Ten years before Martin Luther King was shot, a fair bit before I was born a man and woman got married in Virginia. Virginia may have been for lovers, but it certainly wasn't for married ones if their skin tones were too different.
Mildred Jeter was Black. Richard Loving was White. They didn't know that it was illegal for them to wed. And when they found out, gently informed by handcuffs and an arrest warrant, they made a Federal case out of it. In 1967 the Supreme Court ruled that marriage was such a fundamental human right that all miscegenation laws - over a third of the States still had them - were null and void.
Mildred Loving died a week ago, the last person to be prosecuted for race-mixing in the United States.
A couple of quotes from Mrs. Loving:
June 12 is unofficially Loving Day in honor of that brave family.
Our personal relation to this story goes back a few years even though we only heard of them a few days ago.
When we applied for a marriage license we were told that we had to fill in the appropriate box for "race". I tried "Other", "Human", "Indo-Dravidian" and "1500 meters". Tiel checked all the ones that applie, Asian, Black and Native American. We were informed that we couldn't get married unless we filled out one and one officially accepted choice only. We gritted our teeth and did as told although I did scrawl "Pongid".
Calling the various government bureaus didn't help. The State Health Statistics people were downright angry. They collected the statistics because it was the Law. Why was the law there? Why, because they needed it to collect the stastics. And they sent them to the Census Bureau and NIH. Who were we to question that?
The Census bureau and NIH told us they didn't have any real use for the numbers but took them because a number of States insisted on supplying the data.
We looked a little further. It turned out the requirement went back to the 1850s and the original Oregon Organic Law that forbade a "member of the White Race" from marrying a "Free Negro, Mulatto, Kanaka or Chinaman". The County had to collect the information to make sure no miscegenation occured. The laws against such marriages were kicked over by judicial decree in the 1950s. The last vestiges sat rotting in the statutes until we asked the Oregon Legislature to remove them, which they did. It didn't take a Federal case this time. In a generation almost nobody will remember that we used to have laws that stupid.
