Can’t stop Loving
Mildred Loving, the Rosa Parks of interracial marriage, passed away last Friday. She and her husband Richard’s Supreme Court case Loving v. Commonwealth of Virginia struck down anti-miscegenation laws nationwide on June 12, 1967:
Mrs. Loving and her husband, Richard, were in bed… five weeks after their wedding, when the county sheriff and two deputies, acting on an anonymous tip, burst into their bedroom and shined flashlights in their eyes. A threatening voice demanded, “Who is this woman you’re sleeping with?”
Mrs. Loving answered, “I’m his wife.”
Mr. Loving pointed to the couple’s marriage certificate hung on the bedroom wall. The sheriff responded, “That’s no good here…”
Mildred’s mother was part Rappahannock Indian, and her father was part Cherokee. She preferred to think of herself as Indian rather than black…
Virginia’s law had been on the books since 1662, adopted a year after Maryland enacted the first such statute… Though the Supreme Court’s 1967 decision in the Loving case struck down miscegenation laws, Southern states were sometimes slow to change their constitutions; Alabama became the last state to do so, in 2000. [Link]
… fearing social ignominy for an unmarried pregnant woman… [Richard and Mildred] drove up to the District to get married. She would always say that she didn’t know they were being subversive; she only thought that Washington had less marital red tape. Back home, they were rousted out of bed at 2 a.m. a few weeks later by a sheriff who carted them off to jail for “cohabiting as man and wife, against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth…”
Richard Loving died when a drunken driver plowed into their car in 1975. She lost an eye in the accident… Hollywood finally got around to making a movie about the marriage in 1996, Showtime’s Mr. and Mrs. Loving… [Link]
On January 6, 1959, the Lovings pleaded guilty and were sentenced to one year in prison, with the sentence suspended for 25 years on condition that the couple leave the state of Virginia. The trial judge in the case, Leon Bazile… proclaimed that “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay and red, and He placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with His 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 mix.” [Link]
Before Loving, 38 states had passed some kind of ban on racial intermarriage. Many Punjabi farmers in California’s Central Valley ended up marrying Mexican-American women, in part because of a ban on marrying whites. Had Loving been handed down a few years earlier, it also would have cleared the way nationally for the marriage of Barack Obama’s parents.
on Tuesday, May 6th, 2008, 9:32 pm in History, Issues, Law › 
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Well, except that Loving v. Virginia was decided in 1967, and I’m pretty sure Obama’s parents were divorced by then. Obama was born in 1961.
Thanks, Neisha.
No problem. (Nerdy lawyer tendencies come in handy on occassion.) Not that Mrs. Loving’s case wasn’t hugely significant. And, what the Loving decision will likely do at some point in the future is pave the way for gay marriage. I’ll need to read it again, but IIRC, Loving was one of the group of decisions that expanded privacy rights that were gleaned from the “penumbra” of the Bill of Rights. Another one of those decisions is Roe v. Wade.
Way to imply Punjabis find Latinas second-best to white women. Where does that put black women, then?
’20s farm California was different from today, after Loving. They were constrained in their marriage choices. They could not bring Punjabi women over and they could not intermarry with the largest and most prosperous community, whites. Much of the literature emphasizes they married whom they were permitted to marry.
I think class, or perceived class, played a bigger role in the marriage chances of the early Sikhs in California than we now think. Let’s not forget, for example, Dalip Singh Saund, who, though he was a Berkeley Math PhD, and though he couldn’t find professional employment, nevertheless married a lady of Czech origin in 1928. Sure, there was the whole other problem of whether non-Protestant East Europeans were themselves to be thought of as white or not. But I think at the time the marriage was seen as White-Other.
Link
Had Dalip Singh been a lumberjack or farmhand, I doubt very much he would have been able to marry Marian. In later decades as well - especially the 1950s and early 1960s - before there was an identifiable ‘South Asian’ community outside of California - many South Asian men married white women - the men were scientists, professors, engineers, doctors, and thus ‘clearly middle, if not upper-middle class’. All this was before Loving. I have to believe that the ‘miscegenation laws’ were quite selectively applied, at least post-WW2. Nevertheless, Loving was important as a clear statement from the Supreme Court.
Sure, we’re talking about the farmers here. Not sure about Saund and selective enforcement, but Czech Americans were probably seen as foreigners at the time, just as Irish Americans were for a long time.
Re: the ’50s-’60s, California’s anti-miscegenation law was struck down in ‘48. Loving invalidated remaining laws nationwide.
Its land law preventing land ownership was struck down in ‘46. Prior to that the farmers used to put property in their wives’ names.
Again, I don’t know if that had any impact on the South Asian scientists etc, during the ’50s-60s - most of whom were not in California, and not all of whom were male.
Good question. You’d want to see whether a particular marriage was legally prohibited in the state and whether the law was enforced at the time.