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Sunday, March 11, 2007

Law - Marking the 40th anniversary of the Loving vs. Virginia decision

The Chicago Tribune today has a long story by Kayce T. Ataiyero and Bonnie Miller Rubin, headined "A cultural taboo fades: Ruling altered mind-set on interracial marriage," marking the 40th anniversary of the Loving vs. Virginia decision. It begins:

When Mary Hughes, a white woman from Minnesota, married her husband Millard, a black man from Houston, she knew they would have to make compromises to navigate a society still largely segregated in 1965. A simple road trip to an Ohio wedding became a delicate dance to avoid stopping in Indiana, a state that banned such unions.

Today, the Homewood couple have traveled all over the country, a freedom afforded to them by a landmark Supreme Court case that 40 years ago this summer repealed state bans on interracial marriages. Suddenly, those trips got a whole lot safer.

"I read about [the case] in Time magazine and I thought OK, the United States is finally getting it," Hughes said, recalling how she reacted to the 1967 high court decision. "This whole idea that people of different races couldn't be married, it should not have been an issue."

Affirming the right to love and marry without regard to race swept aside one of the last vestiges of state-sanctioned segregation.

The story notes that '[W]hen the daughter of Secretary of State Dean Rusk married a black man in 1967, the private decision was considered so politically risky that Time magazine gave it cover treatment."

The comparisons with today's fight for gay marriage and civil unions is inescapeable. According to the story, "Brian Powell, a sociology professor at Indiana University" who "interviewed 1,500 Americans on gay marriage, [said that] opponents sounded 'eerily similar' to those who once justified laws that banned race mixing."

Posted by Marcia Oddi on March 11, 2007 11:49 AM
Posted to General Law Related