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Date published: 2/16/2005
When Richard and Mildred Loving of Caroline County married in 1958, they planned to raise their family in the rural area they’d always called home. But the law wouldn’t allow the mixed marriage. The groom was white, and the bride, part black and Indian. Caroline County deputies burst into the Lovings’ bedroom five weeks after they married and arrested them. The judge sentenced them to a year in jail, then suspended it—if the couple stayed out of Virginia for 25 years. The Lovings moved to Washington, but didn’t want to raise their three children in the slums. Five years later, they returned to Caroline to appeal the ruling, with help from the American Civil Liberties Union. The national spotlight was the last thing the Lovings sought, but it shone brightly as their legal quest went on for several years. In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the law, leading to similar rulings in 16 other states. Richard Loving died in a car crash in 1975. In 1996, when a cable channel came to Caroline to make a movie about the couple, Mildred Loving was still living next to the house where her late husband grew up. She reluctantly granted an interview, but said she was tired of talking about the case. The Lovings never considered themselves civil-rights champions. “We are not doing it because somebody had to do it and we wanted to be the ones,” Richard Loving said in 1966, when he and his wife were featured in Life magazine. “We are doing it for us—because we want to live here.”
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