[Congressional Record Volume 154, Number 74 (Tuesday, May 6, 2008)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E831-E832]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                    ON THE PASSING OF MILDRED LOVING

                                 ______
                                 

                          HON. JAMES P. MORAN

                              of virginia

                    in the house of representatives

                          Tuesday, May 6, 2008

  Mr. MORAN of Virginia. Madam Speaker, I rise to recognize the passing 
of a great lady and civil rights icon, Mildred Loving.
  I did not know Mrs. Loving personally, but I do know of her 
accomplishments for which she deserves our praise and gratitude.
  At a time of Jim Crow and powerful forces of racial hatred and 
segregation, Mildred Delores Jeter and Richard Perry Loving proved that 
the power of love and the simple act of living true to their beliefs 
was stronger and more enduring than base bigotry.
  When Mildred and Richard married, they were breaking the law. As an 
interracial couple, it was illegal for them to be married in the 
Commonwealth of Virginia. Instead, they obtained a marriage certificate 
from the District of Columbia but returned to live in Virginia, their 
home. A short time later, they were arrested, literally in their 
bedroom, and hauled off to jail. Under a plea bargain, they agreed to a 
1-year suspended sentence under the condition that they not return 
together or at the same time to Virginia.
  Inspired by the civil rights movement, the couple challenged 
Virginia's Racial Integrity Act, taking Loving v. Virginia all the way 
to the Supreme Court--and winning. As the Washington Post reported 
today, Richard Loving counseled the couple's ACLU attorneys that the 
real issue was actually very simple. ``Tell the court,'' he said, ``I 
love my wife, and it is just unfair that I can't live with her in 
Virginia.''
  In my efforts to grant federal recognition to Virginia's Native 
American people, I have come across similar stories of courage, 
determination and love fighting to overcome Virginia's legacy of racial 
division and subjugation.
  Today we recognize Mrs. Loving, her life, her courage, and her 
determination for equality under the law. She was an American hero and 
we mourn her passing.

                 [From the New York Times, May 6, 2008]

      Mildred Loving, Who Fought Ban on Mixed Marriage, Dies at 68

                          (By Douglas Martin)

       Mildred Loving, a black woman whose anger over being 
     banished from Virginia for marrying a white man led to a 
     landmark Supreme Court ruling overturning state miscegenation 
     laws, died on May 2 at her home in Central Point, Va. She was 
     68.
       Peggy Fortune, her daughter, said the cause was pneumonia.
       The Supreme Court ruling, in 1967, struck down the last 
     group of segregation laws to remain on the books--those 
     requiring separation of the races in marriage. The ruling was 
     unanimous, its opinion written by Chief Justice Earl Warren, 
     who in 1954 wrote the court's opinion in Brown v. Board of 
     Education, declaring segregated public schools 
     unconstitutional.

[[Page E832]]

