As Black History Month gets underway, the Missouri History Museum provides programs that invite the community to look at how far we have come and the road we still have to travel. One such program is the documentary, A Loving Story on Wednesday, February 13 at 7 p.m.
Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving were an interracial couple in the 1950s who made the mistake of falling in love. Knowing it was against to the law to get married in their home state of Virginia, they traveled to Washington DC to legally wed before the birth of their first child. When they returned home, they were arrested and given a one-year prison term which was suspended when the couple agreed to leave the state. The couple moved to Washington, D.C. but continued to fight to have their marriage recognized in Virginia so they could return home to visit their families without the fear of getting arrested.
Using the 14th Amendment to argue the case, the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) represented the Lovings, and before long the case came before the Virginia Supreme Court which ultimately upheld the lower court’s decision. Still determined that their marriage should legally recognized, the Lovings appealed to the United States Supreme Court. It was this court, in June 1967, that struck down the Virginia Racial Integrity Act of 1924 that forbade interracial marriage.
Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote the majority’s opinion and said:
Marriage is one of the “basic civil rights of man,” fundamental to our very existence and survival…. To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discrimination. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.
To those of us who were born after 1967, it is hard to believe a time when it was illegal for people of different races to get married. The last state to remove such a law from its books (though they were all unenforceable after the Loving decision) was Alabama in 2000 and that with only 60% voting for it in a ballot initiative. That means 40% of the people of Alabama in 2000 believed that people of different races should not get married.
St. Louis is not immune to the controversy around the issue. A few years ago, a cover story about the best places to kiss in St. Louis sparked a firestorm of negative internet comments when it showed an African American man and a white woman kissing. As with most anonymous internet comments, they were ugly, unnecessary, and downright unreadable. The Museum was so interested in exploring why people felt this way, that we incorporated the image and comments into one of our Teens Make History plays. We also invited the young couple in the picture (yes, they are a real couple, not models) to come and talk about the experience and how they felt about the comments.
The topic of interracial dating divides people along generations, race, and even gender. Regardless of your personal feelings about the topic, it is hard to argue the fact that people should legally be allowed to “jump the broom” with the person of their choice regardless of race.
The Loving Story Screening
Wednesday, February 13th
7pm
FREE
This documentary tells the dramatic story of Richard and Mildred Loving, an interracial couple living in Virginia in the 1950s, and their landmark Supreme Court case, Loving v. Virginia, that changed history.
