Loving v. Virginia: A Bedroom Raid, a 25-Year Exile and a 9-0 Ruling

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Mildred and Richard Loving grew up in Central Point, a mixed-race community in Caroline County, Virginia, in a state governed by the 1924 Racial Integrity Act. Richard was white, and Mildred was of Native American and Black ancestry. When Mildred became pregnant in 1958, they married in Washington, D.C., that June, and on July 11, 1958, the local sheriff and deputies entered their bedroom at night. Mildred pointed to their marriage certificate on the wall, and the officers said it had no legal weight in Virginia. Facing one to five years in prison, the couple pleaded guilty in early 1959 and received a suspended sentence on condition that they leave Virginia and not return together for 25 years.

Living in Washington, the Lovings struggled with city life and sometimes slipped back to Caroline County at night. In 1963 Mildred wrote to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, who referred her to the ACLU, and two volunteer lawyers took the case. They had to overcome the equal application theory from Pace v. Alabama in the 1880s, which held that punishing both partners equally satisfied equal protection. The original trial judge refused to lift the sentence, reasoning that a creator had placed the races on separate continents, and Virginia's Supreme Court upheld the ban. On June 12, 1967, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren ruled 9 to 0 for the Lovings under both the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses.

• The officers who raided the home hoped to catch the couple in the act of illegal intimacy.
• In earlier cases, courts had surgeons examine people's physical traits on the witness stand to decide their race.
• The Lovings skipped the oral arguments, and Richard asked his lawyer to tell the justices that he loved his wife.
• Alabama did not remove anti-mixing language from its constitution until 2000.
• The 2015 ruling striking down same-sex marriage bans relied on Loving, and a 2022 federal law required recognition of both kinds of marriage.