This Jan. 26, 1965 file photo shows Mildred Loving and her husband Richard P Loving. Fifty years after Mildred and Richard Loving’s landmark legal challenge shattered the laws against interracial marriage in the U.S., some couples of different races still talk of facing discrimination, disapproval and sometimes outright hostility from their fellow Americans. This Jan. 26, 1965 file photo shows Mildred Loving and her husband Richard P Loving.
Born Mildred Jeter, she’s mostly known by the name she took when she — a black woman living in segregated Virginia — dared to break the rules by marrying a white man named Richard Loving. “The white people were just like the black people,” said Clarke, a black man. “You lived and survived ... it was a sharing thing.”
And so, they drove some 80 miles to Washington, D.C., in 1958, married and returned to Central Point to start a new life.Within a month, they were in jail. It was 1964, and the Lovings had spent the past few years living in exile in Washington after being convicted on charges of “cohabitating as man and wife, against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth,” according to their indictments. Laws banning racially mixed marriages existed in at least 17 states.
American courts had proven tough on race-mixing in the past: A handful of cases similar to the Lovings’ had come up before in other places, but were stuck in a thicket of state-sanctioned racism and red tape. Richard, by all accounts a stoic, blue-collar man content to let Mildred do the talking, moved his family into a small house on Passing Road, and tried to live happily ever after.