Loving v. Virginia

In 1967 in Loving v. Virginia, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote on behalf of a unanimous Supreme Court to declare antimiscegenation laws in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Laws against interracial marriage were widespread in the United States into the 1960s. An interracial couple from Virginia, wanting to be “Mr. and Mrs. Richard Loving,” found themselves taken to jail in 1958 and then to court because he was white and she was not. They were convicted of the crime of marrying each other, but eventually they appealed their convictions, and the case went to the U.S. Supreme Court. There, the Fourteenth Amendment, which had been in the Constitution for almost exactly a century, was for the first time interpreted to declare unconstitutional all state laws against interracial marriage. As a result, more than three hundred years after the first of such laws was passed, none could any longer be enforced. States retained their authority over the law of marriage in other respects but no longer as regarded racial classifications.

Thus, thirteen years after the Warren Court overturned segregated public schooling, all laws against interracial marriage—the last refuge for state-mandated segregation—were overturned as well. As with the Montgomery bus boycott, some citizens had protested the segregation laws, and their resistance led to the Supreme Court’s ruling against those laws. The Lovings, then, can be seen as important actors in the civil rights movement. At the same time, Chief Justice Warren’s decision to throw out the case against them can be seen as a crucial document, akin to President Harry S. Truman’s Executive Order 9981 in 1948 against segregation in the U.S. armed forces, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954, and the congressional passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Loving v. Virginia brought down the last of the Jim Crow laws that had segregated so much of American life for so long.