∞ June 12th is Loving Day : Oxford University Press blog
Friday, June 12th is Loving Day, a holiday that deserves widespread attention.
Loving Day commemorates the Supreme Court’s 1967 decision in Loving v. Virginia, the case that made interracial marriage legal. Both the case and the holiday take their name from Richard and Mildred Loving, a couple who grew up and fell in love in Virginia, a state that epitomized America’s tragic history of miscegenation law. Between 1890 and 1948, 30 states outlawed interracial marriage; many of them banned whites from marrying Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, and American Indians as well as blacks. Enforced by police and prosecutors, by marriage license clerks, and in civil and criminal courts, miscegenation laws were designed to prevent interracial couples from marrying and to punish them if they did. Judges justified these laws by insisting that interracial marriage was somehow “unnatural,” a claim that became so pervasive that by 1958, 94 percent of Americans told pollsters they opposed interracial marriage.
its weird to think that when my parents were born it would have been straight up illegal for me to exist.
Isn’t it absolutely crazy that so much of our country is against Gay Marriage? I know that our grandchildren will look back at this time period in the same way we look back at at the prohibition of interracial marriage.
