Kate Sheppard wrote last year about Mildred and Richard Loving, the couple whose 1967 case before the US Supreme Court ended forever the restrictions on inter-racial marriage in the US.
Even as they changed America, the Lovings were never a household name. After getting married in Washington, DC, in June 1958, they simply returned to their home in Central Point, Virginia. Mildred was unaware, she said, of her state’s “Racial Integrity Act,” a 1924 law forbidding interracial marriage—although she later added that she thought her husband knew about it but didn’t figure they’d be persecuted. [Read more…]