Loving for All
By Mildred Loving
Prepared for Delivery on June 12, 2007,
The 40th Anniversary of the Loving vs. Virginia Announcement
When my late husband, Richard, and I got married in Washington, DC in 1958, it wasn't to make a political statement or start a fight. We were in love, and we wanted to be married.
We didn't get married in Washington because we wanted to marry there. We did it there because the government wouldn't allow us to marry back home in Virginia where we grew up, where we met, where we fell in love, and where we wanted to be together and build our family. You see, I am a woman of color and Richard was white, and at that time people believed it was okay to keep us from marrying because of their ideas of who should marry whom.
When Richard and I came back to our home in Virginia, happily married, we had no intention of battling over the law. We made a commitment to each other in our love and lives, and now had the legal commitment, called marriage, to match. Isn't that what marriage is?
Not long after our wedding, we were awakened in the middle of the night in our own bedroom by deputy sheriffs and actually arrested for the "crime" of marrying the wrong kind of person. Our marriage certificate was hanging on the wall above the bed.
The state prosecuted Richard and me, and after we were found guilty, the judge declared: ""Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix." He sentenced us to a year in prison, but offered to suspend the sentence if we left our home in Virginia for 25 years exile.
We left, and got a lawyer. Richard and I had to fight, but still were not fighting for a cause. We were fighting for our love.
Though it turned out we had to fight, happily Richard and I didn't have to fight alone. Thanks to groups like the ACLU and the NAACP Legal Defense & Education Fund, and so many good people around the country willing to speak up, we took our case for the freedom to marry all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. And on June 12, 1967, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that, "The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men," a "basic civil right."
My generation was bitterly divided over something that should have been so clear and right. The majority believed that what the judge said, that it was God's plan to keep people apart, and that government should discriminate against people in love. But I have lived long enough now to see big changes. The older generation's fears and prejudices have given way, and today's young people realize that if someone loves someone they have a right to marry.
Surrounded as I am now by wonderful children and grandchildren, not a day goes by that I don't think of Richard and our love, our right to marry, and how much it meant to me to have that freedom to marry the person precious to me, even if others thought he was the "wrong kind of person" for me to marry. I believe all Americans, no matter their race, no matter their sex, no matter their sexual orientation, should have that same freedom to marry. Government has no business imposing some people’s religious beliefs over others. Especially if it denies people’s civil rights.
I am still not a political person, but I am proud that Richard's and my name is on a court case that can help reinforce the love, the commitment, the fairness, and the family that so many people, black or white, young or old, gay or straight seek in life. I support the freedom to marry for all. That's what Loving, and loving, are all about.
I was rather stunned to find out about this. From all that I've read, Mrs. Loving was not one to make a big deal of the court case that allowed her to marry her husband. The two of them didn't even attend the arguments before the Supreme Court. In 1992, the New York Times published an article, "A Mixed Marriage's 25th Anniversary of Legality":
Mildred Jeter Loving ... remains the same intensely private woman she was a quarter-century ago, when her name entered the lawbooks, and she is as reluctant to acknowledge her contribution to the civil rights movement as she once was to participate in it.
...
[F]or Mrs. Loving, ... blazing legal trails was an experience she would gladly have forgone. The ordeal -- which included five days in jail and banishment to a place where she could no longer walk down a country lane to pick up her mail -- is one she revisits only reluctantly.
"It was thrown in my lap," she said about the case. "What choice did I have?"
And the first page of Phyl Newbeck's Virginia Hasn't Always Been for Lovers says,
Mildred Loving does not see what she did as particularly heroic or even newsworthy. After years of being approached in June of every year ending in a 2 or a 7 by reporters celebrating a five-year anniversary of the case, she feels as though she has spent her life being interviewed. In 1997, the thirty-year anniversary of her case, she turned down a request for an interview by Emerge magazine and has kept her silence ever since. Her children are grown, but they still defer to their mother's request that they not talk to the media about the family and the case. My initial attempts to contact her were rebuffed.
That Mrs. Loving broke her silence to speak out on the case on behalf of those struggling for marriage rights now impresses me all the more. Thank you, Mrs. Loving.
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