       In Loving v. Virginia, Warren wrote that miscegenation laws 
     violated the Constitution's equal protection clause. ``We 
     have consistently denied the constitutionality of measures 
     which restrict the rights of citizens on account of race,'' 
     he said.
       By their own widely reported accounts, Mrs. Loving and her 
     husband, Richard, were in bed in their modest house in 
     Central Point in the early morning of July 11, 1958, five 
     weeks after their wedding, when the county sheriff and two 
     deputies, acting on an anonymous tip, burst into their 
     bedroom and shined flashlights in their eyes. A threatening 
     voice demanded, ``Who is this woman you're sleeping with?''
       Mrs. Loving answered, ``I'm his wife.''
       Mr. Loving pointed to the couple's marriage certificate 
     hung on the bedroom wall. The sheriff responded, ``That's no 
     good here.''
       The certificate was from Washington, D.C., and under 
     Virginia law, a marriage between people of different races 
     performed outside Virginia was as invalid as one done in 
     Virginia. At the time, it was one of 16 states that barred 
     marriages between races.
       After Mr. Loving spent a night in jail and his wife several 
     more, the couple pleaded guilty to violating the Virginia 
     law, the Racial Integrity Act. Under a plea bargain, their 
     one-year prison sentences were suspended on the condition 
     that they leave Virginia and not return together or at the 
     same time for 25 years.
       Judge Leon M. Bazile, in language Chief Justice Warren 
     would recall, said that if God had meant for whites and 
     blacks to mix, he would have not placed them on different 
     continents. Judge Bazile reminded the defendants that ``as 
     long as you live you will be known as a felon.''
       They paid court fees of $36.29 each, moved to Washington 
     and had three children. They returned home occasionally, 
     never together. But times were tough financially, and the 
     Lovings missed family, friends and their easy country 
     lifestyle in the rolling Virginia hills.
       By 1963, Mrs. Loving could stand the ostracism no longer. 
     Inspired by the civil rights movement and its march on 
     Washington, she wrote Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and 
     asked for help. He wrote her back, and referred her to the 
     American Civil Liberties Union.
       The A.C.L.U. took the case. Its lawyers, Bernard S. Cohen 
     and Philip J. Hirschkop, faced an immediate problem: the 
     Lovings had pleaded guilty and had no right to appeal. So 
     they asked Judge Bazile to set aside his original verdict. 
     When he refused, they appealed. The Virginia Supreme Court of 
     Appeals upheld the lower court, and the case went to the 
     United States Supreme Court.
       Mr. Cohen recounted telling Mr. Loving about various legal 
     theories applying to the case. Mr. Loving replied, ``Mr. 
     Cohen, tell the court I love my wife, and it is just unfair 
     that I can't live with her in Virginia.''
       Mildred Delores Jeter's family had lived in Caroline 
     County, Va., for generations, as had the family of Richard 
     Perry Loving. The area was known for friendly relations 
     between races, even though marriages were forbidden. Many 
     people were visibly of mixed race, with Ebony magazine 
     reporting in 1967 that black ``youngsters easily passed for 
     white in neighboring towns.''
       Mildred's mother was part Rappahannock Indian, and her 
     father was part Cherokee. She preferred to think of herself 
     as Indian rather than black.
       Mildred and Richard began spending time together when he 
     was a rugged- looking 17 and she was a skinny 11-year-old 
     known as Bean. He attended an all-white high school for a 
     year, and she reached 11th grade at an all-black school.
       When Mildred became pregnant at 18, they decided to do what 
     was elsewhere deemed the right thing and get married. They 
     both said their initial motive was not to challenge Virginia 
     law.
       ``We have thought about other people,'' Mr. Loving said in 
     an interview with Life magazine in 1966, ``but we are not 
     doing it just because somebody had to do it and we wanted to 
     be the ones. We are doing it for us.''
       In his classic study of segregation, ``An American 
     Dilemma,'' Gunnar Myrdal wrote that ``the whole system of 
     segregation and discrimination is designed to prevent 
     eventual inbreeding of the races.''
       But miscegenation laws struck deeper than other segregation 
     acts, and the theory behind them leads to chaos in other 
     facets of law. This is because they make any affected 
     marriage void from its inception. Thus, all children are 
     illegitimate; spouses have no inheritance rights; and heirs 
     cannot receive death benefits.
       ``When any society says that I cannot marry a certain 
     person, that society has cut off a segment of my freedom,'' 
     the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said in 1958.
       Virginia's law had been on the books since 1662, adopted a 
     year after Maryland enacted the first such statute. At one 
     time or another, 38 states had miscegenation laws. State and 
     federal courts consistently upheld the prohibitions, until 
     1948, when the California Supreme Court overturned 
     California's law.
       Though the Supreme Court's 1967 decision in the Loving case 
     struck down miscegenation laws, Southern states were 
     sometimes slow to change their constitutions; Alabama became 
     the last state to do so, in 2000.
       Mr. Loving died in a car accident in 1975, and the Lovings' 
     son Donald died in 2000. In addition to her daughter, Peggy 
     Fortune, who lives in Milford, Va., Mrs. Loving is survived 
     by her son, Sidney, of Tappahannock, Va.; eight 
     grandchildren; and 11 great-grandchildren.
       Mrs. Loving stopped giving interviews, but last year issued 
     a statement on the 40th anniversary of the announcement of 
     the Supreme Court ruling, urging that gay men and lesbians be 
     allowed to marry.

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