Loving and the right to marry
Mildred Loving has died at 68. The aptly named Virginia woman's courageous struggle to strike down laws barring interracial marriage led to a landmark 1967 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that struck down state miscegenation laws.
Still a relatively young woman, Loving was a living link to the central struggles of the civil rights era. And she taught new generations of Americans that the march of freedom is not yet finished.
After Mildred Delores Jeter, a young woman of mixed Native American and African-American background, married a young white man, Richard Loving, the couple fell afoul of Jim Crow laws in their native Virginia. Five weeks after the Lovings were married in 1958, local sheriff's deputies arrested them and charged them with violating Virginia's Racial Integrity Act.
Thus began an epic civil rights battle that would lead, with encouragement from former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and the American Civil Liberties Union, to the Supreme Court chambers in Washington. There, Chief Justice Earl Warren would write the opinion upholding the right of the Lovings to marry and to live together in their native state.
The decision was an essential one in the process of dismantling the legal framework of Southern segregation. As the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. noted in explaining the importance of the legal and moral issues at stake, "When any society says that I cannot marry a certain person, that society has cut off a segment of my freedom."
King uttered those words in 1958, at the time of the Lovings' initial arrest.
The Nobel Peace Prize winner would be assassinated a decade later -- just months after the Supreme Court finally overturned Virginia's miscegenation law, and with it similar laws across the country.
Had King survived to the present day, no doubt he would have joined Mildred Loving in telling Americans that the fight for the right to marry was more than just a black-and-white issue.
In 2007, on the 40th anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling in regard to her marriage rights, Mildred Loving released a statement urging that same-sex couples be permitted to marry.
"I believe all Americans, no matter their race, no matter their sex, no matter their sexual orientation, should have that same freedom to marry," she explained. "Government has no business imposing some people's religious beliefs over others."
These are words of wisdom, words that the people of Wisconsin -- and America -- should take to heart.
There will come a day when the current opposition to full marriage rights for gay couples and lesbian couples will be every bit as offensive to all responsible people as is the unsettling memory of how, just 50 years ago, a Racial Integrity Act was turned against Mildred and Richard Loving.
File photo
Mildred Loving and her husband Richard Loving are shown in this Jan. 26, 1965, file photo.
