“[My parents] grew up within three or four miles of each other,” Richard and Mildred’s daughter, Peggy Loving, said in a 2011 documentary about the case. Mildred’s brothers played music at parties Richard attended. Black and white families in Caroline County routinely helped harvest each other’s crops. In that small world, it wasn’t so incredible that Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving would meet and fall in love.
“People had been mixing all the time, so I didn’t know any different,” Mildred later said. “I didn’t know there was a law against it.”
Even so, Richard and Mildred knew that some people in their community felt threatened by racial mixing. When they got married in June 1958, they did it quietly in Washington, D.C. About five weeks later, they were arrested back home.
Brought before Judge Leon Bazile in January 1959, the Lovings feared being thrown in prison. So they pleaded guilty in exchange for a one-year sentence. As part of a plea bargain, Bazile suspended the sentence, but under one condition: The Lovings would have to leave Virginia, the place they’d always called home, for 25 years.
Mildred and Richard decided to move to Washington, D.C. But they struggled to adjust to the city, often sneaking back to Virginia to see their family and friends.
At the same time, America was changing. The civil rights movement and protests against racial segregation, many led by Martin Luther King Jr., dominated the news. In early 1963, with that sense of change in the air, Mildred wrote to U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy explaining their situation. Kennedy referred them to the American Civil Liberties Union (A.C.L.U.). There, Mildred’s letter reached the desk of a young lawyer named Bernard Cohen.
Cohen immediately understood the challenges of the case. He knew it would likely take years to resolve, and might well go all the way to the Supreme Court. Cohen also believed the chances of winning were high—and made better by the plaintiffs’ last name. “It was a very good omen,” he said.
First, Cohen appealed to Judge Bazile to reconsider the case. Bazile’s decision, in January 1965, showed them just what they were up against.
“Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow . . . and red, and he placed them on separate continents,” Bazile stated. “The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”