They’d been married just a few weeks when, in the middle of the night in July, 1958, the county sheriff and two deputies, acting on an anonymous tip that the Lovings were in violation of the law, stormed into the couple’s bedroom. Shortly thereafter, they returned to Virginia and took up residence. to get married legally, which they did in 1958. The two fell in love, but had to travel to Washington, D.C. This book tells the story of two Virginia residents, Mildred Jeter, part African-American and part Cherokee, and Richard Loving, a fair-skinned white boy. According to one Virginia statute, a “white person” was absolutely prohibited from marrying anyone other than another “white person.” The license-issuing official had to be satisfied that applicants’ statements as to their race were correct, and certificates of “racial composition” had to be kept by both state and local registrars. Chief Justice Earl Warren, writing for the Court, declared that statutes preventing marriage solely on the basis of racial classification violate the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment.Īt the time of this decision, Virginia was one of sixteen states prohibiting and punishing marriages on the basis of racial classification. Supreme Court declared that anti-mixed marriage statutes were unconstitutional, in the landmark civil rights case Loving v. “I must admit, it’s difficult to imagine that just decades ago couples just like us not only faced discrimination, but were told by their governments that their love was unlawful.”īut it was only in 1967 that the U.S. They fell in love and were married in 2003. As the Author explains in an Afterword to this book, she is white and her husband, fellow illustrator Sean Qualls, is African-American.
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