Equally Yoked: The Story of Loving v. Virginia and the Legalization of Multiracial Marriage

            During the past fifty years, Western culture has experienced a significant shift in its overall stance regarding multiethnic marriage. As late as 1966, seventeen of the fifty states still enforced laws that prohibited certain types of racial intermixing within the bonds of matrimony.[1] The following year, however, the Supreme Court rendered such statutes unconstitutional after hearing the groundbreaking case Loving v. Virginia.[2]
            The Commonwealth of Virginia was one of the states that did not permit couples from dissimilar ethnic backgrounds to wed. In 1958 Richard Loving (a Caucasian) and Mildred Jeter (an African-American with Rappahannock heritage) held their wedding ceremony in Washington, D.C., because the district had no such restrictions.[3] Their attempt to curtail their state’s law, however, met with resistance when they returned to their Virginia residence.
            Law enforcement agents in the small town of Central Point raided their home in the middle of the night. The sheriff arrested them and ordered that they serve a jail sentence of one year for their disregard of Virginia law. The judge offered to suspend the punishment if the Lovings would agree to leave the state for twenty-five years, but instead they decided to appeal the original ruling.[4]
Nine years later, their case appeared before the Supreme Court, and, after a unanimous decision in favor of the Lovings, Chief Justice Warren opined:

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 statues, 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 discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not to marry, a person of another race resides with the individual, and cannot be infringed by the State.[5]

As a result of this decision, multiethnic marriages became legal in all fifty states. The percentage of such unions continues to rise.[6]



[1]For helpful figures that list the states that forbade multiethnic marriage between 1866 and 1966, see the photographs that appear between page 146 and 147 in the following work: Peter Wallenstein, Tell the Court I Love My Wife: Race, Marriage, and Law—An American History (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002). For an informative analysis of the historical factors that led to a gradual dismantling of the objections regarding multiethnic marriage in the United States, see Renee C. Romano, Race Mixing: Black-White Marriage in Postwar America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 12-43.

[2]Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967).

[3]Werner Sollors, Interracialism: Black-White Intermarriage in American History, Literature, and Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 28.

[4]Paul R. Spickard, Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in Twentieth-Century America (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 280.

[5]“U.S. Supreme Court: Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967), Justia, http://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/388/1/case.html (accessed August 10, 2014). The court heard the case on April 10, 1967, and issued a decision on June 12, 1967.

            [6]Wendy Wang, “The Rise of Intermarriage: Rates, Characteristics Vary by Race and Gender,” Pew Research Center’s Social and Demographic Trends Project, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2012/02/16/the-rise-of-intermarriage/ (accessed
June 12, 2018).

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