jun 12, 1967 - 1967: Loving v. Virginia
Description:
On June 12, 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the Virginia statutes prohibiting interracial marriage unconstitutional in the case Loving v. Virginia. The case was decided nine years after Richard Loving, a white man, and Mildred Jeter, a woman of mixed African American and Native American ancestry, had pleaded guilty to having violated Virginia state law prohibiting a white person and a “colored” person from leaving the state to be married and returning to live as man and wife. Their one-year prison sentence was suspended on the condition that the couple leave Virginia and not return as husband and wife for 25 years. Once settled in Washington, D.C., the couple filed suit in a Virginia state court in 1963. The case made its way to the Supreme Court, which reversed their conviction. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote for a unanimous court that the freedom to marry was a basic civil right and that to deny that freedom based on the groundless classifications outlined in Virginia state’s law was “to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law.” The ruling thus invalidated laws against interracial marriage in Virginia and 15 other states.
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