Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967), was an important decision by the United States Supreme Court. The Court ruled that laws stopping people of different races from marrying break the Equal Protection and Due Process parts of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The case involved Richard Loving, a white man, and his wife, Mildred Loving, who was of a different race. In 1959, the Lovings were found guilty for breaking Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924. This law made it illegal for people called “white” and people called “colored” to marry. A judge named Leon M. Bazile sentenced the Lovings to prison but allowed them to avoid serving time if they left Virginia and did not return. The Lovings asked a court to cancel their convictions, saying the law was unfair, but their request was denied. After losing an appeal in Virginia’s highest court, the Lovings asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review their case.

In June 1967, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of the Lovings. The Court canceled their convictions and said Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act was unconstitutional. Virginia argued that its law was fair because it treated people of all races the same. The Court disagreed, explaining that the law was unfair because it made decisions based only on race and banned an action—marriage—that most people were allowed to do. This decision ended all laws in the United States that restricted marriage based on race.

In 2013, courts used this decision as a reference when deciding that laws banning same-sex marriage were unconstitutional. This included the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015).

Background

Anti-miscegenation laws, which banned marriage between people of different races, existed in some states since the colonial period. During the Reconstruction era, which began in 1865, the Black Codes in the seven states of the lower South made interracial marriage illegal. However, new Republican governments in six of these states removed these restrictions. By 1894, when the Democratic Party regained control in the South, the laws were reintroduced.

A major issue was how to define race in a society where many white men had children with enslaved Black women. In practice, a person’s social identity as Black or white often determined their treatment. However, most laws used the "one drop of blood" rule, which stated that having even one Black ancestor made a person legally Black. In 1967, 16 states still had anti-miscegenation laws, mostly in the American South.

Mildred Delores Loving was the daughter of Musial (Byrd) Jeter and Theoliver Jeter. She identified as Indian-Rappahannock but was also reported to have Cherokee, Portuguese, and Black American ancestry. During a trial, it appeared she identified as Black, and her lawyer said she described herself that way. However, police records at the time listed her as "Indian," and by 2004, she claimed she had no Black ancestry.

Richard Perry Loving was a white man, the son of Lola (Allen) Loving and Twillie Loving. Both families lived in Caroline County, Virginia, which followed strict Jim Crow segregation laws. However, their town, Central Point, had a visible mixed-race community since the 19th century.

Mildred became pregnant, and in June 1958, the couple traveled to Washington, D.C., to marry. After returning to Central Point, local police raided their home on July 11, 1958, early in the morning. The officers were searching for them to arrest them for having sex, which was also illegal in Virginia under the state’s anti-miscegenation laws. When the officers found the Lovings sleeping in their bed, Mildred showed them their marriage certificate on the bedroom wall. The officers told them the certificate was not valid in Virginia.

Criminal proceedings

The Lovings were charged under Section 20-58 of the Virginia Code, which forbade interracial couples from getting married in another state and then returning to Virginia. Section 20-59 made marrying people of different races a felony, which could result in a prison sentence of one to five years.

On January 6, 1959, the Lovings admitted to "living together as husband and wife, against the laws of Virginia." They were sentenced to one year in prison, but the judge said they could avoid serving time if they left Virginia and did not return together for at least 25 years. After their conviction, the couple moved to the District of Columbia.

In 1963, Mildred Loving wrote to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy because she was upset about being unable to visit her family in Virginia and faced challenges living in Washington, D.C. Kennedy sent her to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The ACLU assigned lawyers Bernard S. Cohen and Philip J. Hirschkop, who asked a Virginia court to cancel the Lovings’ criminal convictions. They argued that Virginia’s laws against interracial marriage violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal treatment under the law.

On October 28, 1964, after waiting nearly a year for a response, the ACLU lawyers filed a federal lawsuit in a U.S. court. This led the judge in the case, Leon M. Bazile, to rule on the earlier request to cancel the Lovings’ convictions. Bazile compared the laws to an 18th-century idea about race and said the laws were not unconstitutional.

On January 22, 1965, a group of three judges in the federal court delayed deciding the case while the Lovings appealed Bazile’s ruling to the Virginia Supreme Court. On March 7, 1966, the Virginia Supreme Court ruled that the laws against interracial marriage were not unconstitutional because both spouses faced the same punishment. However, the court said the Lovings’ sentences were too vague and ordered them to be resentenced in a local court.

