Loving v. Virginia, the 14th Amendment, and Hope

Interracial Marriage in the Segregated South

In 1967 the Supreme Court led by Chief Justice Earl Warren unanimously ruled that laws prohibiting interracial marriage were unconstitutional. The decision was a long time coming since that laws banning such marriages had been in effect since the colonial era and were strengthen in force as part of the Black Codes during Reconstruction.

Of course, that did not stop people from falling in love, getting married, and starting families. And as this week’s guest Dr. Kathryn Schumaker tells us, these couplings were not secretive in the South and were actually quite common. Katy’s new book, Tangled Fortunes: The Hidden History of Interracial Marriage in the Segregated South shows how white lawmakers worked to prohibit interracial marriages as a way keeping white wealth away from Black hands all the while maintaining the extant racial hierarchy.

Which brings us to Richard and Mildred Loving. Richard was a white man in an open relationship with Mildred, who was of African and Rappahannock descent. By 1958 the couple were expecting their first child, but due to Virginia’s antimiscegenation laws, were forced to marry in Washington, D.C. When they returned they were arrested, found guilty of violating the Commonwealth’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924 and ultimately sentenced to a year in prison, which was changed to time served if the couple promised not to return for 25 years.

Eventually the couple was contacted by the ACLU as part of a slew of cases to battle racist laws. And while we often think fondly of people like Richard and Mildred Loving or even Rosa Parks, what we don’t often think on is the long, laborious, and often dangerous roads these people—who absolutely did not want to be heroes—traveled to make the United States a better place for everyone.

And I think that’s the power of the 2016 film Loving, starring Joel Edgerton as Richard and Ruth Negga as Mildred. It is a powerful film that ably demonstrates the strain relationships like the Lovings sometimes placed on their communities but also the bonds between families and homelands. Edgerton is in my mind one of the finest actors on the planet. Irishwoman Ruth Negga gives one of the best performances you’ll ever see. For her part, she was nominated for an Academy Award.

The Lovings on film versus real life.

And all of that brings us back to the relevance of the case today. The Court ruled in favor of the Lovings because Virginia’s law violated the Equal Protection and Due Processes clauses of the 14th Amendment. Unfortunately, it did not extend in its decision the same privileges to same sex marriages, though it proved important in the Obergefell v. Hodges decision of 2015. And of course, talk of overturning the 14th Amendment seems to dominate much of the current political dumpster fire dialogue.

There are other scholars who you can read, but I’ve come to see the 14th Amendment as the single most important Amendment in the Constitution. Many of the Amendments are protections from the government, but this one is different. This one tells us who gets to be an American and have the blessings of citizenship guaranteed to them. It also addresses such things as inciting a rebellion, though that is totally not related at all to the aforementioned political discussion.

So with all that said, I wanted to talk with Katy Schumaker about Loving and use that to talk about the long history of interracial marriages in the South. I often get asked about the best “history” movies and that’s hard to describe, but usually what people are asking about are the most historically accurate films. Well, films aren’t documentaries but they do have an obligation to get at what Ed Zwick called the “necessary truths” of a subject or event. In this case, Loving delivers both, and I think demonstrates the power of film to really effectively tell and teach history. And it’s what HATM has really come to embrace as a learning and growing mechanism.

About our guest

Kathryn Schumaker, a historian of the modern United States, is a Senior Lecturer in American Studies at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. She received her PhD in History from the University of Chicago. Her scholarship is focused on intersections of race, gender, and American law. Her new book, Tangled Fortunes: The Hidden History of Interracial Marriage in the Segregated South, explores how interracial families survived in the hostile political, social, and legal environment of Jim Crow Mississippi. She is also the author of Troublemakers: Students’ Rights and Racial Justice in the Long Twentieth Century. She has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Academy of Education and Spencer Foundation, the American Historical Association, and the American Society for Legal History.

Own her book

Amazon link here: Tangled Fortunes

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