Loving Day is June 12th: Celebrate the Legal Right to Interracial Marriage

If you hear the words “Loving Day” and think I’m referencing a pop culture holiday on February 14th, then read on – ‘cause you’re mistaken. Loving Day, feted annually on June 12th, is not just a Hallmark holiday orchestrated to push the sale of greeting cards and chocolate hearts like its February cousin. Rather, it’s a serious celebration of a landmark Supreme Court decision about personal freedom. Why is it called Loving Day, you ask?

Well, never had a Supreme Court case been so aptly named as Loving v. Virginia, the 1967 decision that nullified a state law banning interracial marriage. The case secured the legal right of citizens in all states to marry they people they love without regard to race, a move with which only the most bigoted of Americans would now disagree. Loving Day, observed on June 12th to coincide with the anniversary of the decision, exists to celebrate the legal right to interracial marriage. This hard-won battle helped to shape the ongoing civil rights movement, and Loving Day honors the couple who waged this fight and all the couples who came before and after.

Mildred Jeter, a black woman, and Richard Loving, her white boyfriend, were residents of Virginia who wanted to get married in the late 1950s. Because the state of Virginia had a law (boldly titled the “Racial Integrity Act of 1924”) which denied marriage rights to people of different races, the couple got married in the District of Columbia and then returned to Virginia, where they were actually arrested for a felony! Although Jeter and Loving were sentenced to a year in jail for breaking the law, a Virginia judge agreed to suspend the sentence if the couple left the state. And that’s exactly what they did. But Loving and his wife didn’t leave quietly: they moved to DC and began fighting the unfair law in 1963.