Just in time for Valentine’s Day, filmmakers Nancy Buirski and Elisabeth Haviland James are releasing their 2010 HBO documentary The Loving Story with new photographs of Mary and Richard Loving, the Virginia couple who challenged the state’s ban on interracial marriages nearly half a century ago. The Lovings went from a fortuitously named and very private duo to reluctant civil rights heroes. They wed in June of 1958 and were arrested on the charge of violating the state’s anti-miscegenation statutes a month later. They pled guilty in January 1959, but their sentences were suspended, as they agreed to leave the state and not return as a couple. Not content to accept their forced exile, they engaged Bernard Cohen, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in November 1963. When the Virginia Supreme Court refused to hear their appeal in 1966, the U.S. Supreme Court took up the case. In June 1967, the latter Court declared Virginia’s ban unconstitutional, essentially overturning a law that had stood since 1691. Richard Loving died in a car accident in 1975, and Mary Loving died of pneumonia in 2008. Their daughter Peggy provided additional pictures of her parents to Buirski and Haviland James. In an age when the institution of marriage seems to suffer the flippancies of Newt Gingrich and Kim Kardashian, it’s necessary to remember a couple who fought so hard for the simple human right to love each other.
Chief Writing Wolf 