The Lovings, with help from the ACLU, appealed the Virginia Supreme Court’s decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. Virginia’s attorney general, Robert McIlwaine, represented the state. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review the case on December 12, 1966. The Lovings did not attend the court hearing, but one of their lawyers, Bernard S. Cohen, passed along a message from Richard Loving: "Mr. Cohen, tell the Court I love my wife, and it is just unfair that I can't live with her in Virginia."

Precedents

Before the 1967 case of Loving v. Virginia, several legal cases addressed the issue of interracial relationships. In Virginia, on October 3, 1878, the Supreme Court of Virginia ruled in Kinney v. The Commonwealth that a marriage between Andrew Kinney, a Black man, and Mahala Miller, a white woman, which had been legally performed in Washington, D.C., was not valid in Virginia. In 1883, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Pace v. Alabama, stating that a couple in Alabama who had been convicted for having an interracial relationship did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment. At that time, laws in many states considered interracial marriage a serious crime (a felony), while non-marital relationships between people of different races were treated as less severe (a misdemeanor).

The U.S. Supreme Court later ruled that banning interracial relationships did not break the Equal Protection Clause because both white and non-white people were punished equally for such acts. The court did not decide whether banning interracial marriage was constitutional, as the person who brought the case, Mr. Pace, did not challenge that part of the law. After Pace v. Alabama, laws that banned marriage and relationships between people of different races were not tested in court until the 1920s.

In 1921, in Kirby v. Kirby, Joe R. Kirby asked Arizona to end his marriage because his wife, Mayellen Kirby, was of "Negro" descent, which violated Arizona’s anti-miscegenation law. The Arizona Supreme Court determined Mayellen was of mixed race based on her physical appearance and allowed the annulment of the marriage.

In 1933, the California case Roldan v. Los Angeles County confirmed that California’s anti-miscegenation laws at the time did not prevent a Filipino person from marrying a white person. However, this ruling was short-lived, as the law was quickly changed to ban such marriages.

In 1939, in the Monks case, a court in San Diego, California, decided that the marriage between Marie Antoinette and Allan Monks was invalid because Marie Antoinette was considered to have "one-eighth Negro blood." The case involved a dispute over Allan Monks’ will, which left different amounts of money to his wife and a friend. Marie Antoinette’s lawyers argued that Arizona’s anti-miscegenation law made it impossible for her to legally marry anyone, as the law banned marriage between people of mixed race and others. However, the court dismissed this argument, stating the case involved a mixed-race person and a white person, not two mixed-race people. The U.S. Supreme Court did not reconsider the issue in 1942.

A major change occurred in 1948 with the case Perez v. Sharp (also known as Perez v. Lippold). The Supreme Court of California ruled that California’s ban on interracial marriage violated the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Supreme Court decision

On June 12, 1967, the Supreme Court made a unanimous 9–0 decision in favor of the Lovings. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote the Court’s opinion, and all the justices agreed with it.

The Court first considered whether Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act broke the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. This clause states: "nor shall any State … deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." Virginia officials argued that the Act did not break this clause because it treated both white and non-white people the same, as the punishment for breaking the law was the same for all races. For example, a white person who married a black person faced the same penalties as a black person who married a white person. The Court had accepted this "equal application" idea 84 years earlier in the case Pace v. Alabama, but it rejected it in Loving.

The Court explained that because Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act used race to decide who was guilty of a crime, the Equal Protection Clause required the Court to examine the law very closely to see if it was constitutional:

Applying its strict scrutiny standard, the Court concluded that the Racial Integrity Act had no purpose other than "invidious racial discrimination" meant to "maintain White Supremacy." The Court therefore ruled that the Act broke the Equal Protection Clause:

The Court also said that Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act broke the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. The Court stated that the freedom to marry is a basic constitutional right, and taking this right away based on race was unconstitutional:

Finally, the Court ordered that the Lovings’ criminal convictions be overturned.

Effects

After the Supreme Court ruled against anti-miscegenation laws, these laws stayed in some state books but could not be enforced. In Alabama, state judges continued to use its anti-miscegenation law until 1970, when the Nixon administration got a court decision in United States v. Brittain from a U.S. District Court. In 2000, Alabama became the last state to change its laws to match the Supreme Court’s decision. At that time, 60% of voters supported a constitutional amendment, Amendment 2, which removed anti-miscegenation language from the state constitution.

After the Loving v. Virginia case, the number of interracial marriages increased across the United States and in the South. For example, in Georgia, interracial marriages rose from 21 in 1967 to 115 in 1970. Nationally, 0.4% of marriages were interracial in 1960, 2.0% in 1980, 12% in 2013, and 16% in 2015, nearly 50 years after Loving.

