She made a difference

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				THE
Column Archive				VIRGINIA GAZETTE
				WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA
She made a difference				June 14, 2008

It is rather sad that the passing of Mildred Loving on May 2^nd slipped by virtually unnoticed. Little mention of it was made on newscasts, and those papers that took note of her death consigned the news to the obituary pages.

Even sadder is the fact that few of us know who Mildred Loving was.

Yet it was she, a young black woman, who with her husband Richard, an equally young white man, fought all the way to the Supreme Court for their right to live as a married couple in Virginia in 1958.

The couple had married in Washington, D.C. and returned to live in their home in Caroline County. There, in July, 1958, they were arrested by the county sheriff, told that their D.C. marriage certificate was not valid in Virginia and taken to court.

A county judge found them in violation of the Virginia Racial Integrity Act, the state’s anti-miscegenation law, and banned them from Virginia. If they returned, warned the judge, they would be thrown in jail.

The case went from there to the Virginia Supreme Court in 1965. That court upheld the local ruling with the now inconceivable justification that it was bound to “preserve the racial integrity of its citizens” and prevent “a mongrel breed of citizens.”

Following this ruling, Mildred Loving wrote to then Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who in turn put her in touch with two fledgling lawyers working for the Virginia ACLU.

They took the case, now known as Loving vs. Virginia, to the Supreme Court. In 1967, the justices rendered unconstitutional all Southern anti-miscegenation laws. They based their conclusions on the Equal Protection clause of the Constitution, noting that Virginia’s racial integrity law came into play only when one member of the interracial couple was white. In short, the concept of white supremacy would no longer be tolerated.

While Richard Loving died in 1975, Mildred lived to see the day when there are over 4 million legally married interracial couples in the United States.

That many of these couples now live in Virginia – and not a few in the Williamsburg area – is testimony to the incredible risks the Lovings took to solidify their love and to raise a family in the state in which they were born.

One need only look at this year’s prom photos from local high schools to see that the impact of the Loving case, when combined with the successful integration of schools as a result of Brown vs. Board of Education, has radically challenged and changed entrenched puritanical views relative to racial mixing and interracial dating.

No longer need we look aghast at young interracial couples holding hands in high school halls or dancing together on prom nights. No longer can we rationally fear resultant “mongrel breeds of citizens” when blacks, whites or Asians turn amorously toward partners of other races.

Thanks in no small part to the Lovings, we have finally grasped the fact that the arrows of Eros target more the internal complexities of the heart than the superficialities of external skin color.

In a recent column in the New York Times, Paul Krugman noted that “Mr. Obama’s nomination wouldn’t have been possible 20 years ago. It’s possible today only because racial division, which has driven U.S. politics rightward for more than four decades, has lost much of its sting.”

Obama himself is the product of an interracial marriage and, as a result, has suffered at the hands of some voters. Two out of ten voters in the West Virginia Democratic primary admitted freely that they could not vote for a black man, while others questioned his interracial background.

Despite Obama’s intellectual successes at Harvard Law School, his election to the Illinois state legislature and then to the U.S. Senate, he is still conflated by some with those mongrel breeds that the Virginia Supreme Court hoped to protect us from.

How ironic it is, then, that in the state in which the Lovings fought so valiantly to live as a married couple Krugman’s racial assessment may have some merit.

Despite his interracial heritage, not only did Obama win Virginia’s primary election with the votes of both blacks and whites, but there are those who think that the state may actually be in play for a black candidate in the presidential election in November.

While such predictions may be overly sanguine, the fact is that Virginia has come a long way in its climb upward out of that dirty little sinkhole of rancid racism into which it had slipped as a result of an incomprehensibly irrational fear and unconscionably narrow-minded legal approbation.

Whether he wins or not, Obama is indebted to Mildred and Richard Loving, as well as to all those who fought so fiercely to overcome the state’s massive resistance to racial equality, for the chance to subdue at least one squadron of the racist phalanx that constituted the bulwark of the Solid South.