EDITORIAL OBSERVER

Loving v. Virginia and the Secret History of

Race
By BRENT STAPLES
Published: May 14, 2008

Americans born in the 21st century will shake their heads in disbelief on
learning that 40 states once had laws prohibiting interracial marriage. The
Supreme Court struck down the last of these statutes in the 1967 case of
Mildred and Richard Loving, a black woman and a white man who were
arrested and banished from Virginia for the crime of being married.
The couple became celebrities after the landmark ruling known as Loving
v. Virginia. But Mildred and Richard wanted nothing to do with fame. They
returned to the tiny, backwoods community of Central Point, in Caroline
County, Va., and shunned publicity. Richard died of injuries sustained in a
car accident in 1975. Mildred, who died this month, was quiet and selfeffacing and maintained all along that they married because they were in
love, not to fight a civil rights battle.
The particulars of the case which featured a stereotypical Southern
sheriff and a medieval system of laws turned Caroline County into an
emblem of blunt-force segregation. But the story was more complicated.
Like many rural areas in the Jim Crow South, Caroline County was
governed by two competing racial ideologies. The impulse toward
segregation was of course etched in law. But Central Point, which had been
a visibly mixed-race community since the 19th century, was home to a
secret but paradoxically open interracialism. The communitys story goes a
long way toward explaining how the Lovings thought about race and why
they behaved as they did.
Virginia slave owners, including Thomas Jefferson, were notorious for
fathering children with their slaves. The 19th-century diarist Mary Boykin
Chesnut could easily have been speaking of Caroline County planters when
she wrote: Like the patriarchs of old, our men live all in one house with

their wives and their concubines; and the mulattoes one sees in every
family partly resemble the white children.
Many of the mixed-race men and women in Caroline County settled in and
around Central Point. They were already thriving by the early 20th century.
Their church, St. Stephens Baptist, was, as one historian noted, the largest
and most costly house of worship in Caroline, white or colored. People in
the congregation and community were as a whole, very nearly white, the
historian wrote, and, out of their community, could not be recognized or
distinguished as colored people.
Inside Caroline County, Virginias strict laws on segregation applied. But
when they ventured beyond Caroline County where no one knew them
many of Central Points residents found it a simple matter to pass as
white. They visited white-only movie houses and restaurants. They also
served in all-white units of the segregated Army during World War II.
The community developed a system for protecting the racial identities of
Central Pointers who moved away and married into white families. When
they took their white relatives back with them to visit, their younger
brothers and sisters, who attended the colored school, just stayed home.
This was well known to the teachers at the school, who apparently accepted
the absences without question.
The state officials who enforced segregation were clearly aware of what
Central Points residents were up to and tried to stop it. They circulated lists
of families described as descendants of black people. For a time, the state
corrected birth certificates to note the real race of the bearer. It didnt
change things much in Central Point.
By the time that Richard and Mildred had begun to date in the 1950s, they
had lived their whole lives in a community that had made an art form of
evading Jim Crow restrictions on relationships.
Some accounts suggest that Central Point already had many other
interracial unions both legal and common law. So why were Mildred and
Richard singled out for arrest? It is possible that someone who held a

grudge against the couple complained to the sheriff. Such a complaint could
have come from one of the local white men who had taken a black lover and
used the law as an excuse not to marry.
The Supreme Court ruling underscored the stupidity and unfairness of
segregation. And the case drew back the curtain on the secret history of race
in the South. But for Mildred and Richard this struggle was not about
changing the world. It was about fighting for the right to be married to one
another and then returning to the community that was their home.
Secondary Source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/14/opinion/14wed4.html