Loving v. Virginia

Judicial decision

By: U.S. Supreme Court

Date: June 12, 1967

Source: Loving v. Virginia. 388 US 1 (1967)

About the Author: The Supreme Court of the United States is the nation's highest court of appeals and final arbiter of the Constitution. The court consists of eight associate justices and one chief justice. The opinion in Loving v. Virginia was delivered by Chief Justice Earl Warren.

INTRODUCTION

Segregation did not just involve restaurants and schools. In many states, blacks and whites were prohibited from marrying. Virginia had a ban on black-white interracial marriages that dated to 1691, and violators faced a prison term of one to five years. Nevertheless, Mildred Jeter, a black woman, and Richard Loving, a white man employed as a bricklayer, married in Washington, DC, in 1958. The subsequent events would end with the legalization of interracial marriages across the United States.

Jeter and Loving had grown up together in the small Virginia town of Sparta. They did not know another black-white couple when they married. No one from their families objected to the match, but an anonymous individual later notified authorities about the marriage. On July 15, 1958, three Caroline County, Virginia lawmen entered the Lovings' home at two in the morning and dragged them out of bed and to jail. The couple was convicted of a crime by marrying. In lieu of a prison term, they accepted exile from the state for twenty-five years. In 1965, the Lovings sued to have the law overturned. They lost in the Virginia Supreme Court, but the subsequent 1967 Supreme Court decision in Loving v. Virginia overturned Virginia's state prohibition on black-white interracial marriages.

PRIMARY SOURCE

U.S. Supreme Court
Loving v. Commonwealth of Virginia

388 U.S. 1 (1967)

Appeal from the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia.

No. 395.

While the state court is no doubt correct in asserting that marriage is a social relation subject to the State's police power, Maynard v. Hill, (1888), the State does not contend in its argument before this Court that its powers to regulate marriage are unlimited notwithstanding the commands of the Fourteenth Amendment. Nor could it do so in light of Meyer v. Nebraska, (1923), and Skinner v. Oklahoma, (1942). Instead, the State argues that the meaning of the Equal Protection Clause, as illuminated by the statements of the Framers, is only that state penal laws containing an interracial element [388 U.S. 1, 8] as part of the definition of the offense must apply equally to whites and Negroes in the sense that members of each race are punished to the same degree. Thus, the State contends that, because its miscegenation statutes punish equally both the white and the Negro participants in an interracial marriage, these statutes, despite their reliance on racial classifications, do not constitute an invidious discrimination based upon race. The second argument advanced by the State assumes the validity of its equal application theory. The argument is that, if the Equal Protection Clause does not outlaw miscegenation statutes because of their reliance on racial classifications, the question of constitutionality would thus become whether there was any rational basis for a State to treat interracial marriages differently from other marriages. On this question, the State argues, the scientific evidence is substantially in doubt and, consequently, this Court should defer to the wisdom of the state legislature in adopting its policy of discouraging interracial marriages.

Because we reject the notion that the mere "equal application" of a statute containing racial classifications is enough to remove the classifications from the Fourteenth Amendment's proscription of all invidious racial discriminations, we do not accept the State's contention that these statutes should be upheld if there is any possible basis for concluding that they serve a rational purpose. The mere fact of equal application does not mean that our analysis of these statutes should follow the approach we have taken in cases involving no racial discrimination where the Equal Protection Clause has been arrayed against a statute discriminating between the kinds of advertising which may be displayed on trucks in New York City, Railway Express Agency, Inc. v. New York,(1949), or an exemption in Ohio's ad valorem tax for merchandise owned by a nonresident in a storage warehouse, Allied Stores of Ohio, [388 U.S. 1, 9] Inc. v. Bowers, (1959). In these cases, involving distinctions not drawn according to race, the Court has merely asked whether there is any rational foundation for the discriminations, and has deferred to the wisdom of the state legislatures. In the case at bar, however, we deal with statutes containing racial classifications, and the fact of equal application does not immunize the statute from the very heavy burden of justification which the Fourteenth Amendment has traditionally required of state statutes drawn according to race.

