US mourns black woman who defied racist divorce order
Wednesday, 7 May 2008
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On a hot July night almost exactly 50 years ago, Mildred Loving and her husband Richard were roused from their bed by the sheriff of the rural Virginia county where they lived and hauled off to jail. Their only crime was to be a black woman and a white man presumptuous enough to be married at a time when many southern US states banned mixed-race unions.
They were convicted and told, if they did not divorce, they had to leave the state and not return for 25 years.
It didn't work out that way: the Lovings took their case to the Supreme Court and, in 1967, added their names to the list of heroes of the civil rights movement as the court agreed to strike down the ban on interracial marriage, in Virginia and everywhere else.
At the time, 17 of the 50 states had restrictions of one kind or another. In the intervening 41 years, the number of mixed marriages around the US has risen to an estimated 4.3 million.
The legacy left by Mildred Loving – whose death at the age of 68 has just been announced – is not nearly as well known as that of Rosa Parks, the first woman to challenge segregation on the Alabama buses, or civil rights luminaries such as Martin Luther King. But, in a year when the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, Barack Obama, is himself the product of a mixed-race marriage, its significance is hard to overstate.
Ms Loving never sought any kind of public advocacy role for herself, and led a quiet life in the small town of Milford, about 90 miles south of Washington.
"It wasn't my doing," she said in a recent interview about the court case. "It was God's work."
Mildred Jeter – her maiden name – was just 11 when she met her future husband, who was six years her senior. When she was 18, in 1958, she became pregnant and the couple decided to drive to Washington to get married. At the time, she didn't realise it was illegal. "I think my husband knew," she once told the Associated Press. "I think he thought [if] we were married, they couldn't bother us."
They were arrested shortly after they returned to their home town of Central Point, north of the Virginia state capital, Richmond. The rap sheet listed the chief charge as "cohabiting as man and wife, against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth".
The judge, Leon Bazile, left no doubt about the prevailing opinion on their union. "Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents," he said in his ruling. "And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows he did not intend for the races to mix."
Segregation had been in place for more than 50 years, following a notorious Supreme Court ruling in 1898 deeming the races "separate but equal" – a formulation under which a slew of discriminatory laws was passed. The Lovings moved to Washington after their 1958 trial, with no intention of pursuing the case. When they were arrested again five years later on a visit to Mildred's mother, they took their case to Bobby Kennedy, then the Attorney General before it eventually went to the Supreme Court.
