Monday, May 5, 2008

IF LOVING YOU IS WRONG, I DON'T WANNA BE RIGHT: Mildred Loving, plaintiff in the landmark case of Loving v. Virginia, passed away yesterday. Loving (nee Jeter), a black woman, didn't know it was illegal when she married a white man, and her description of what she did -- "we loved each other and got married" -- was decidedly unheroic. Yet it was Loving who wrote to Bobby Kennedy that Virginia's anti-miscegenation law was wrong, and it was Loving's too-right-to-be-true name that topped the case that said, once and for all, that a marriage applicant's race is none of the state's business. Mildred's husband, Richard, died in 1975, but at least Mildred lived long enough to see the notion of opposition to interracial marriage disappear from both the law and all but the most stubborn corners of modern culture.

Hat tip: Russ.

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