Loving v. Virginia

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.

The case arose after Richard Loving, a white man, and Mildred Jeter, a woman of mixed African American and Native American ancestry, traveled from their residences in Central Point, Virginia, to Washington, D.C., to be married on June 2, 1958. Having returned to Central Point, they lived in the home of Mildred’s parents while Richard, a construction worker, built a new house for the couple. In July 1958, police entered the Lovings’ bedroom in the early morning hours and arrested them for having violated the state’s ban on interracial marriage. At a hearing in a Virginia state court in January 1959, the Lovings pleaded guilty to having violated Section 20-58 of the Virginia state code, which prohibited a “white” person and a “colored” person from leaving the state to be married and returning to live as man and wife. Section 20-58 specified that punishment for violation of the law—confinement in the state penitentiary for one to five years—should be the same as that provided in Section 20-59, which prohibited marriage between “white” and “colored” persons. The term “white person” was defined in Section 20-54 as a person with “no other admixture of blood other than white and American Indian,” provided that the amount of Indian blood was one-sixteenth or less; the term “colored person” was defined in Section 1-14 as a person “in whom there is ascertainable any Negro blood.” Sections 20-59 and 20-54 were derived from provisions of the state’s Act to Preserve Racial Integrity, adopted in 1924.

The judge sentenced the Lovings to one year in jail but suspended the sentence on the condition that the couple leave the state immediately and not return as man and wife for a period of 25 years. Having established residence in Washington, D.C., the Lovings filed suit in a Virginia state court in November 1963, seeking to overturn their convictions on the grounds that Sections 20-58 and 20-59 were inconsistent with the Fourteenth Amendment. After the state court rejected the Lovings’ challenge, the case was accepted for review by Virginia’s Supreme Court of Appeals, which upheld the constitutionality of 20-58 and 20-59 but voided the sentences because the condition under which they were suspended was, in its view, “unreasonable.” Citing its earlier decision in Naim v. Naim (1965), the appeals court ruled that, despite the statutes’ use of racial classifications to define the criminal offenses in question, neither statute violated the guarantee of equal protection of the laws because the penalties they imposed applied equally to both “white” and “colored” persons. The Lovings then appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments on April 10, 1967.

Writing for a unanimous Court, Chief Justice Earl Warren reversed the Lovings’ convictions. He first dismissed the Naim court’s reading of the equal protection clause, declaring that “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.” Accordingly, he rejected Virginia’s contention that the constitutionality of the statutes, given their presumptive compatibility with the equal protection clause, should depend solely on whether they served a rational purpose—a question best left to the wisdom of the state legislature, Virginia argued, in light of doubtful scientific evidence. To the contrary, Warren insisted, citing Korematsu v. United States (1944), “the Equal Protection Clause demands that racial classifications, especially suspect in criminal statutes, be subjected to the ‘most rigid scrutiny’”—in contrast to the less-demanding “rational-basis” standard—“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.” Yet, he continued, “there is patently no legitimate overriding purpose independent of invidious racial discrimination which justifies this classification.”

Warren’s opinion was also notable for its affirmation of the freedom to marry as “‘one of the ‘basic civil rights of man,’ fundamental to our very existence and survival,” citing the Supreme Court’s decision in Skinner v. Oklahoma (1942). To deny this freedom “on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes,” Warren contended, would be “to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law.”

The Supreme Court’s ruling overturned the Lovings’ conviction and had the effect of invalidating laws against interracial marriage in 15 other states.