Bernard Cohen was one of the two lawyers who worked on the Loving v. Virginia case on behalf of Mildred and Richard Loving. In 2007, he co-wrote a powerful essay in support of same-sex marriage.
Philip Hirschkop was one of two lawyers who represented Mildred and Richard Loving. Hirschkop found himself involved in the cast completely by accident. However, he was an important figure in fighting for civil rights during the tumultuous 1960s. In a recent Washington Post article, Hirschkop recalled: “I remember I hugged Mildred for the first time in all the years I had known her . . . And [then] they left our offices as a legally married couple no longer facing incarceration and able to raise their children living near their parents, family and friends in the commonwealth of Virginia.”
In 2007, AMEA, a group of groups that advocated for multiracial Americans organized a conference held in Chicago to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Loving v. Virginia decision. Now we’re about to celebrate the 50th anniversary at the Mixed Remixed Festival. It’s going to be big.
The Loving v. Virginia decision was a pivotal civil rights ruling. In recent years, legal scholars have wrestled with what exactly it has meant to jurisprudence since. One great book co-edited by Kevin Noble Maillard is Loving v. Virginia: in a Post-Racial World: Rethinking Race, Sex, and Marriage (2012). We highly recommend it if you want to understand more about the legacy of this case.
Did you know that you can hear the oral argument before the Supreme Court of the Loving v. Virginia decision? You can find it here. You can also read the transcript as well.
I confess that it’s a little bit difficult to hear the attorney argue this: “It is not infrequent that the children of intermarried parents are referred to not merely as the children of intermarried parents but as the victims of intermarried parents and as the martyrs of intermarried parents.”
Loving Day is an annual nationwide grassroots celebration to celebrate the Loving v. Virginia decision. The brainchild of Ken Tanabe, Loving Day’s mission is to fight racial prejudice through education and to build multicultural community.
Richard Loving was a white man who was in some ways “passing” as black. As writer and scholar Arica Coleman wrote: “[Richard Loving] lived in a county that was less than 50% white. His father was the employee of one of the wealthiest “Negroes” in the county for nearly 25 years. Richard’s closet companions were black, including his drag-racing partners and Mildred’s older brothers.” Coleman explains that the Loving’s “are prime examples of the way such [racial] lines have long been blurred.”
Richard and Mildred Loving raised three children Sidney, Donald and Peggy. Scholar and write Arica Coleman has explained that Sidney was Mildred’s son from a prior relationship. Donald was born 4 months after they were married. Peggy is their only daughter.
Chief Justice Ear Warren wrote the unanimous Loving v. Virginia. “To deny this right on so unsupportable a basis as racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment,” wrote Warren , “is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law.”
Thurgood Marshall would join the Supreme Court a few months after the Loving v. Virginia decision. Marshall who married his second wife, Cecilia Suyat who is of Filipino descent, in 1955 was in an interracial marriage himself. In a 2016 Washington Post interview, his widow Cecilia “Cissy” Marshall said that when he first proposed she responded:
“‘No way. No way. People will think you are marrying a foreigner’ . . . He said, ‘I don’t care what people think. I’m marrying you.’ He was so persuasive. So we got married. And, actually, there was no repercussion because people knew me.”
Richard Loving died in a car accident in 1975 when a drunk driver struck his car. Mildred lost an eye in the same accident. Mildred never re-married. She lived the rest of her life in the Virginia home Richard built.
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