John Gadsby Chapman’s 1840 painting depicts Pocahontas’s baptism and rechristening as Rebecca before her 1614 marriage. She died in England soon thereafter and the peace brokered with the marriage collapsed. Rolfe presented her, duly baptized, in England as a symbol of peace, an example of England’s “civilizing” potential in the New World, and a means to raise funds for the Virginia Company’s colony. Instead, she married John Rolfe as a condition of release after being held captive by English settlers for more than a year. Matoaka, better known as Pocahontas, did not wed Captain John Smith as the Disney version of her life implies. The first recorded interracial marriage in American history was the celebrated marriage of the daughter of a Powhatan chief and an English tobacco planter in 1614. And 50 years on, many of their effects remain. Yet, for 300 years, interracial marriage bans defined racial boundaries and served as justification for America’s apartheid system. Accordingly, individuals across the political spectrum, from gay rights activists to opponents of Affirmative Action who call for colorblindness, cite it to support their political agendas. In fact, most Americans now claim to celebrate the precepts behind Loving and the case has become an icon of equality and of prejudice transcended. Today, few would publicly admit to opposing interracial marriage. In 2017, in contrast, 91 percent of Americans believe interracial marriage to be a good or at least benign thing. Even though legal in most states by 1959, the overwhelming majority of white Americans then believed rejecting interracial marriage to be fundamental to the nation’s well-being. Today, 17 percent of newlyweds and 10 percent of all married couples differ from one another in race or ethnicity. In 1967, only 3 percent of newlyweds were interracial couples. In the decades that followed, the nation’s views on interracial marriage have undergone a slow sea change. Alabama(1883), but 300 years of legal code.Ī chart depicting American approval and disapproval of interracial marriage from 1958 to 2007. Despite this line of argument, lower courts upheld the verdict because, as one jurist wrote, “the fact that separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”Īfter multiple appeals, the case reached the Supreme Court, where Chief Justice Earl Warren’s opinion for the unanimous court declared marriage to be “one of the ‘basic civil rights of man’…To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications…is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty.” Warren further ruled that interracial marriage bans were designed expressly “to maintain White Supremacy.” The court’s decision not only struck down an 80-year precedent set in the case Pace v. The ACLU appealed the Lovings’ conviction, arguing interracial marriage bans contradicted the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause.
Kennedy, who in turn referred her to the American Civil Liberties Union. After being arrested again in 1963 while visiting relatives in Virginia, Mildred Loving wrote Attorney General Robert F. The Lovings chose exile over prison and moved to D.C. Pleading guilty to “cohabiting as man and wife, against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth,” they were offered one year imprisonment or a suspended sentence if they left their native state.Ī 2013 Loving Day celebration in New York City (photo by Willie Davis). In 1958, the pair were arrested in the middle of the night in their Virginia home after marrying the month before in Washington, D.C. The case that brought down interracial marriage bans in 16 states centered on the aptly named Richard and Mildred Loving. Many decried it as judicial overreach and resisted its implementation for decades. The case established marriage as a fundamental right for interracial couples, but 72 percent of the public opposed the court’s decision at the time. The event takes its name from the 1967 Supreme Court ruling in Loving v. In June, many Americans marked Loving Day-an annual gathering to fight racial prejudice through a celebration of multiracial community.