Supreme Court Decisions: Loving v. Virginia, 1967

A unanimous Court struck down state laws banning marriage between individuals of different races, holding that these anti-miscegenation statutes violated both the Due Process and the Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Loving v. Virginia was a Supreme Court case that struck down state laws banning interracial marriage in the United States. The plaintiffs in the case were Richard and Mildred Loving, a white man and Black woman whose marriage was deemed illegal according to Virginia state law. With the help of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Lovings appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled unanimously that so-called “anti-miscegenation” statutes were unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment. The decision is often cited as a watershed moment in the dismantling of “Jim Crow” race laws...

Mildred and Richard Loving, an interracial couple, married in D.C. but moved to Virginia where interracial marriage was banned. They sued for violation of the Equal Protection Clause. The Court held that the Virginia law violated the Fourteenth Amendment because of the law’s clear purpose to create a race-based restriction...

Civil rights encompasses a broad range of activities that engage citizens of all backgrounds—the right to vote, to lawfully assemble, to petition the government, to be judged equally before the law, and to express oneself without censorship. Civil rights and liberties do not end there though, as the right to marry whom we wish has been debated in courts for decades. Jim Crow laws throughout the American South banned inter-racial marriages alongside state laws defining Black ancestry. In 1967, the Supreme Court handed down a landmark decision on civil rights on that very topic: the famous Loving v. Virginia case...

Loving v. Virginia, legal case, decided on June 12, 1967, in which the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously (9–0) struck down state antimiscegenation statutes in Virginia as unconstitutional under the equal protection and due process clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment.

On June 12, 1967, Mildred and Richard Loving, a mixed-race couple, were finally able to live together as a legally married couple in their home state of Virginia. Nine years earlier the Lovings had left Virginia to get married. After their marriage the Lovings returned to Virginia. At that time, however, Virginia had a miscegenation statute that criminalized interracial marriages. It was also a felony for a mixed-race couple to leave the state with the purpose of marrying and returning.

In 1958 Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving, two young lovers from Caroline County, Virginia, got married. Soon they were hauled out of their bedroom in the middle of the night and taken to jail. Their crime? Loving was white, Jeter was not, and in Virginia--as in twenty-three other states then--interracial marriage was illegal. Their experience reflected that of countless couples across America since colonial times. And in challenging the laws against their marriage, the Lovings closed the book on that very long chapter in the nation's history. Race, Sex, and the Freedom to Marry tells the story of this couple and the case that forever changed the law of race and marriage in America...

Description: U.S. Reports Volume 388; October Term, 1966; Loving et ux. v. Virginia

In 1967, the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Loving v. Virginia that laws against interracial marriage were unconstitutional. Mildred Loving, a black woman married to a white man, had been prosecuted under one such Virginia law in 1958 and challenged it in the high court. PBS NewsHour correspondent Jeffrey Brown talks to Bernard Cohen, a longtime friend of the Lovings and one of the lawyers who argued their case before the Supreme Court.