Jan. 23, 1965 - A constitutional test of Virginia laws that make it a crime for a white person to marry a Negro will begin in Richmond, Va., next week. The case is regarded as certain to go to the U.S. Supreme Court and may become a landmark.
Eighteen other states have similar laws that would be affected by a Supreme Court decision in the Virginia case.
On Wednesday, lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union will argue before a three-judge Federal court in Richmond that the state’s enforcement of Virginia’s anti-miscegenation laws has grossly violated the constitutional rights of Mr. and Mrs. Richard Loving, both lifelong residents of Virginia.
Mr. Loving, 31, is a construction worker. His wife, Mildred, 25, is part Indian and part Negro. Both had spent their lives in Caroline County, just south of Fredericksburg, until January 1959, when they were banished from the state by County Circuit Judge Leon Bazile. They moved to Washington with their three children. Aware of the Virginia law, they had been married in Washington on June 2, 1958.
The charge brought against them five weeks after their marriage was violation of Title 20, Sections 58 and 59 of the Virginia Code: “If any white person and colored person shall go out of this state for the purpose of being married and with the intention of returning, they shall be punished by confinement in the penitentiary for not less than one nor more than five years.”
The Lovings pleaded guilty and, in January 1959, Judge Bazile sentenced each to a year in prison. He suspended the sentences, however, “for a period of 25 years upon provision that both accused leave Caroline County and the state of Virginia at once and do not return together or at the same time for a period of 25 years.”
For several years, the Lovings lived in Washington and observed the court’s edict. When financial difficulties increased in 1963, they wrote a letter to Robert F. Kennedy, then Attorney General, asking help in returning to Virginia.
Kennedy called on the American Civil Liberties Union, which arranged for two lawyers from Alexandria, Va., to take the case.
“All we want to do is go back to Virginia, build a home, and raise our children,” Mrs. Loving said this week. “We loved each other and got married. We are not marrying the state. The law should allow a person to marry anyone he wants.”
The states that have anti-miscegenation laws are the 11 Southern states, the border states of Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, and Oklahoma, and Indiana, Wyoming, and Delaware.
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