protect my life and my family. You know, it was just so powerful to hear that and and also to just have seen them come out on the other side and just, you know, be happy and successful in their kids and grandkids. And they're my heroes.
Nick Capodice: [00:23:19] So for this couple who are only able to marry because of Loving v. Virginia, that case is a seminal moment in their lives. And they lived through what that decision and other civil rights decisions could not do, which is to magically eliminate racism and its threats in the U.S.. But I want to know about newly married interracial couples. Did they think about Loving what it did or what it didn't do?
Farrah Parkes: [00:23:43] It was definitely a bigger deal for the older couples because they had just been so much sentir about, you know, social center as well as, you know, the loving decision being recent. But in terms of anybody that got married, you know, like after 1980 or so, I'm not sure it was there was necessarily necessarily a variation. I do think that the gay couples like because they because same sex marriage was so new, loving was a bigger thing in their minds because they also recognized, you know, the ways that this marriage hadn't been legal nationwide until 2015. You know, that there were precedents for that.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:24:26] And as far as walking through life as an interracial couple and confronting racism together, Farrah and Brad told me that, of course, that did come up in a lot of interviews.
Brad Linder: [00:24:37] People did sort of learn how to walk through the world together as a couple and deal with the fact that they might not be always seen the same way by other people.
Farrah Parkes: [00:24:49] Yeah. And just sort of developing, you know, a greater understanding of racial dynamics in this country. Not that, you know, they are the white partner is completely, you know, cleansed of all, you know, sort of the racism that everybody walks around in and just inherent everywhere but that they develop a better understanding of what it is that people of color go through. And then also just, you know, the sharing of different cultural traditions.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:25:18] And for Ferrah, part of the reason she wanted to commemorate this case is because it is so recent, because it was a decision made by flesh and blood, men in black robes, men who can change their minds.
Farrah Parkes: [00:25:33] It's scary, actually, I think, to realize that it was so recent. Like if you had asked me before I learned about loving, if there was a time when when people of different races could marry, I would have said yes. But if you had asked me to guess when that ended, I probably would have guessed a lot earlier than 1967 and the fact that it was so. You know, tenuous I mean, you know, the Supreme Court, you know, it is the law of the land, but it's still, you know, the courts can change and and judges change. And so there's also the sense that, you know, these things could change. And it's not sort of enshrined into it's not in the constitution. Right. And it's only in certain states laws. So I think it's scary to think about how. Some people, humanity and some people's rights are really being held on by a thread,
Nick Capodice: [00:26:41] And this brings me, Hannah, to the question we always ask why do we talk about the Supreme Court cases? Why are they important to return to or to celebrate as fair? And Brad did. And I think it's in part because there are moral beings at their core, people who made a decision to preserve a right. And people could make a decision to dismantle that right as well, but either way, the reason they come to that decision is in part based on their being flesh and blood, changeable human beings who see humanity and others. So we talk about these cases to remember what people recognized as a civil right and why they chose to uphold it so that we will know in the future what to point to if that right is challenged.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:27:24] And in the case of Loving v. Virginia in particular, we are talking about a man and a woman who loved one another and wanted to be married, live in the same home, raise their children and the judges who said, yes, that is your right. They didn't just make that decision based on the Constitution. They made it because they heard a story about human beings. And it was a good one, actually. Judge Farooqi brought this up, you know, yes. Judges passed down rulings based on the language of the Constitution. That's where law locates justice and injustice. But a sense of injustice that's also a feeling right and wrong, are defined by our founding documents and by our moral compass. To people, loving one another is not some fun anecdote in oral argument. It's the core of this case. It's part of what makes Loving v. Virginia a landmark case.
Judge Zia Faruqui: [00:28:22] We're not just robots, we're not automatons. We're just sitting and blindly looking. This I bring my life experiences with me to court as a judge, as a person in an interracial marriage. Sure. That comes to mind what would have happened if at the Virginia State Court there was someone who loved a black woman? There's someone who he was you know, he was Native American. Perhaps they would have said like the same result. But at least as they were thinking about it, they think about how does this make the Lovings feel? Right. And so that's my second point as to why this is super important. It's really upsetting. I mean, it really is. I mean, I'm NMI. So I think about most things now in terms of my kids and my daughter, who when she was, I guess, like seven pre pandemic and came back from class, was like, wait, like what happened to black people? I don't understand. You're like, oh my God, I don't even know how to begin this conversation. And I talked about loving. So because it's something that was really easy for me, because it obviously affects us. I was like, you know, there used to be a law that mama mama couldn't get married. And like, why? I was like, that's a good question. And, you know, it's but it is I want not only because of vigilance, but I just want her to appreciate and me to appreciate, like nothing is for granted that we shouldn't take anything for granted and like, hurt has happened and hurt requires, you know, thoughtful reflection upon it. And then also remedies. Right. Like what was a remedy for the Lovings?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:29:44] Richard and Mildred Loving won their case. An interracial couples won the right to marry without persecution. The Lovings raised their kids in Virginia. Richard died in a car crash at the age of 41, a crash that Mildred survived. She died in 2008 at the age of 68. And though neither of these individuals considered themselves history makers, they were only doing what they thought was right. Their case has been cited again and again in marriage equality cases. It was a major precedent case in the decision of Oberg, AFLD v. Hodges in 2016, the case that upheld the right to same sex marriage. Mildred did not live to see that case, but up until the end of her life, she did maintain a sense of right and wrong when it comes to love. Here's what she said on the fortieth anniversary of her court case.
Judge Zia Faruqui: [00:30:33] And so she issues this statement June 2007. She says, My generation was bitterly divided over something that should have been so clear and right. The majority believe that what judge said that it was God's plan to keep people apart and the government should discriminate against people in love. But I have lived long enough now to see big changes. The older generations fears and prejudices have given way in today's young people realize that if someone loves someone, they have a right to marry, surrounded as I am now by wonderful children and grandchildren. Not a day goes by. They don't think of Richard and our love, our right to marry and how much it meant to me that freedom to marry the person precious to me, even if others thought that was the wrong kind of person for me to marry. I believe all Americans, no matter of their race, no matter their sex, no matter their sexual orientation, should have that same freedom to marry. Government has no business imposing some people's religious beliefs over others, especially if it denies people civil rights. I'm still not a political person, but I am proud that Richard 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 that freedom to marry for all. That's what Loving and loving are all about.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:32:11] This episode was produced by me, Hannah McCarthy with Nick Capodice, Christina Philips is our senior producer. Our staff includes Jacqui Fulton and Mitch Schacci. And Erika Janik is our executive producer music in this episode by Chris Zabriskie, Daniel Birch, Xylo Ziko and Crowander. We have so many more resources and so many more episodes. You can find all of them at Civics101podcast.org. And don't forget, you never have to miss a single Civics 101 episode. Follow us on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And while you're there, leave us a review. We want to know what you think of us. And a very special thanks to Rebecca Fanning of the U.S. courts for all of her help, both on this episode and this entire Supreme Court series. Civics 101 supported in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.
