Marlene Wagman-Geller

Jun 12, 2025 by Marlene Wagman-Geller

 

     Before the exchange of rings, the minister recites a quotation from the Book of Common Prayer, “What therefore God hath joined together, let no man put asunder.” Unfortunately, to put asunder is what the state of Virginia routinely did, thereby lending an ironic overtone to its slogan, “Virginia is for lovers.” And yet, through a Southern steel magnolia, Vergil’s words came to pass, “Amor vincit omnia.”

    In 1950 a seventeen-year-old man from Central Point in Caroline County, north of Richmond, walked down a dirt pass to hear some hillbilly music, never dreaming the walk would change his life-as well as his country. Seven brothers of the Jeter family were performing that night, playing bluegrass in their farmhouse. In the audience were their two sisters, Garnet and Mildred Dolores. Although he had come for the entertainment, he was drawn to Mildred. The eleven-year-old had been nicknamed String-bean-shortened to Bean-because of her stick-thin frame. It was not love at first sight because she initially thought he was arrogant. As it turned out he was not; rather, Richard Perry Loving was just a man of few words.

     During the next several years they spent free time together though segregation compelled their attendance in different schools and churches. Other than this, in Central Point fraternizing between the races was not an issue; Richard’s favorite pastime was drag-racing in a car he co-owned with an African-American friend. This was not the case, though, when they ate lunch in nearby Bowling Green and were obliged to sit at different counters. Over the years their courtship turned romantic, but, as Lysander observed in A Midsummer’s Night Dream, “The course of true love never did run smooth.” 

       At age eighteen, Mildred became pregnant, and the problem was not morning sickness, but rather, societal illness. The trouble was not merely because she was an unwed teen from a poor family with a grade eleven education. The thorn was although interracial intimacy was not uncommon, legalizing it was a horse of a different color. Apartheid flourished in Cold War America as Virginia’s “Racial Integrity Act-” instituted in 1662- prohibited marriage between the races. However, they determined to do what was elsewhere deemed the right thing to do and decided to exchange vows. They knew it would create a tempest, but they loved each other. Mildred, who strongly identified with her Indian heritage-she had Cherokee and Rappahannock Native American roots- felt she was the 1950s Pocahontas-and the legendary princess had married a white man. Because of their honorable intentions, the couple was to have more on their plate them merely choosing the china pattern for their wedding registry.

       Richard attempted to sidestep Jim Crow and on a summer afternoon in 1958 the pair travelled to Washington, D. C. with Mildred’s father and one of her brothers to serve as witnesses. They were saddened they could not have been married by one of their own ministers and picked a random name from a phonebook. Afterwards they returned to Central Point where Richard had purchased an acre of land near Mildred’s family home on which he planned to build a house for his family. It was their hope that Richard’s mother, a midwife, would deliver their baby, and that they would live in the bosom of relatives in a bucolic country setting. It was then that matters turned truly ugly. 

       Five weeks after the ceremony, the newlyweds ‘midsummer’s night dreams’ were shattered when the local sheriff, his deputy, and the county jailer, (the sum total of law enforcement in Caroline County,) barged into the couple’s residence.  They might have caught them in the act, but the Lovings were asleep.  Brooks shone a flashlight in their faces and the sheriff demanded of Richard, “Who is this woman you’re sleeping with?” Richard did not answer. He never spoke much to strangers, a combination of his reticent nature and embarrassment he was a bricklayer with a single year of high school. Mildred answered, “I’m his wife.” “Not here you’re not,” the sheriff replied. In protest Richard pointed to the framed marriage certificate on his wall from the District of Columbia to which Sheriff Garnett Brooks growled, “That’s no good here.” Virginia charged the newlyweds with unlawful cohabitation “against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth.” The officers took the newlyweds to a rat-infested jail in Bowling Green and Richard spent a night behind bars, his pregnant wife several more. It was the night the lights went out in Virginia.

      Because the Lovings were indeed in violation of the law- and their court-appointed attorney did not have a high opinion of his clients and referred to Richard as a redneck- they had no choice other than to plead guilty. Judge Leon Bazile informed the defendants that as “as long as you live you will be known as felons.” They were sentenced to one year in prison-the maximum the judge could have imposed was five- for violating the anti-miscegenation statute. They were offered a plea bargain of a dismissal with the provision they leave the state and not return in one another’s company for twenty-five years. Not surprisingly, they chose banishment. They paid the court fees of $36.29 each, and moved across the Potomac where Donald, Peggy and Sidney were born. They secretly returned for Mildred to give birth that led to their next incarceration. Their lawyer used his friendship with the judge to secure their release but warned them there would be no further leniency.

      The Lovings dearly missed their close-knit families and friends and the concrete of their ghetto in Washington, D. C. was a cold contrast to the open spaces of Caroline County. For Mrs. Loving, Washington might as well have been Siberia. As her husband said, “Mildred was crying the blues all the time.” For marrying the only man she had ever loved, Mrs. Loving had paid a steep price. She could have collapsed under the hammer of Jim Crow but she decided to still rise. She had to be strong for her husband and children. Her breaking point was when a car hit her son Donald and she decided that sometimes when things are a crying shame there comes a time to stop crying- and start doing.

