Loving v. Virginia changed the marriage landscape for interracial couples. It is often cited as a reason why same-sex couples should be allowed to legally marry. As Mildred Loving said, "the law should allow a person to marry anyone he wants."Mildred Loving, a black woman whose challenge to Virginia's ban on interracial marriage led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling striking down such laws nationwide, has died, her daughter said Monday. [...]
''I want (people) to remember her as being strong and brave yet humble -- and believed in love,'' Fortune told The Associated Press.
Loving and her white husband, Richard, changed history in 1967 when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld their right to marry. The ruling struck down laws banning racially mixed marriages in at least 17 states.
''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,'' the court ruled in a unanimous decision.
Her husband died in 1975. Shy and soft-spoken, Loving shunned publicity and in a rare interview with The Associated Press last June, insisted she never wanted to be a hero -- just a bride. [...]''The law that threatened the Lovings with a year in jail was a vestige of a hateful, discriminatory past that could not stand in the face of the Lovings' quiet dignity,'' said Steven Shapiro, national legal director for the ACLU.
''We loved each other and got married,'' [Loving] told The Washington Evening Star in 1965, when the case was pending. ''We are not marrying the state. The law should allow a person to marry anyone he wants.''
h/t to Lambert at Corrente
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