Opinion

  Opinion  

CLARENCE PAGE: A LOVING COUPLE'S LEGACY

There is a poignant significance to the passing of Mildred Loving at a time when a biracial senator leads the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Their stories are connected by time, skin color and a U.S. Supreme Court decision.

Mildred and Richard Loving had been married only five weeks in 1958 when the county sheriff burst into their bedroom with two deputies.

The authorities shined flashlights in the Lovings' eyes and a menacing voice demanded, "Who is this woman you're sleeping with?"

When Richard pointed to their marriage certificate on a wall, the sheriff responded, "That's no good here."

The District of Columbia marriage license was "no good" because Richard was white and Mildred was black in a small Virginia town in 1958, when it was one of at least 17 states that banned interracial marriage.

The raid, sparked by an anonymous tip, resulted in a night in jail for Richard, several more for Mildred, a felony conviction, and their banishment from returning to the state together or at the same time for 25 years.

They returned to their home state sooner than that, thanks to the landmark Supreme Court ruling in their case, Loving v. Virginia, that overturned state miscegenation laws in 1967.

Mildred Loving died on May 2 at her home in Central Point, Va. She was 68. Her husband died in a car accident in 1975.

Four decades after the court decision that bears their poignantly appropriate name, the world feels like a very different place, thanks in part to that court decision.

Interracial marriages have multiplied as American attitudes toward race have relaxed, although for some groups dramatically more than for others.

Since 1970, the number of married people in the United States who have a spouse of another race has climbed from fewer than 2 per 100 to nearly 8 per 100, according to Stanford University sociologist Michael J. Rosenfeld, a leading specialist in interracial marriage trends.

The growth of interracial marriages in the military offers an example of what can occur across racial lines in the closest thing we have to a colorblind society. The Army sees only one color, I was told after I was drafted in 1969: Army green. In accord with that dictum, census figures show intermarriage more than twice as likely in the military for all racial groups except Asian men.

That's a reflection of how long the military has been integrated into one unified, egalitarian and meritocratic culture. Significantly, the military has a level playing field that is ordered from the top down and obeyed by a military culture that is by nature intolerant of nonconformity.

But in establishing a right to marry whom you please regardless of race, the Loving decision also has touched off a heated debate over whether the right to marry should be extended to couples of the same sex.

Frankly, I don't see how anyone else's marriage would make my marriage any weaker, as opponents of gay marriage suggest. Nevertheless, I expect that debate to continue for a while. Public resistance to interracial marriage was a lot weaker in the late 1960s than resistance to gay marriages is today.

American attitudes toward race have relaxed considerably. Our attitudes toward sex are still pretty uptight.

Clarence Page is a columnist with Tribune Media Services.