June 12 Is Loving Day- When Interracial Marriage Finally Became Legal in the US: NPR

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- NPR, June 12, 2022. Ed.

When Richard and Mildred Loving awoke in the middle of the night a few weeks after their June, 1958 wedding, it wasn't normal newlywed ardor. There were policemen with flashlights in their bedroom. They'd come to arrest the couple. "They asked Richard who was that woman he was sleeping with? I say, I'm his wife, and the sheriff said, not here you're not. And they said, come on, let's go, Mildred Loving recalled that night in the HBO documentary The Loving Story.

The Lovings had committed what Virginia called unlawful cohabitation. Their marriage was deemed illegal because Mildred was Black and Native American; and Richard was white. Their case went all the way to the Supreme Court. And on June 12, 1967, the couple won. Now, each year on this date, "Loving Day" celebrates the historic ruling in Loving v. Virginia, which declared unconstitutional a Virginia law prohibiting mixed-race marriage — and legalized interracial marriage in every state.

- The couple is given a choice: flee or go to jail: After they were arrested, the Lovings were sentenced to a year in prison. Then, a judge offered them a choice: banishment from the state or prison. They chose to leave Virginia at the time, but after several years, the Lovings asked the American Civil Liberties Union to take their case. Bernard Cohen and Philip Hirschkop, two young ACLU lawyers at the time, did.

- The ACLU takes up their case: The lawyers asked the court to look closely at whether the Virginia law violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. If the framers had intended to exclude anti-miscegenation status in the 14th Amendment, which assures equal protection under the law, they argued that it would have been easy for them to write a phrase excluding interracial marriage, but they didn't Cohen argued: "The right to marry"...
https://www.npr.org/2021/06/12/1005848169/loving-day-interracial-marriage-legal-origin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loving_v._Virginia

[elleng]

1. Thank you

[appalachiablue]

2. A landmark on the path to progress. More about

Center Point and Caroline County, Va. where the Lovings were from.

- Caroline County is a United States county located in the eastern part of the Commonwealth of Virginia. The northern boundary of the county borders on the Rappahannock River, notably at the historic town of Port Royal.. The Caroline county seat is Bowling Green. Known for tobacco and later mixed crops, worked by generations of enslaved African Americans, such agriculture gradually became less important.

In the 20th century it was known for thoroughbred horse farms. It is the birthplace of the renowned racehorse Secretariat, winner of the 1973 Triple Crown: the Kentucky Derby, Preakness Stakes and Belmont Stakes... As of the 2020 census, the county population was 30,887. It has doubled in the last fifty years. Caroline is now considered part of the Greater Richmond Region and benefited by suburban and related development...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caroline_County,_Virginia

[hlthe2b]

3. Poignant, given there is an emerging risk to the right to interracial marriage given where we are

with Roe and other privacy-based and or equal protection-based rights (and the emergence of mainstream racist/homophobic/overwhelmingly misogynistic views among one very militant political party in this country). Clarence Thomass notwithstanding. Hell, he'd probably vote to overturn Loving v Virginia, just as he's repeatedly voted for other harmful ideology-based decisions impacting African Americans.

[appalachiablue]

7. CT would probably vote to overturn Loving, Ginni's

wuppin' would be fierce.

[LetMyPeopleVote]

4. For this thread

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[LetMyPeopleVote]

5. From Vice President Harris

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[appalachiablue]

6. Tx for adding these, wonderful photos of the couples.