Love: The Loving Vs. Virginia Court Case

Love Is All We Need A honeymoon - it's what a couple does after they get married. It’s usually nice, peaceful and filled with joy. However, for one newly married couple in 1958, a honeymoon became disaster. Five weeks after Richard Loving married Mildred Jeter they were sleeping peacefully together in bed when they were awakened by a loud banging on their bedroom door. Three men burst through the door and shined a light in the couple’s eyes yelling, “Why are you sleeping in the same bed? That’s illegal!” The Lovings offered their marriage license. “That’s not worth anything here,” the sheriff said. He made the couple get out of bed only to arrest and handcuff them. The reasons for the arrest one might ask? Solely the color of their skin. These types of arrest were happening all over the

Virginia overturned the laws conclusively and affected miscegenation laws across the country.

To truly understand the Loving v. Virginia court case one first needs to look at the pioneers who fought anti-miscegenation laws in the United States. In Alabama in 1883, Tony Pace, a black man, and Mary J. Cox, a white woman, were put on trial for fornication (“Overview of Pace v. Alabama”). The couple decided to challenge the Alabama code which deemed fornication illegal all the way up to the supreme court. Their argument revolved around the question, “can a government prohibit interracial relationships?” (“Overview of Pace v. Alabama”). Here, the question of the constitutionality of anti-miscegenation laws were being questioned. Eventually, “the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that state-level bans on interracial marriage do not violate the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution” (Head). Astonishingly, the Pace v. Alabama “ruling will hold for more than 80 years” (Head). It was not until 1964 when another supreme court case weakened Pace v. Alabama. The case was McLaughlin v. Florida. It began when the