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NEWS & LETTERS, June - July 2008
For Mildred Loving
Mildred Loving passed away on May 2. She and her husband Richard took the right to love to the Supreme Court and made it legal. In 1967 the Court struck down the ban on interracial marriage in the Lovings' home state of Virginia, leading to similar racist laws being overturned around the country.
Richard and Mildred had been childhood sweethearts in Central Point, Caroline County, an area where working-class Black and white people lived side by side. They were married in Washington, D.C., then arrested back home in Virginia in 1958, only 50 years ago. In that time and place, love and marriage made them literal outlaws. Deputy sheriffs broke into their bedroom in the middle of the night.
Everybody since has owed Mildred a debt of gratitude, and like true love itself, she was modest about that: "The preacher at my church classified me with Rosa Parks, I don't feel like that. Not at all. What happened, we really didn't intend for it to happen. What we wanted, we wanted to come home."
There was a poor movie made about the Lovings in 1996--the filmmakers hijacked their story. As Mildred said, "None of it was very true. The only part of it right was I had three children." There is a more serious and accurate account of the Loving's life in the book Virginia Hasn't Always Been for Lovers (Southern Illinois University Press, 2004) by Phyl Newbeck.
In 2007 Mildred released a statement supporting the human right to marry the person one loves, and it concluded: "I am still not a political person, but I am proud that Richard's and my name is on a court case that can help reinforce the love, the commitment, the fairness, and the family that so many people, black or white, young or old, straight or gay seek in life. I support the freedom to marry for all."
Mildred didn't have an easy life. Richard Loving was killed by a drunk driver in 1975, and Mildred lost an eye in that same crash. Her son Donald passed away in 2000. But Mildred had strength, and dignity, and the modesty of a real hero. Any voice might be louder, but none was more true.
--Gerry Emmett
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