Richard Loving
On July 11, 1958 a couple of hours after midnight, Richard Loving a white man and Mildred Loving an African American woman were awakened to the presence of three officers in their bedroom. One of the three officers demanded from Richard to identify the woman next to him.1
Based on a true story, this telefilm takes place in 1960, when 17 states enforced laws that prohibited inter-racial marriages. But when white Virginian Richard Loving impregnates his black girlfriend Mildred, he decides to marry her, for neither believes that the law will be enforced.2
The old laws that you referenced were finally overturned on June 12, 1967, when the United States Supreme Court in the case of Loving v. Virginia, reversed the laws that forbade interracial marriages. Mildred Jeter, a Black woman, and Richard Loving, a White man, committed a felony under Virginia law because, after marrying in the District of Columbia, they lived together as husband and wife in Caroline County, Virginia.3
The arrest and conviction of the young couple…Richard, 24 and Mildred, 18…is similar to the arrest four years earlier, of civil rights heroine, Rosa Parks. Whereas Rosa Parks refused to obey Montgomery’s ordinance requiring colored people to sit in the rear of city buses, Richard and Mildred Loving refused to obey Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law, prohibiting marriage between individuals classified as being of different races.4
This year will mark the thirty-eighth anniversary of Loving v. Virginia, a Supreme Court case many born post 1967 may not be aware of. In June of 1958, Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter were married in Washington D.C. Upon their return to their home state of Virginia, the couple was arrested, convicted of a felony, and sentenced to a year in jail.5