Loving V. Virginia Summary

Loving V. Virginia is a notable case where two citizens of Virginia, a 17 year old African American female named Mildred Jeter, married a 23 year old white man named Richard Loving in Washington, DC in June 1958. During this time the District of Columbia did not have any laws prohibiting interracial marriages where as Virginia, the state the two currently resided in did. Not long after their marriage the newlyweds returned to Virginia and were served an indictment by the Circuit Court of Caroline County in October 1958. The indictment stated that the two were violating Virginia’s anti-miscegenation laws against interracial marriage. Thus the Lovings had to plead guilty to the charges in January 1959 (Warren, 1967).

The Lovings were sentenced

to one year in jail; however, the judge gave the two the option of adjourning the sentence if they both left the state of Virginia and never returned for 25 years. Mildred was able to get The American Civil Liberties (ACLU) to represent her and her husband and they processed appeals on behalf of the Lovings in 1963. The Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals ruled against the Lovings favor in 1966 and ACLU brought the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1967 the U.S. Supreme Court “unanimously struck down Virginia’s law prohibiting interracial marriages as a violation of the fourteenth amendment”(Newbeck & Wolfe, 2013). Loving v. Virginia made laws against interracial marriages illegal in 16 states and reversed the decision in the land mark case Pace v. Alabama (1883), where the supreme court ruled anti-miscegenation laws was in fact constitutional, outlawing all laws that restricted marriages based off of race (Wallenstein, 2006).
Due to the fact that the case Loving v. Virgina banned all laws that prohibited interracial marriages this case relates to the identity of race/ethnicity. According to Castaneda and Zuniga (2013) “race is a sociopolitical construct, not a biological one, that is created and reinforced by social institutional norms and practices”(p. 58). These laws prohibiting interracial marriages were set in place during a time period where America was still desegregating and minorities where attempting to deconstruct various systems, such as Jim Crow Laws, that were put into place to keep these identities separate. Jim Crow laws began in the year 1877 and its sole purpose was to “enforce racial segregation in the South between the end of [the] Reconstruction period in 1877 and the beginning of the civil rights movement of the 1950s” (Ufrosky, 2015). The Reconstruction period was Americas attempt to reduce social economic status and political inequalities that came as a result from slavery however, when this period ended there were still various laws that were in place to keep states and people segregated.
As a consequence of the Jim Crow laws being in place only nine years after African Americans received their 14th amendment citizenship rights, the 14th amendment was a fluid law when it came to African Americans and left up to a states interpretation (Wallenstein, 2006). When the Loving v. Virginia case was still being tried in Virginia’s Circuit Court of Caroline County, the state judge is quoted saying “The fact that He(God) separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix (Quindlen, 2013 p. 405)” this was one mans interpretation of the law that directly affected the Lovings future. This state judges understanding of the fourteenth amendment and marriage is the primary reason as to why Mildred and Richard Loving had to flee Virginia and fight for their constitutional rights to begin with.
Implications that can be drawn from the legal ruling in the case of Loving v. Virgina are that