Essay on Loving v. Virginia (388 U.S. 1)

We hear multiple people weigh in on the court case and give their opinions and expose the cultural issues that are occurring. Reverend Sykes for instances tells us that he has “ never seen a jury of white people favor on the side of a colored man” and we also hear from Dolphus Raymond talks about that "the hell white people give coloured folks, without even stopping to think that they're people too." This shows that many people are very aware of what is going on in this time period but either choose to ignore it or tend to join in on the hazing and racism. As sad as it is to say, that is very similar to the culture that happens today. We typically ignore the issues that are occurring today or with some people tend to join in on the attack and the racism or other cultural issues that go on.

The United States Supreme Court was, and still is today, the important backbone of America’s judicial system. This court deals with numerous cases throughout the year and keeps the country and government fair with its decisions. However, being responsible for giving justice where it is due, the Court is sometimes faced with hard choices that will make a lasting impression on the U.S. and its people. In the case of Loving v. Virginia, it did just that. As a Supreme Court landmark case, Loving v. Virginia definitely indicated a critical moment of change in civil rights for America and interracial couples everywhere.

The idea of the one-drop rule was applied to these laws causing it not only to be a widely excepted rule by the countries populous, but also as a legally accepted one. Hollinger explains that “The principle was sharpened under Jim Crow, when opposition to social equality for black was well served by a monolithic notion of blackness accompanied by legislation that outlawed as miscegenation black-white marriages.” [10] These laws rested upon the constructed notion that blackness was somehow indicated by biological factors. A perfect example of this is that “Law regulating interracial marriage and the conduct of free people of color defined blackness as a genealogical quantum” In some places even those who had “one-sixteenth “black blood” [were] legally black,” [11] and therefore denied the right to marry a white person. Anti-miscegenation legislation, which has implied use of the one-drop rule, has a long history in the United States with the final anti-miscegenation law was struck down in Loving vs. Virginia as recently as 1967. These laws were created to maintain racial purity, and have been instrumental in solidifying both the idea of race and different racial categories in the United States.

In 1931 two white women were riding the train along with the other men (the blacks and whites). When the fight broke out the blacks had won and let the white men off the train, however when the white men got off the train, they reported the incident to the local sheriff and that’s when the train stopped in Scottsboro, Alabama and everyone on the train was arrested. That’s how it all started in Scottsboro, Alabama and it was just the beginning of the case. The two women on the train Victoria Price and Ruby Bates were about to be in serious trouble because Ruby Bates was a minor and in that time it was a federal crime to take a minor across state lines for the reason of prostitution. The only way they could get of trouble in their situation was to say the black men raped them. In the time of 1931 rape was sanctioned by death. Usually they would’ve responded by a lynching, which was when they hung someone who was suspected of a crime, but for this case the citizens of Scottsboro wanted to hold a trial instead. The trial wasn’t fair at all because the outcome had been decided before the trial even

The day was February 20,2003, in the city of Portsmouth where two Portsmouth police officers had pulled a vehicle over who was driven by David Lee Moore. While listening to police radio they had heard that the man they pulled over who went by the nickname “chubs” was driving on a suspended license. The officer’s soon determined that chubbs was indeed driving on a suspended license. The officers who made the stop arrested chubbs for the misdemeanor of driving on a suspended license. This violation could have lead to chubbs serving a 1-year in jail and a $25,000 fine, according to Va Code Ann 18.2-11. The officers then searched the vehicle in which chubbs was driving. During the search of the

Richard and Mildred Loving were arrested in 1959 for violating South Carolina’s anti-miscegenation statue, barring interracial marriage between people of color and whites. The Lovings, who had to travel hundreds of miles to Washington DC to legally wed in an attempt to appease South Carolina law, were charged and found guilty for "cohabiting as man and wife, against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth" (Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967). As part of their sentence, the Lovings were forced to leave the state of South Carolina and relocate in Washington D.C. After experiencing the difficulties of living so far away from their friends and family, Mildred Loving wrote to the American Civil Liberties Union who ultimately set the legal proceedings under the argument that the

Virginia case which served to take down interracial marriage bans in Virginia. Richard and Mildred Loving pleaded guilty to violating the Racial Integrity Act on January 6. The judge of the court sentenced Richard and Mildred Loving to one year in jail, but would suspend the sentence if they left their hometown of Central Point, Virginia for 25 years, they could only reason they would be allowed to return home was to visit family members but they would have to do so separately. As a couple, they traveled to Washington D.C. to live. Five years later they were arrested for the second time, this time they were arrested for traveling together while attempting to visit family in Virginia to celebrate Easter.

