Love In Black And White

How the true-life story of Richard and Mildred Loving — an interracial couple arrested in 1958 for marrying each other — became the least controversial film about race this season

- Stephen Galloway

In the early hours of July 11, 1958, a sheriff and two of his deputies burst into the rural Virginia home of a young married couple, Richard and Mildred Loving, and went straight to their bedroom. Shining flashlights in their eyes, the lawmen demanded to know what the Lovings were doing together.

“They asked Richard who was that woman he was sleeping with,” Mildred said later. “I said, ‘I’m his wife,’ and the sheriff said, ‘Not here you’re not.’”

The couple was charged with defying the state’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924 and thrown into jail, where Richard remained overnight, while Mildred was kept several days longer before being released to her father. Their crime? One was black, the other white, in an era when miscegenation was illegal in 24 states.

Soon after, a local judge sentenced Richard, a construction worker, to a year in prison. “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay and red,” he declared, “and He placed them on separate continents, and but for the interference with His arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages.”

Some strange act of kindness or perversion led him to soften that sentence, and instead of insisting that Richard be jailed, he offered the couple an alternative: They could leave the state as long as they promised not to return — at least as husband and wife — for the next quarter-century.

And so the Lovings moved to Washington, D.C., where they had obtained their marriage certificate, and remained there for the next few years, deeply in love but longing to return to the place they called home.

Their story — and that of the battle they fought to have their marriage accepted in Virginia, which went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and resulted in a landmark civil rights ruling — is the basis of Jeff Nichols’ new movie,