The State argues that statements in the Thirty-ninth Congress about the time of the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment indicate that the Framers did not intend the Amendment to make unconstitutional state miscegenation laws. Many of the statements alluded to by the State concern the debates over the Freedmen's Bureau Bill, which President Johnson vetoed, and the Civil Rights Act of 1866, 14 Stat. 27, enacted over his veto. While these statements have some relevance to the intention of Congress in submitting the Fourteenth Amendment, it must be understood that they pertained to the passage of specific statutes and not to the broader, organic purpose of a constitutional amendment. As for the various statements directly concerning the Fourteenth Amendment, we have said in connection with a related problem, that although these historical sources "cast some light" they are not sufficient to resolve the problem; "[a]t best, they are inconclusive. The most avid proponents of the post-War Amendments undoubtedly intended them to remove all legal distinctions among 'all persons born or naturalized in the United States.' Their opponents, just as certainly, were antagonistic to both the letter and the spirit of the Amendments and wished them to have the most limited effect." Brown v. Board of Education, (1954). See also Strauder v. West Virginia, [388 U.S. 1, 10] (1880). We have rejected the proposition that the debates in the Thirty-ninth Congress or in the state legislatures which ratified the Fourteenth Amendment supported the theory advanced by the State, that the requirement of equal protection of the laws is satisfied by penal laws defining offenses based on racial classifications so long as white and Negro participants in the offense were similarly punished. McLaughlin v. Florida, (1964).

The State finds support for its "equal application" theory in the decision of the Court inPace v. Alabama, (1883). In that case, the Court upheld a conviction under an Alabama statute forbidding adultery or fornication between a white person and a Negro which imposed a greater penalty than that of a statute proscribing similar conduct by members of the same race. The Court reasoned that the statute could not be said to discriminate against Negroes because the punishment for each participant in the offense was the same. However, as recently as the 1964 Term, in rejecting the reasoning of that case, we stated "Pace represents a limited view of the Equal Protection Clause which has not withstood analysis in the subsequent decisions of this Court." McLaughlin v. Florida, supra, at 188. As we there demonstrated, the Equal Protection Clause requires the consideration of whether the classifications drawn by any statute constitute an arbitrary and invidious discrimination. The clear and central purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment was to eliminate all official state sources of invidious racial discrimination in the States. Slaughter-House Cases, 16 Wall. 36, 71 (1873); Strauder v. West Virginia, (1880); Ex parte Virginia, (1880); Shelley v. Kraemer, (1948); Burton v. Wilmington Parking Authority, (1961). [388 U.S. 1, 11]

There can be no question but that Virginia's miscegenation statutes rest solely upon distinctions drawn according to race. The statutes proscribe generally accepted conduct if engaged in by members of different races. Over the years, this Court has consistently repudiated "[d]istinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry" as being "odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality." Hirabayashi v. United States, (1943). At the very least, the Equal Protection Clause demands that racial classifications, especially suspect in criminal statutes, be subjected to the "most rigid scrutiny," Korematsu v. United States, (1944), and, if they are ever to be upheld, they must be shown to be necessary to the accomplishment of some permissible state objective, independent of the racial discrimination which it was the object of the Fourteenth Amendment to eliminate. Indeed, two members of this Court have already stated that they "cannot conceive of a valid legislative purpose…which makes the color of a person's skin the test of whether his conduct is a criminal offense." McLaughlin v. Florida, supra, at 198 (STEWART, J., joined by DOUGLAS, J., concurring).

There is patently no legitimate overriding purpose independent of invidious racial discrimination which justifies this classification. The fact that Virginia prohibits only interracial marriages involving white persons demonstrates that the racial classifications must stand on their own justification, as measures designed to maintain White Supremacy. We have consistently denied [388 U.S. 1, 12] the constitutionality of measures which restrict the rights of citizens on account of race. There can be no doubt that restricting the freedom to marry solely because of racial classifications violates the central meaning of the Equal Protection Clause.

SIGNIFICANCE

In 1960, there were 51,000 black-white couples. By 2000, this number had reached 450,000, still only a fraction of the total in the United States. While American attitudes toward racially mixed marriages have improved over the decades, many Americans continue to oppose a close relative marrying someone of another race. In 2000, eighty-six percent of African Americans surveyed by Harvard University declared that they would welcome a white person into their families, but only fifty-five percent of white families responded in kind.

Increasingly open attitudes toward interracial marriage can be credited in part to Loving v. Virginia, which overturned not only the Virginia marriage ban, but also similar laws in fifteen other states. Fourteen other states had already repealed their laws by that time. A dozen states continued to keep their bans on the books, but such laws were unenforceable in the wake of the court decision. In 2000, Alabama became the last state to remove its antimiscegenation law from the books.

FURTHER RESOURCES

Books

Moran, Rachel F. Interracial Intimacy: The Regulation of Race & Romance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

Newbeck, Phyl. Virginia Hasn't Always Been for Lovers: Inter-racial Marriage Bans and the Case of Richard and Mildred Loving. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois Press, 2004.

Wallenstein, Peter. Tell the Court I Love My Wife: Race, Marriage, and Law An American History. New York: Palgrave, 2004.