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It’s not generally a very wise thing to do, but I entered into a little dispute on Facebook a little while ago. It was about Mildred and Richard Loving of Virginia. A friend shared a discussion thread which was mostly very critical of the way that the Lovings are portrayed in their recent namesake movie. The Lovings’ marriage was illegal in 1950’s Virginia because Mildred was a woman of color and Richard was white. They knew this, so a pregnant, 19-year-old Mildred and 25-year-old Richard traveled to Washington, D.C. to be married. But this didn’t help them when it came to state law: marrying out-of-state to avoid Virginia’s anti-miscegenation laws, then returning to live as husband and wife, was also illegal.

The young man who initiated the Facebook thread (I won’t name names here, since this piece is only about the ideas expressed) invited a discussion of this fact stated in Mildred Loving’s 2008 obituary in Legacy.com:  “Mildred Jeter was 11 when she and 17-year-old Richard began courting“. My friend who shared the thread, an African-American scholar, was also particularly concerned with another aspect of this story, as many others were: Mildred identified herself at the time of her marriage and for the rest of her life as ‘Indian’, not ‘Black’ or ‘Negro’…. Read the original piece here

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