     In 1963, inspired by the Civil rights Movement and the March on Washington, Mildred wrote to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy for help, and he put them in touch with the American Civil Liberties Union. They accepted the case pro bono and Bernard S. Cohen and Philp J. Hirschkop served as their attorneys. Because of their religion they may have felt a personal connection to the case-not only because they viewed Virginia as denying a basic human right- as the case echoed Nazi Germany’s Nuremberg law that forbade marriage between Gentiles and Jews. The two men paid for their part in legal history. There was cold shoulders from some disapproving bar colleagues, nasty anonymous telephone calls, disparaging references to “two Jew lawyers” in the Ku Klux Klan newspaper and sugar poured into the gasoline tanks of family cars.

          Cohen, the lead attorney, first problem was the Lovings had pled guilty and therefore had no legal right to an appeal. He asked Bazile to set aside his original verdict. The judge refused and reiterated the couple’s culpability with the words, “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and He placed them on separate continents…The fact that He separated the races shows that He did not intend for the races to mix.” The attorneys saw the quagmire as the perfect leverage for a hearing in front of the Supreme Court and though Richard disliked being used as a leverage for anything, he agreed. The private Lovings became accidental activists, cast in the roles of the unwitting righters of a historic wrong. When they were featured in Life Magazine they were shocked to find themselves in the eye of the storm.

      When the Supreme Court heard the arguments seventeen states remained steadfast in their refusal to repeal laws banning interracial marriages. Various eyes were riveted on the trial: the Klan looked through the holes in their hoods and prayed the status quo continue; liberals hoped the bastion of prejudice would meet its demise; romantics felt the drama of a Southern love story. Cohen said there was something serendipitous about the fact that the case would be called Loving vs. the Commonwealth of Virginia. Mildred said the only thing that mattered to her was being able to walk down the street, in view of everyone, with her husband’s arm around her. Eschewing the limelight, the couple spent the trial hours at home, Mildred sewing and cooking, Richard laying bricks and mowing the lawn. Although he did not attend the hearing for which he had been instrumental, Richard sent a message to the Justices: “Mr. Cohen, tell the Court I love my wife and it is just not fair that I cannot live with her in Virginia.”  The Court agreed.

       In the 1967 decision it ruled 9 to 0 that Virginia’s laws were aimed at white supremacy, were unconstitutional and a violation of the 14^th Amendment. Chief Justice Earl Warren- who in 1954 wrote the court’s opinion in Brown v. Board of Education-wrote, “Marriage is one of the basic civil rights of man,” and ended the proceedings with the pronouncement, “These convictions must be reversed. It is so ordered.” His decree-to use the motto of Virginia-was a “sic semper tyrannis” that struck a stake through the heart of Jim Crow and eliminated one of the last vestiges of slavery. Of the ruling Mildred later said, “I feel free now.” After nine years, the Lovings were legally able to return as a family to Virginia.  Richard built by hand a simple, cinder-block house close to both of their parents, on Passing Road.

    If the Bible Belt had been ruled by karmic justice, the second half of the Lovings’ lives would have brought the serenity they had been earlier denied, but this was not the case. While laws can be changed by the stroke of a pen attitudes sometimes cannot, particularly racial attitudes in an area that was once the capital of the Confederacy.  In the years after the trial, Brooks and the Lovings never exchanged a word. The sheriff made it clear he harbored no qualms about what he did. “I was acting according to the law at the time, and I still think it should be on the books. I don’t think a white person should marry a black person. I’m from the old school. The Lord made sparrows and robins, not to mix with one another.” He then added, “If they’d been outstanding people, I would have thought something about it. But with the caliber of those people, it didn’t matter. They were both low-class.” Mildred decided to ignore the haters and lived a private, ordinary life with its ordinary pleasures-a wonderful marriage, children, and proximity to family. She attended church, cooked, smoked unfiltered Pall Malls, and drank endless cups of instant coffee with neighbors. A favorite pastime was sitting hand in hand with Richard on their back porch to a peaceful view of the fields they had fought to call home. However, the fates were not yet finished with Mildred Jeter Loving. 

     When Mildred was thirty-five, she, her sister Garnet, and Richard were driving along a highway when a drunk driver broadsided their car. Her husband died on impact, Mildred lost her left eye, and Garnet suffered minor injuries. Richard is buried in a mostly black graveyard just outside the local Baptist church. Even in death, he refused to be bound by the confines of segregation. Mildred’s widowhood was lonely, but she never considered replacing him. They had loved each other.

     In the years following the ruling, the Lovings had turned down countless requests for interviews, public appearances and honors. Mildred Loving had no affiliations beyond her church and her family and never considered herself a hero. “It wasn’t my doing, it was God’s work.” People had accepted they would not hear from the reclusive Mildred again but on the 40^th anniversary of the ruling a gay rights group asked her to make a statement in favor of same sex marriage citing the parallels between their situations. She listened with empathy, a worn bible on her end table, as the group’s founder told of his own struggles with a society that would not permit him to marry who he loved. She agreed and issued the statement, “I support the freedom to marry for all. That’s what Loving, and loving, are all about.”

     Although Mildred continued to shy away from publicity, her legacy kept her name alive. The anniversary of the Supreme Court decision, June 12^th, is celebrated as Loving Day, a time set aside to showcase that the right to marry lays in the hands of individuals, not the state.

       The indefatigable woman, the reluctant warrior in the Civil rights Movement, died in her home in 2008 from pneumonia. She left behind her two surviving children, eight grandchildren, and eleven great-grandchildren, and was interred next to her husband. Mildred showed that love, like water, has no color.

     

      

   

    

     

    

     

     

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