Woman’s Loving legacy endures

MAYBE THEY grew up right here in the commonwealth. Maybe the military brought them to the area on their latest tour of duty. Or maybe they relocated to Virginia after catching each other’s eye in another state.

Whatever the circumstance, interracial couples owe a tremendous debt to a woman whose name, appropriately enough, was Loving.

Mildred Loving, 68, the surviving spouse of the couple who smashed a ludicrous system of racial separation in Virginia and other Southern states, died late last week in Central Point. But her name will forever be a legacy to love — no matter the race of the couple, no matter the state in which that love blossoms. Mildred was black, and her husband, Richard, was white.

In Loving v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court in 1967 unanimously overturned miscegenation laws that had survived in the commonwealth and 15 other states. The ruling effectively overturned the last set of segregation laws in the country, which required the separation of the races in marriage.

After I moved to Virginia 30 years later, I was struck by the frequency with which I saw interracial couples shopping, driving, walking — just living. There seemed to be noticeably more mixing here than in Michigan or New Jersey, two states I’d worked in previously. Maybe it’s the large presence of the military, which brings together people of different backgrounds, races and religions.

Given the history of the Loving case, I’d often chuckle. Why had it been the business of the state to tell people whom to love, anyway? And what would the separatists from decades ago think now? Various statistics estimate that 5 to 7 percent of the nation’s marriages are interracial, a large increase from 1970.

Today mixed-race couples generally live in peace, according to Ken Tanabe, 30, founder and president of something called the Loving Day Project (www.lovingday.org). It’s a five-year-old, educational community effort that borrows its name from the Supreme Court case and its protagonists.

“The situation has improved” for interracial couples over the years, Tanabe, a product of an interracial union, told me Thursday evening in a phone interview from New York City, where he works in graphic design. “Racism is not dead, though; it’s in the shadows.”

News accounts tell of occasional harassment and vandalism — even violence. There are stares and unsolicited comments. But interracial couples can legally live together in Virginia and elsewhere, thanks to the Lovings, and their fight a half-century ago.

According to the written record, they’d begun spending time together when Richard was 17 and Mildred was 11. Both families lived in Caroline County. When she became pregnant at age 18, they did “the right thing.” In 1958, they drove to Washington, D.C., married on June 2, and then returned to Caroline County.

About five weeks later, they were awakened in their bedroom around 2 a.m. by the sheriff and deputies shining flashlights on them. (Imagine the outrageous invasion of privacy.) They were taken to jail. Eventually, they pleaded guilty to violating the state’s Racial Integrity Act. As part of a plea bargain, they had to leave Virginia and not return together or at the same time for 25 years.

After a few years in D.C., though, the couple missed the country, and sought legal help to return to the commonwealth. “We have thought about other people,” Richard Loving said in a Life magazine interview in 1966, “but we are not doing it just because somebody had to do it and we wanted to be the ones. We are doing it for us.”

After the high court ruling, they returned to Virginia. Richard died in a car accident in 1975. Mildred never remarried, and she rarely gave interviews as the years passed.

But their battle clearly spoke of their love for each other, and made it that much easier for people of all races to love freely.

Roger Chesley is associate editor of The Pilot’s editorial page. Reach him at (757) 446-2329 or at roger.chesley@pilotonline.com.