Facts of the case: this was a landmark civil rights case that overturned laws that prohibited interracial marriage. The case involved a black woman named Mildred Loving and a white man Richard Loving, who was sentenced to prison in the state of Virginia for getting married. It was a crime because the marriage of the two was a violation of the state’s anti-miscegenation law, which was called the Racial Integrity Act of 1924. The couple got married in Washington, DC and upon their return they were indicted for unlawful cohabitation and placed in jail. Mildred Loving wrote a letter to the Attorney General; who was Robert F. Kennedy for assistance and in return she was referred to the ACLU who represented the couple in the case. The Supreme Court governed that Virginia’s bans on interracial marriages were considered unconstitutional. The court found that the anti-miscegenation laws did not infringe on the Equal Protection Clause

The case is about a couple living in Virginia, Mildred Loving, a black woman and Richard Loving, a white man. Mildred got pregnant when 18 years old in Washington D.C. hence avoided

Justice Warren in the unanimous opinion of the Court, states that the anti-miscegenation statutes cannot stand constituently with the Fourteenth Amendment and violated equal protection. Virginia argued that its miscegenation statutes punished both white and black participants in an interracial marriage equally and served the legitimate state purpose of preserving the “racial integrity” of its citizens by referencing the decision in Naim v. Naim, 197 Va. 80, 87 S.E.2d 749 (1955). The Court rejected the Virginia’s contention and stated: “The clear and central purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment was to eliminate all official state sources of invidious racial discrimination in the States.” The “equal application” argument put forward by Virginia

In What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America, Peggy Pascoe examines the history of miscegenation and how it laid the foundation of white supremacy in the United States. While visible forms of white supremacy such as segregation helped mask the importance of miscegenation laws, Pascoe argues that miscegenation laws was a national movement tied inseparably to gender and sexuality that went beyond the Black/White dynamic, which courts and bureaucracies of local marriage officials used to produce race in America. Pascoe goes on to argue that the core of miscegenation laws reached beyond the realm of romance as courts began to condemn the respectability of interracial relationships by equating them with illicit sex rather than marriage. Thus, this idea of unrespectable, unnatural, and immoral relationships became women into the fabric of the American society.

On June 2, 1958 Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving went to Washington D.C. to get married and they went back to Virginia a few days later. But because Mildred was of African-American and Native American decent, and Richard was white they were arrested for violating the state law that prohibits interracial marriage. At the time, Virginia was one of 17 states, including Texas and Alabama, that had laws prohibiting interracial marriage (Wolfe). The Supreme Court Case Loving v. Virginia is an important of part of American history that has had a huge impact on racial equality and has helped change the definition of marriage in the United States forever.

The basis of this case coming to the Supreme Court attention was because a white 23 year old male Richard Loving married a Negro 17 year old woman Mildred Jeter, who were both from Virginia, where in this state they had a law that marriages

The Lovings then seeked out a goal of trying to get state laws to veto the law that prohibited interracial marriage. Roughly forty-five years later, the Loving’s story of their struggle to get the acceptance of interracial marriage is now displayed as a symbol of equality. The film Loving reflects on

Historic change in American matrimony is especially pronounced in three areas: the equalizing of the respective rights and duties of wives and husbands, the dissolution of marital prohibitions based on race, and the evolution from state-defined grounds for divorce to couple-defined no fault divorce. The most recent area of debate is whether the state should sanction marital consent between same-sex couples. Although such a prospect is unthinkable to some, earlier forms of legal marriage are equally unimaginable now.