Loving Day: Legally Loving Another of a Different Race

"Love is in the air and we are celebrating "Loving" all day!  On June 12th, over 50 years ago, the court room victory in the Loving vs. Virginia case, made it legal to love another of different color in Virginia and 15 other states.

Loving vs. Virgina is the landmark case, involving Mildred Loving and Richard Loving, that did away with laws banning interracial marriage.  Mr. and Mrs. Loving, an interracial couple from Virginia, traveled to Washington, D.C. to marry, thereby escaping Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which made marriage between whites and non-whites illegal.

The Loving couple (no pun intended) returned as a married couple to a state unwilling to accept their union and was basically told their marriage certificate wasn't worth the paper on which it written, thus invalid in the common wealth. In 1959, in their effort to escape a one-year prison sentence, the couple took a plea bargain to leave Virginia and not return together for at least 25 years. The loving only got better, as the babies kept coming even after their forced move to the District of Columbia.

However, the couple grew frustrated after years of social isolation and inability to travel together back to Virginia. Mildred Loving decided she'd had enough and wrote a protest to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, which marked the beginning of legal proceedings to appeal the 1959 ruling preventing them from living as husband and wife in Virginia.

The couple refused to give up on their right to love. As a result, June 12, 1967 is a landmark in civil rights history, as the Supreme Court's unanimous ruling invalidated laws prohibiting interracial marriage.

In 2016, the self-titled story, Loving, made it to film detailing the interracial couple's love story and battles for their right to love and wed. The historical drama celebrates the real-life courage necessary to stand on the right side of history and change the world forever.

Happy Loving Day, Texarkana!