How Loving v. Virginia Ended Interracial Marriage Bans

Loving v. Virginia is the 1967 U.S. Supreme Court decision that struck down every state law banning interracial marriage. In a unanimous opinion by Chief Justice Earl Warren, the Court held that Virginia’s anti-miscegenation statutes violated both the Equal Protection Clause and the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and it declared that the freedom to marry a person of another race belongs to the individual and cannot be taken away by the state.¹

The Couple Behind the Case

Richard Loving, a white man, and Mildred Jeter, a woman of Black and Native American descent, grew up in Central Point, Virginia. In June 1958, they traveled to Washington, D.C. to marry because Virginia law forbade their union, then returned home to Caroline County. Within weeks, local police raided their bedroom in the middle of the night and arrested them both.¹

On January 6, 1959, the Lovings pleaded guilty to violating Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage. The trial judge sentenced each of them to one year in jail but suspended the sentence for twenty-five years on the condition that they leave Virginia and not return together during that period.¹ The couple moved to Washington, D.C., where they raised three children in exile from their families and community.

What Virginia Law Actually Prohibited

The Lovings were convicted under statutes that traced back to Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924. Virginia Code Section 20-54 prohibited any white person from marrying anyone other than another white person, defining “white” as a person with “no trace whatever of any blood other than Caucasian.”¹

To close the obvious workaround of traveling elsewhere to marry, Virginia Code Section 20-58 made it a crime for a white person and a “colored person” to leave the state to marry and then return to Virginia to live as spouses. That is the provision the Lovings were prosecuted under. Section 20-59 classified any violation as a felony punishable by one to five years in the state penitentiary.¹

How the Case Reached the Supreme Court

In 1963, Mildred Loving wrote to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy asking for help. Kennedy referred the Lovings to the American Civil Liberties Union, which assigned two young volunteer attorneys, Bernard S. Cohen and Philip J. Hirschkop. In November 1963, they filed a motion in the state trial court to vacate the convictions on the ground that the statutes violated the Fourteenth Amendment.²

When the trial court did not act for nearly a year, the Lovings filed a federal class action seeking a three-judge panel. The state trial judge finally denied the motion in January 1965. The Lovings appealed to the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia, which upheld the convictions and the statutes. From there, the Lovings appealed to the United States Supreme Court, which agreed to hear the case.²

At oral argument on April 10, 1967, Cohen and Hirschkop called Virginia’s laws “slavery laws, pure and simple,” designed to maintain the lower social and economic position of Black Virginians. They also pressed the practical stakes: the statutes declared children of interracial couples “bastards” and stripped families of insurance and Social Security benefits they were otherwise entitled to.³

The Equal Protection Holding

Virginia’s central defense was that its laws did not discriminate because they punished both spouses equally: a white person who married across racial lines received the same penalty as a Black person who did. That “equal application” theory had precedent. In 1883, the Supreme Court had accepted it in Pace v. Alabama, holding that anti-miscegenation laws did not discriminate because the punishment fell on both races alike.⁴

The Court in Loving rejected that reasoning. Chief Justice Warren wrote that the mere equal application of a law containing racial classifications is not enough to save it from the Fourteenth Amendment. Racial classifications in criminal statutes are “especially suspect” and must survive the most rigid scrutiny, meaning the government must prove the classification is necessary to a legitimate purpose unrelated to racial discrimination.²

Virginia could not clear that bar. The Court noted a telling feature of the statutes: they prohibited only interracial marriages involving white persons. A Black person and an Asian person could legally marry in Virginia. That asymmetry made the purpose plain. Warren concluded that the racial classifications “must stand on their own justification, as measures designed to maintain White Supremacy.”² The statutes existed to enforce a racial hierarchy, and that ended the equal protection analysis.

Marriage as a Fundamental Right

The Court did not stop there. Warren’s opinion held that Virginia’s statutes also violated the Due Process Clause by depriving the Lovings of a fundamental liberty. “The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men,” Warren wrote. “Marriage is one of the basic civil rights of man, fundamental to our very existence and survival.”¹

The opinion closed with a line that has been quoted ever since: “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.”² By grounding the decision in both equal protection and due process, the Court created a framework that would prove more durable than either clause alone.

Which States the Ruling Affected

The Supreme Court issued its decision on June 12, 1967. All nine justices joined Warren’s opinion.⁵ The convictions were reversed and Virginia’s statutes declared unconstitutional.

The ruling reached far beyond Virginia. Sixteen states still had laws prohibiting interracial marriage on the day the case was decided: Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia.⁶ All of those laws fell at once. County clerks could no longer use race to deny marriage licenses, prosecutors could no longer charge couples with felonies for their choice of spouse, and marriages that had been treated as legally void were recognized.

What Loving Still Does in Constitutional Law

Loving’s recognition of marriage as a fundamental right became one of the most frequently cited precedents in American constitutional law. The Court built on it in Zablocki v. Redhail (1978), striking down a Wisconsin law that barred parents with unpaid child support from marrying, and in Turner v. Safley (1987), holding that even prisoners retain the right to marry.

The most significant extension came in 2015. In Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court relied on Loving’s framework to hold that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry. Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion cited Loving repeatedly, drawing on both the equal protection and due process reasoning Warren had used nearly fifty years earlier.⁷ The move was structurally the same: restricting marriage through a classification that serves no legitimate purpose violates both clauses working together.

The core of Loving v. Virginia has held for more than half a century. The choice of whom to marry belongs to the individual, and the Constitution does not permit the state to take it away.⁸

1
Justia. Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967)
2
Library of Congress. Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967)
3
Encyclopedia Virginia. Excerpts from a Transcript of Oral Arguments in Loving v. Virginia
4
Justia. Pace v. Alabama, 106 U.S. 583 (1883)
5
Oyez. Loving v. Virginia
6
U.S. Government Publishing Office. H. Res. 431 – Expressing the Sense of the House of Representatives Regarding the 40th Anniversary of the Supreme Court Decision in Loving v. Virginia
7
Justia. Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. 644 (2015)
8
Constitution Annotated. Marriage and Substantive Due Process