Tuesday, June 13, 2017

Yesterday was Loving Day: 50 years of legal inter-racial marriage throughout the United States

Yesterday was Loving Day, the anniversary of the Supreme Court decision on June 12, 1967 in the case of Loving v. Virginia, that bans on interracial marriage were unconstitutional.

I don't think anyone can help being reminded of the Supreme Court decision on June 26, 2015, that decided that bans on same sex marriage were unconstitutional (in the less fortuitously named case of OBERGEFELL ET AL. v. HODGES, DIRECTOR, OHIO DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH, ET AL.).

Here's the NY Times, on a couple married in 1950 in California: ‘We Are Not Unusual Anymore’: 50 Years of Mixed-Race Marriage in U.S.

"When they married in Oakland in 1950, mixed-race marriage had just become legal in California, the result of a lawsuit that reached the State Supreme Court. They are among the oldest living interracial couples legally married in the United States. It would be nearly two decades before all couples like them across the country were allowed to marry.

On Monday, they will mark the 50th anniversary of Loving v. Virginia, the United States Supreme Court case that overturned antimiscegenation laws nationwide. Mildred and Richard Loving, a black woman and a white man, had been sentenced to a year in a Virginia prison for marrying each other. The case would serve as a basis for the Supreme Court decision allowing same-sex marriage."

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