Loving v. Virginia

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

Chief Justice Warren declares in the opening sentence of his opinion, “This case presents a constitutional question never addressed by this Court.” While he is pointing out the novelty of the question, and certainly of the position the Court took that day, at the same time the chief justice may be apologizing for the Court’s failure to address the question of interracial marriage at any of several earlier opportunities, including three on his watch. He specifies the question of whether state laws against interracial marriage violate the equal protection and due process clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. He does not reserve the punch line: indeed, those laws do conflict with the Fourteenth Amendment; so they must fall. He then recounts the long journey the Lovings had taken, from their wedding nine years earlier up until their triumph achieved as he then read the Court’s unanimous ruling that their convictions could not stand. And he quotes the trial judge’s language about how God had “created the races”—five are listed—and wanted them not “to mix,” though Warren misdates the trial judge’s comments as coming from the original trial in 1959 rather than the actual occasion, the rehearing in 1965.

The chief justice quotes in full the statutory provisions that made it a crime for an interracial couple in Virginia to marry, not only inside the state but also outside of it if they planned to return to Virginia and live as a married couple there, as the Lovings had. He also supplies (in a lengthy footnote not reproduced here) the exact language that defined “white persons” and “colored persons” in Virginia. He notes that the Lovings had never contested their being classified, one as white and the other as colored, under those legal provisions (an approach sometimes taken by other interracial couples, who claimed to be both white or both nonwhite and therefore not subject to prosecution under the law). Warren mentions the extraordinary antiquity of Virginia’s law, where “penalties for miscegenation arose as an incident to slavery and have been common in Virginia since the colonial period.” But, as he observes, “the present statutory scheme dates from the adoption of the Racial Integrity Act of 1924,” whose key provisions he recounts. A footnote (not provided here) lists the statutory provisions of the fifteen other states, all in the South, that still had such laws as Virginia’s, and it also lists the fourteen states that, in the previous two decades, had repealed their antimiscegenation laws.

Part I

In part I of the opinion, the chief justice reviews the charges against the Lovings and the leading arguments that the state of Virginia offered in its defense of its laws, and he rebuts each in turn. The Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia, whose ruling was under appeal in this case, had, as one of its arguments in support of the constitutionality of the state’s antimiscegenation laws, reached for a ruling by that same court a decade earlier, Naim v. Naim (1955), regarding a Chinese man and a white woman. As Warren forthrightly assesses, the Virginia court had declared that the state’s “legitimate purposes” in enacting, enforcing, and upholding such laws “were ‘to preserve the racial integrity of its citizens,’ and to prevent ‘the corruption of blood,’ ‘a mongrel breed of citizens,’ and ‘the obliteration of racial pride,’ obviously an endorsement of the doctrine of White Supremacy.” As the chief justice notes a little later, Virginia had banned not all interracial marriages but “only interracial marriages involving white persons.” He goes on, in a footnote (not reproduced here), to condemn racial classifications in criminal statutes regardless of whether the “integrity” of all races or only that of whites is to be protected. So from the Court’s perspective, neither white supremacy nor concern for racial integrity passed muster as a defense of the Virginia laws.

In the opening sentence of the second paragraph, Chief Justice Warren seriously undercuts the state’s reliance on the Tenth Amendment’s declaration regarding the legitimate powers of the states, and thus the rightful limits on federal authority, to deflect arguments based upon the Fourteenth Amendment and the limits on state powers. But such arguments still had to be addressed. In presenting its case to the Supreme Court, the state of Virginia drew upon a ruling from 1888, Maynard v. Hill, in which the Court baldly stated that marriage, “having more to do with the morals and civilization of a people than any other institution, has always been subject to the control of the legislature.” Warren chides the state of Virginia for mounting such an argument in support of its laws of race and marriage: “While the state court is no doubt correct in asserting that marriage is a social relation subject to the State’s police power,… the State does not contend in its argument before this Court that its powers to regulate marriage are unlimited notwithstanding the commands of the Fourteenth Amendment. Nor could it do so,” the chief justice goes on, in view of some important cases from long before the 1960s but long after the 1880s, including Meyer v. Nebraska (1923), in which the Court had spoken expressly of “the right … to marry.”

The state also argued that the equal protection clause should be understood as reflecting an intent by the Framers that, so long as punishments visited upon people, both black and white, were the same for violating a given law, such as Virginia’s against interracial marriage, then the requirements of equal protection were satisfied. Indeed, the Supreme Court had accepted that very argument in 1883 in Pace v. Alabama, a case that arose when a man classified as black and a woman classified as white had, upon conviction for living together without being married, suffered a more severe sentence than they would have had they both been white or both black. Judge Bazile, in writing his opinion in 1965 in support of the original outcome for the Lovings at trial six years before, called upon a wide range of precedents that supported him, but he ignored a 1964 ruling by the Supreme Court to the contrary—viewing it as no more legitimate than he had perceived Brown v. Board of Education to be a decade earlier. That 1964 ruling, McLaughlin v. Florida, Chief Justice Warren now invokes, quoting the remark that “Pace represents a limited view of the Equal Protection Clause which has not withstood analysis in the subsequent decisions of this Court.” Thus, Pace v. Alabama helped the state’s case no more than did Maynard v. Hill. As to whether the Fourteenth Amendment protects against “classifications drawn by any statute” that “constitute an arbitrary and invidious discrimination,” the Court had so held in McLaughlin v. Florida, and it is ruling so again in Loving v. Virginia. Warren has established that the equal protection clause sufficed to strike the Virginia laws and therefore the Lovings’ convictions under those laws.

Part II

The Lovings’ attorneys had also argued on the basis of the due process clause, and this portion of the Fourteenth Amendment the Court also considers. To do so, the Court cites the 1942 case Skinner v. State of Oklahoma (which was primarily concerned with sterilization as legal punishment) as well as Maynard v. Hill, one of the key props in the state’s case. That long-ago case from 1888, which on its face had nothing to do with race, spoke in very strong terms not only of legislative prerogative in the law of marriage but also of the supreme importance of marriage as an institution. So in the short final section on the due process clause, the chief justice speaks of “this fundamental freedom” and notes with reproof how antimiscegenation laws serve to “deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law.” In short, though the Court does not use this precise language, Richard Loving had been denied—not despite his being a white man but indeed because he was a white man—the right to marry Mildred Jeter, and she had been similarly deprived of the right to marry him. In sum, this dual deprivation, and the Lovings’ punishment for the crime of trying to be a married couple, constituted a denial of both equal protection and due process of law. So, the Court concludes, “These convictions must be reversed.”