McClain on Reflections on Loving v Virginia at Fifty

Linda C. McClain, Boston University School of Law, has published Prejudice, Moral Progress, and Being 'On the Right Side of History': Reflections on Loving v. Virginia at Fifty as 86 Fordham Law Review 2701 (2018). Here is the abstract.

What does it mean to be on the “right” or “wrong” side of history? When Virginia’s Attorney General explained his decision not to defend Virginia’s “Defense of Marriage Law” prohibiting same-sex marriage, he asserted that it was time for Virginia to be on the “right” rather than the “wrong” side of history and the law. He criticized his predecessors, who defended the discriminatory laws at issue in Brown v. Board of Education, Loving v. Virginia, and United States v. Virginia. Loving played a crucial role in the majority opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges, even as the dissenters disputed its relevance; it continues to feature in post-Obergefell controversies over religious liberty and LGBT rights. Looking back at the record in Loving, this article argues that Loving illustrates a theme of generational moral progress in constitutional interpretation: laws once justified by appeals to nature, history, tradition, divine law, and the well-being of children and society are repudiated as rooted in prejudice. Virginia sought to distance its antimiscegenation law from prejudice and white supremacy by appealing to social science that identified problems posed by “intermarriage” -- particularly for children -- and rejected the idea that intermarriage was a path toward progress and freedom from prejudice. Countering with narratives of constitutional moral progress, the Lovings and their amici argued that Virginia’s law was an odious relic of slavery and a present-day reflection of racial prejudice, unsupported by modern science. The article concludes with a look at Obergefell, and the competing arguments southern states made about Loving and the lessons of history.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Mr. and Mrs. Loving

You can once again watch the wonderful Mr. and Mrs. Loving, with Timothy Hutton and Lela Rochon (made for television, 1996), and not available on DVD right now, on Amazon Prime. While Nancy Buirski's Loving and The Loving Story, interpretations of the battle Mildred and Richard Loving fought to overturn the Virginia law against miscegenation are also available, I have a soft spot for the 1996 film and am glad to see it for the first time in a number of years.

I hope it remains on Amazon Prime long enough for my fall class on Law and Society to get a chance to see it. Many of my students would have been five years old or younger when it first aired, and of course wouldn't have been born yet when the U.S. Supreme Court decided the history-making case (1967). Maybe their parents weren't either?

A short bibliography of the movie and the case.

ACLU, Loving: Looking Back at the Landmark Case, Loving v. Virginia

Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967).

Patricia Hruby Powell, Loving Vs. Virginia: A Documentary Novel of the Landmark Civil Rights Case (Chronicle Books, 2017).

Robert A. Pratt, Essay: Crossing the Color Line: A Historical Assessment and Personal Narrative of Loving v. Virginia, 41 Howard L.J. 229 (1997/1998).

Peter Wallenstein, Virginia Hasn't Always Been For Lovers: Interracial Marriage Bans and the Case of Richard and Mildred Loving, 112 The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 440(4) (2004).

Sheryll Cashin's New Book on the Loving v. Virginia Case: Loving: Interracial Intimacy in America and the Threat To White Supremacy @SheryllCashin @GeorgetownLaw

New from Beacon Press: Sheryll Cashin, Loving: Interracial Intimacy in America and the Threat To White Supremacy (2017). Here is a description of the book's contents.

Loving beyond boundaries is a radical act that is changing America. When Mildred and Richard Loving wed in 1958, they were ripped from their shared bed and taken to court. Their crime: miscegenation, punished by exile from their home state of Virginia. The resulting landmark decision of Loving v. Virginia ended bans on interracial marriage and remains a signature case—the first to use the words “white supremacy” to describe such racism. Drawing from the earliest chapters in US history, legal scholar Sheryll Cashin reveals the enduring legacy of America’s original sin, tracing how we transformed from a country without an entrenched construction of race to a nation where one drop of nonwhite blood merited exclusion from full citizenship. In vivid detail, she illustrates how the idea of whiteness was created by the planter class of yesterday and is reinforced by today’s power-hungry dog-whistlers to divide struggling whites and people of color, ensuring plutocracy and undermining the common good. Cashin argues that over the course of the last four centuries there have been “ardent integrators” and that those people are today contributing to the emergence of a class of “culturally dexterous” Americans. In the fifty years since the Lovings won their case, approval for interracial marriage rose from 4 percent to 87 percent. Cashin speculates that rising rates of interracial intimacy—including cross-racial adoption, romance, and friendship—combined with immigration, demographic, and generational change, will create an ascendant coalition of culturally dexterous whites and people of color. Loving is both a history of white supremacy and a hopeful treatise on the future of race relations in America, challenging the notion that trickle-down progressive politics is our only hope for a more inclusive society. Accessible and sharp, Cashin reanimates the possibility of a future where interracial understanding serves as a catalyst of a social revolution ending not in artificial color blindness but in a culture where acceptance and difference are celebrated.