Tomah Journal - Printable Version

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Published - Sunday, May 11, 2008

Editorial: Mildred Loving helped transform America only a short time ago

Mildred Loving died last week at the age of 68.

It was Loving and her late husband, Richard, who successfully challenged laws that banned interracial marriage. They were criminally charged under Virginia’s miscegenation statute but had their convictions reversed by the 1967 U.S. Supreme Court case, Loving v. Virginia. Three observations about Loving’s life and what it symbolized:

u The civil rights revolution is, historically speaking, a very recent event. The very fact that a litigant in a major civil rights case had her obituary printed only last week reminds us that millions of living Americans can still recall the era of institutionalized racial discrimination. Just 41 years ago, 16 states still maintained bans on interracial marriage, and Alabama didn’t officially scrub its law until 2000. Jim Crow is recent, not distant, history, and the wounds it inflicted on the black community remain far from thoroughly healed.

u Loving v. Virginia was decided by a liberal Supreme Court led by Chief Justice Earl Warren. Conservatives often deride the Warren Court, but which of its precedents do they wish to change (Roe v. Wade was decided by the Burger Court). Does any conservative believe that Loving v. Virginia was wrongly decided? How about Brown v. Board of Education? It was a liberal Warren Court precedent (Tinker v. Des Moines School District), not a conservative one, that effectively overturned a Tomah High School art teacher’s grading policy that banned religious expression in any student art project.

u Americans today face the same debate over gay marriage. Mildred Loving herself saw the parallels between her struggle to marry the white man she loved and the struggle for same-sex couples to win legal recognition for loving, monogamous, lifetime unions. On the 40th anniversary of the Loving v. Virginia case, she said:

“Surrounded as I am now by wonderful children and grandchildren, not a day goes by that I don’t think of Richard and our love, our right to marry, and how much it meant to me to have that freedom to marry the person precious to me, even if others thought he was the ‘wrong kind of person’ for me to marry. I believe all Americans, no matter their race, no matter their sex, no matter their sexual orientation, should have that same freedom to marry.”

Richard and Mildred Loving fought against fundamental wrong and convinced the Supreme Court to establish a noble and lasting legal precedent. They are the very definition of American heroes.