How the case involving Richard and Mildred Loving changed history.
Every year, people celebrate Loving Day on June 12th. It's a celebration that marks the day the Supreme Court struck down state bans against interracial marriage.
The day is meant to honor the monumental case, Loving v. Virginia, and the interracial couple, Richard and Mildred Loving. The 1967 Supreme Court decision struck down 16 state bans on interracial marriage as unconstitutional.
Mildred got pregnant in 1958 and the couple traveled to Washington, D.C. to get married. They then returned home to Caroline County, Virginia, and not long after they were woken in the middle of the night by law enforcement officials who told them they were breaking the law.
They were jailed on charges of unlawful cohabitation and then offered a choice to either continue to serve jail time or leave Virginia for 25 years. The couple chose the latter and left the state.
Mildred Loving reportedly wrote a letter to the Attorney General at the time, Robert F. Kennedy, pleading their case. Kennedy directed her to the American Civil Liberties Union and then a lawyer from the ACLU took their case. The case eventually made its way to the Supreme Court where it was unanimously overturned on June 12, 1967.
It's been five decades since the historic decision and now interracial marriages have become much more common and have increased dramatically.
In 2015, one in six newlyweds had a spouse of a different race or ethnicity which is more than five times higher than the number of intermarried newlyweds in 1967, according to Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data.
“It was God’s work.”- Mildred Loving told The Associated Press.
Richard Loving died in a car crash in 1975 and Mildred Loving died in 2008. Their story is chronicled in the 2016 movie named Loving and a 2011 documentary The Loving Story.
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