The Faculty Lounge

Loving v. Virginia's Mildred Loving: 1940-2008

By DIONNE WALKER for the AP:

RICHMOND, Va. - Mildred Loving, a black woman whose challenge to Virginia's ban on interracial marriage led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling striking down such laws nationwide, has died, her daughter said Monday.   

Peggy Fortune said Loving, 68, died Friday at her home in rural Milford. She did not disclose the cause of death.

Loving and her white husband, Richard, changed history in 1967 when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld their right to marry. The ruling struck down laws banning racially mixed marriages in at least 17 states.

They had married in Washington in 1958, when she was 18. Returning to their Virginia hometown, they were arrested within weeks and convicted on charges of "cohabiting as man and wife, against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth," according to their indictments.

The couple avoided a year in jail by agreeing to a sentence mandating that they immediately leave Virginia. They moved to Washington and launched a legal challenge a few years later.

After the Supreme Court ruled, the couple returned to Virginia, where they lived with their children Donald, Peggy and Sidney.

Richard Loving died in 1975 in a car accident that also injured his wife.

In a rare interview with The Associated Press last June, Loving said she wasn't trying to change history ? she was just a girl who once fell in love with a boy.

"It wasn't my doing," Loving said. "It was God's work."

A sad passing. 

One note on the report.  Loving is usually described as an "inter-racial" marriage case, but it even goes beyond that.  The statute in Virginia didn't ban "racially mixed marriages " as the article describes, but only some racially mixed marriages.  It made it a felony for "any white person [to] intermarry with a colored person, or any colored person [to] intermarry with a white person."  In other words, Blacks, Native Americans, Asians, or any other persons of color could marry with each other, but could not marry someone who was White.  The state's need to defend "racial integrity" as Virginia claimed fell flat because the statute was designed to preserve White racial purity exclusively.  Its one of the quintessential White supremacy cases of the era.          

-Kathleen A. Bergin

The Future of the Reparations Movement?

I haven't written about reparations in a while, in part because other news has been consuming everyone's attention this spring.  There have been some developments: the University of Maryland's starting a course this fall to investigate its connections to slavery.  Ira Berlin, one of country's most distinguished historians, is convening the course.  And I hear rumors that William and Mary is discussing its connections to slavery as well.  (I did write about Harvard's non-investigation recently and a little about a potential lawsuit by Sally Hemings' issue to get access to Thomas Jefferson's grave and here a few weeks ago.)

But perhaps--and I'm really tentative about this--the reparations movement is shifting dramatically.  Look; it's no secret that the movement is challenged politically--(only a small percentage of white people are in favor of "reparations" for slavery--by which they mean huge cash payments to individuals, regardless of need.  No one that I know who is a serious scholar of reparations is thinking in those terms.   I think that's just a way anti-reparations writers have of making the movement look foolish.  That's a discussion best left for another time.

There is one place, though, where the movement has had an effect.  I think talk of reparations has shifted discussion of race.  President Bush's moving speech at Goree Island in 2003, where he acknowledged that we have a long way to go to incorporate everyone in the bounties that our country has to offer, is one example of rhetoric that has been shaped by the movement.

Despite the movement's impact on discussion, I think we're seeing another shift in politics, outside of the  reparations movement.  That shift, led most recently by Senator Obama, is away from affirmative action.  (The shift has, obviously, been underway a long, long time.  But this is where Senator Obama's critical--he's signaling a shift away from race-based affirmative action.  In the Pennsylvania debate, for instance, he said his daughters do not need affirmative action, but acknowledged that some poor white children do.) 

So what happens now?  Reparations talk has, for the better part of a decade (and at other times through our post-Civil War history), reminded us of the many ways in which some Americans have been grossly mistreated--and how that legacy is having an effect today.  But that knowledge mixes in other ways with politics and morality--and perhaps, perhaps will lead to renewed calls for social-welfare programs for all people in need.

I predicted in Reparations Pro and Con that the reparations movement would be the entry point for renewed calls for social welfare programs, but that the movement might end up in non-race based programs.  (I think that's right for a series of reasons--in part political, in part moral.)  And that, indeed, seems to be where this is headed.  Though, as I say, I'm really tentative about this.  We'll see....

Politics, Race And Felon Disenfranchisement

The New York Times reports on the ongoing  challenge to enforce  the voting rights of Alabamians who have been convicted of crimes.   In the article, an Alabama Republican is quoted (from 2005) as opposing looser felon disenfranchisement laws on the grounds that those convicted of felonies are less likely to vote Republican.  Christopher Uggen, a sociologist at Minnesota, and Jeff Manza, a sociologist at Northwestern, published  one of the most dramatic studies of the political impact of felon disenfranchisement back in 2002.  Projecting likely voting patterns among convicted felons, they suggest that up to seven recent Senate races and one Presidential race - Bush v. Gore - would have come out differently if we did not disenfranchise felons. 

Felon disenfranchisement has an intuitive appeal - we deny the right to vote to those who breach the fundamental social contract and violate the law.  But these laws have deeply racist roots and a dramatically disparate racial impact today.  There is also a deep democratic problem with the policy; as we criminalize and prosecute more and more conduct, we passively strip more and more citizens of voting rights.   When we adopt draconian criminal justice policies, we don't notice or debate the impact of these policies on democracy and citizenship.  But activists supporting these policies surely know where their bread is buttered; if Alabama's top Republican gets it, I can't imagine that many other political experts don't see and project the impact of expanded criminal laws.

Many people have a deep discomfort with acknowledging that our criminal justice system is now doing the heavy lifting of Jim Crow laws.  With 1 in 15 black adults in prison, and millions of black adults disenfranchised, it simply will not do to argue that this broad social phenomenon is simply the aggregation of millions of bad free-will choices.