Loving "Loving"

So here is the thing: June 12 marks the 41st anniversary of the Supreme Court decision on Loving et Ux. v. Virginia. In 1958 two Virginia residents, a black woman named Mildred Jeter and a white man named Richard Loving married in the District of Columbia because it was against the law in the state of Virginia for a white person to marry anyone from any other race except the white race. They were charged with violating the law by the state of Virginia. They plead guilty to the charge and were sentenced to one year in jail. They received a suspended sentence if they promised to leave the state and not return together for 25 years. They decided that they weren't going to accept something so inherently absurd and something so clearly an affront to their rights as human beings, and their case wound up in front of the Supreme Court, which overturned the convictions and ruled unanimously for the couple, the opinion, delivered by Chief Justice Earl Warren stated, in part:

"Marriage is one of the "basic civil rights of man," fundamental to our very existence and survival. To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.

These convictions must be reversed."

This all happened six years after my own parents got married in Germany, and let me tell you getting to the point where they said "I do" was no picnic according to my mom. The United States Army wanted my parents to consider and reconsider, and purposely made it tough for them to get married. What they didn't know about my mother is that she knew that my father was going to be the love of her life and her husband from the moment she set eyes on him and NOTHING save Almighty God himself was going to prevent this. My mom had to have a physical exam; they checked with the local town hall to make sure she didn't have a criminal record (my mother was raised as much by nuns as her own family and grew up solidly upper middle class, for crying out loud!) The Army chaplain, a priest, had to school them on exactly what they might expect being a mixed-race couple in a country that contained 17 states that considered miscegenation (what an ugly word) illegal. Now that I think about it, I don't know who he thought he was telling--my dad was a 34 year old black man from Alabama, so nobody had to tell him anything. And my mom lived through Nazi Germany. Granted, she was a child, but come on, she didn't pick up a thing or two about what happens when one race subjugates another? Even after all of that, my father's commanding officer did not have to sign the papers giving them permission to wed. But he did. They got married on April 6, 1961.

A year and a half later, after a rough sea voyage of about a week we (I was something like 8 weeks old) wound up in Brooklyn, then at Fort Dix in New Jersey, so nobody was getting arrested, at least not in my family. And then the Supreme Court made what was just and right, legal.

So it was with some deep surprise that I read that a high school in Mississippi was holding its first integrated prom ever almost 41 years to the day of the Loving ruling ! Prior to this year the students at Charleston High School have had two separate, privately-sponsored proms, one for black kids, and one for whites. Since 1997, Morgan Freeman, a native of Charleston, has offered to pay for the prom if the school throws one for everyone. They finally took him up on the offer. You can hear about it here. The slide show of the event is fun and worth looking at. But I have to say, when I first found out about this, I thought that Charleston must be one of those isolated villages that you read about--remote enclaves where time stands still. Apparently, I'm more idealistic and naive than I thought. I know the race problem is FAR from over, but I thought we had gotten over this race mixing thing long ago. At least enough to allow kids of different races and cultures to go to one prom.