Loving Day is coming

There was an NPR broadcast recently about the celebration of Loving Day; today's NY Times has this column with further background:

Americans born in the 21st century will shake their heads in disbelief on learning that 40 states once had laws prohibiting interracial marriage. The Supreme Court struck down the last of these statutes in the 1967 case of Mildred and Richard Loving, a black woman and a white man who were arrested and banished from Virginia for the crime of being married.

The couple became celebrities after the landmark ruling known as Loving v. Virginia. But Mildred and Richard wanted nothing to do with fame. They returned to the tiny, backwoods community of Central Point, in Caroline County, Va., and shunned publicity. Richard died of injuries sustained in a car accident in 1975. Mildred, who died this month, was quiet and self-effacing and maintained all along that they married because they were in love, not to fight a civil rights battle.

But it seems that segregation in Central Point was not really as straightforward as all that:

Many of the mixed-race men and women in Caroline County settled in and around Central Point. They were already thriving by the early 20th century. Their church, St. Stephen's Baptist, was, as one historian noted, "the largest and most costly house of worship in Caroline, white or colored." People in the congregation and community were "as a whole, very nearly white," the historian wrote, "and, out of their community, could not be recognized or distinguished as colored people". . .

By the time that Richard and Mildred had begun to date in the 1950s, they had lived their whole lives in a community that had made an art form of evading Jim Crow restrictions on relationships.

Some accounts suggest that Central Point already had many other interracial unions -- both legal and common law. So why were Mildred and Richard singled out for arrest? It is possible that someone who held a grudge against the couple complained to the sheriff. Such a complaint could have come from one of the local white men who had taken a black lover and used the law as an excuse not to marry.

Posted by David on May 14, 2008 2:05 PM