I’m Not The Only One

Many people may not know who Mildred Loving is, but her court case overturned a shameful (and legal) practice in the United States.  Mildred Loving died last week, May 2, at the age of 68, joining her husband Richard who died in 1975.  This couple became famous-or infamous-in 1958 for the simple act of marriage.

Mildred was of African and Rappahannock (Native American) descent, and her beloved husband was Caucasian.   The two Virginians got their marriage license in Washington, D.C, but upon return to their home state was charged with “cohabiting as man and wife, against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth” according to Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act, which prohibited whites from marrying non-whites.  The Lovings fled Virginia to avoid arrest.  Leon Bazile, the judge who sentenced them to one year in prison if they didn’t leave the state, added the following:

“Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay and red, and He placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with His arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that He separated the races shows that He did not intend for the races to mix.”

The contraband couple sought refuge in Washington, D.C. until 1963 when they sued for Virginia to overturn the previous judgment on the grounds that it violated the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution which requires all states to give equal protection to all of its residents.  The state argued that they did not violate the Fourteenth since both spouses were equally sentenced.

The Lovings turned to the U.S. Supreme Court, who ruled in 1967 that the Racial Integrity Act and all other anti-miscegenation laws were racist and promoted white supremacy, citing that Virginia only prohibited marriage between whites and non-whites and not non-whites of different races.

Strangely enough, many states kept their anti-miscegenation laws on the books albeit unenforced, with Alabama being the last state to repeal their race-mixing ban in 2000.

Few people are familiar with similar court cases involving interracial marriages in the U.S. that precede Loving v. Virginia.

In 1948, Andrea Perez, a Mexican-American woman regarded as white, and Sylvester Davis, an African-American, sued the Los Angeles County Clerk to issue them a marriage license.  The county invoked California’s 98-year old anti-miscegenation law which stated,

“No license may be issued authorizing the marriage of a white person with a Negro, mulatto, Mongolian or member of the Malay race”.  Like the Lovings, the Davis’ argued the state law violated the Fourteenth Amendment and the California Supreme Court agreed and granted them their marriage license.

In 1881 Tony Pace, an African-American and Mary Cox, a white woman, both married (not to each other) Alabama residents were sentenced to two years in jail for “living together in a state of adultery or fornication”.  Like the Lovings, Pace and Cox argued the state’s race-mixing bans violated the Fourteenth Amendment, which had just been passed 13 years earlier.  Alabama prosecutors used the same argument Virginia would use 80 years later and added,

“The evil tendency of the crime is greater when committed between persons of the two races…its result may be the amalgamation of the two races, producing a mongrel population and a degraded civilization, the prevention of which is dictated by a sound policy affecting the highest interests of society and government.”

The difference between these three cases is that Loving ruling was decided during the Civil Rights Movement as well as the fact that the case was heard by the Supreme Court.  Had Davis and Perez sought a marriage license in Alabama or Virginia, they probably would have ended up in jail.  After the Civil War, Alabama made interracial marriage and interracial sex a felony that resulted in a prison sentence of two to seven years. Anyone attempting to officiate an interracial marriage could be fined up to $1,000 and be imprisoned for up to six months.  Pace and Cox who were simply having extramarital sex had to serve their time.

Despite these previous challenges to anti-miscegenation laws the case of Mildred and Richard Loving are the most famous because it ultimately led to a federal ban on these kinds of state laws.  The Supreme Court decision nullified all state laws banning whites from marrying non-whites or having intimate relations with each other.

The Loving ruling affects me personally, as it should for all Latinos.  Since Latinos come in many different shades, in Latin America, people of different races are allowed to marry.  In some cases, Latinos of different colors have found life in the U.S. difficult, especially before the Civil Rights era.  Andrea Perez most likely had blacks or Native Americans in her own family tree, but her light complexion initially made her marriage to Sylvester Davis a legal obstacle.

Because most non-Latinos only recognize Spanish surnames that end in “ez” (my name is not a typical Spanish surname but is Spanish nonetheless) most people look at my facial features, hair, eye shape and complexion to try to guess my own ethnic makeup.  For the record, I am a classic trigueno  (being the descendant of Spaniards, the Taino natives they enslaved and the Africans they enslaved to replace the Tainos) with a dash of Italian.  When not correctly identified as Latino, I’ve been mistaken for everything from Greek to Israeli to Italian to sambo (part Native American and part black) to mestizo (part Native American and part white) to mulatto to Vietnamese to Yemeni (for some reason, Middle Easterners almost always mistake me for being from Yemen and no other part of the Arab World).

Personally, I think most people are way off anyway and have no business making such bad guesses.  But my fiancee, whose father is a Puerto Rican Jew and mother is Sicilian, is so light-skinned there is no way she could ever be mistaken for anything except white.  She has been mistaken for Polish, German, Russian and Dutch and almost never identified as Latina.  When we go to the beach, I turn darker while her skin simply turns red and peels off.  I poke fun at her sometimes, calling her my “mayonnaise momma”.

My point is that the Loving case affects me personally because if such race-mixing laws were still enforced in this country, I may not even be allowed to kiss my fiancee, much less marry her.  Of course, this depends on which state considers me non-white, but the notion that I would have to argue my whiteness in court to validate my marriage to my fair-skinned fiancee.

Furthermore, I don’t think the government has any business deciding who can marry who.  Ironically, Loving v. Virginia has been used in court to argue in favor of same-sex marriage, which currently faces the same uphill battle interracial marriage faced so many years ago.  As I argued in a previous post, the government shouldn’t play any part in banning polygamous marriages, either.

Winston Churchill once said, “Americans will always do the right thing…after having tried everything else.”  At least we progress in baby steps instead of not progressing at all.

P.S.: My fiancee’s mother thought I was Chinese when she first met me!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 at 4:36 am and is filed under History, Hypocrisy, Government Incompetence, Government Corruption, Latin America, Race & Ethnicity, Civil Rights, Government Interference. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.