The Loving v. Virginia case was discussed during debates about same-sex marriage in the United States.

In Hernandez v. Robles (2006), the New York Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, said it would not use the Loving case to decide whether same-sex marriage was a right. The court stated that the history of Loving was different from the history of the same-sex marriage case. In Perry v. Schwarzenegger (2010), a federal district court overturned California’s Proposition 8, which limited marriage to opposite-sex couples. Judge Vaughn R. Walker cited Loving v. Virginia to argue that the right to marry protects an individual’s choice of partner regardless of gender. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals later agreed with this decision on narrower grounds.

In June 2007, on the 40th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Loving decision, Mildred Loving supported same-sex marriage.

Until 2014, five U.S. Courts of Appeals examined whether state bans on same-sex marriage were constitutional. These courts used the Loving ruling in different ways:

• The Fourth and Tenth Circuits used Loving along with other cases, such as Zablocki v. Redhail and Turner v. Safley, to argue that the Supreme Court recognized a "fundamental right to marry" that states cannot restrict unless they meet the court’s "heightened scrutiny" standard. Both courts used this standard to end state bans on same-sex marriage.
• The Seventh and Ninth Circuits ended state bans by arguing that same-sex marriage bans were discrimination based on sexual orientation. The Seventh Circuit cited Loving to say the Supreme Court did not accept tradition as a reason to limit marriage. The Ninth Circuit cited Loving as quoted in United States v. Windsor to say that state marriage laws must respect constitutional rights.
• The Sixth Circuit was the only court that supported state bans on same-sex marriage. It said that when Loving discussed marriage, it only referred to marriage between people of opposite sexes.

In Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), the Supreme Court used Loving, among other cases, to say that states must allow same-sex marriages under the Equal Protection Clause and the Due Process Clause of the Constitution. The court mentioned Loving nearly a dozen times and based its decision on the same principles: equality and the right to marriage. During the case, Justice Anthony Kennedy, who later wrote the majority opinion, noted that the Supreme Court’s decisions ending racial segregation (Brown v. Board of Education, 1954) and ending bans on interracial marriage (Loving v. Virginia, 1967) were about 13 years apart. Similarly, the court’s decisions ending bans on same-sex sexual activity (Lawrence v. Texas, 2003) and ending bans on same-sex marriage (Obergefell v. Hodges, 2015) were also about 13 years apart.

Codification

In 2022, Congress made parts of the Supreme Court's decisions in Loving and Obergefell into federal law by passing the Respect for Marriage Act. This law requires the U.S. federal government and all U.S. states and territories (but not tribes) to accept same-sex and interracial civil marriages as valid in the United States.

In popular culture

In the United States, June 12 is now called Loving Day. This day is not an official holiday, but it is celebrated each year to honor interracial marriages. In 2014, Mildred Loving was recognized by the Library of Virginia as one of its "Virginia Women in History." In 2017, the Virginia Department of Historic Resources placed a historical marker outside the Patrick Henry Building in Richmond. This marker explains the story of the Lovings, who once lived near the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals.

The story of the Lovings has been used in several films:

• The first film, Mr. and Mrs. Loving (1996), was written and directed by Richard Friedenberg. It stars Lela Rochon, Timothy Hutton, and Ruby Dee. Mildred Loving said, "Not much of it was true. The only part that was right was I had three children."
• A documentary called The Loving Story (2012) was created by Nancy Buirski. It first aired on HBO and won a Peabody Award.
• A film titled Loving (2016) is based on Buirski’s documentary. It was directed by Jeff Nichols and stars Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton as the Lovings. Ruth Negga was nominated for an Academy Award for her role.
• A four-part film called The Loving Generation (2018) was made by Lacey Schwartz Delgado and Mehret Mandefro. It explores the lives of biracial children born after the Loving decision.

In music, Nanci Griffith’s 2009 album The Loving Kind is named after the Lovings. It includes a song about them. In 2009, satirist Roy Zimmerman wrote a song called "The Summer of Loving," which is about the Lovings and their 1967 case. The title refers to the "Summer of Love." An opera called Loving v Virginia by Damien Geter and Jessica Murphy Moo premiered in 2025 with Virginia Opera and The Richmond Symphony.

A 2015 book by French journalist Gilles Biassette, L’amour des Loving ("The Love of the Lovings," ISBN 978-2917559598), tells the story of the Lovings and their case. A photo-essay about the couple by Grey Villet, created before the case, was published again in 2017.