Larry Dane Brimner - Finding a Way Home

Richard and Mildred Loving , husband and wife, lay in bed, sleeping, that warm, peaceful Virginia night in July 1958. Around 2:00 a.m., the stillness was shattered when they were jolted awake by the glare of three flashlights and rousted out of bed by Sheriff Garnett Brooks and two deputies. It was a show of force by the entire sheriffs department. The sheriff and his deputies had been to the house before, during daylight hours, but had never found anyone home. This surprise, middle-of-the-night raid rewarded the sheriff with the lawbreakers he had been seeking. Standing beside the bed, Sheriff Brooks demanded to know what Richard was doing with the woman.

A quiet man, no doubt confused by the intrusion, Richard didnt immediately answer the sheriffs question. Mildred spoke up instead, saying, Im his wife.

Sheriff Brooks fired back: Not here youre not. Richard pointed to the couples marriage license that the newlyweds had hung on the bed-room wall, as if to prove Mildreds words were indeed fact, but the sheriff scoffed, saying, Thats no good here.

Richard, a twenty-four-year-old bricklayer, and Mildred, a housewife just shy of her nineteenth birthday, had known each other most of their lives. He was white. She was coloredpart [American] Indian and part Negro. Lifelong residents of Virginia, they lived in Central Point, a small rural area in Caroline County some fifty miles northeast of Richmond, the state capital.

Mixed marriagesthose between a white person and a member of any other racewere against the custom in Virginia. They were also against the law. It had been that way ever since colonial times. Richard and Mildred had committed the crime of falling in love and marrying while continuing to live near their families and friends in Virginia.

The sheriff charged the young couple with unlawful cohabitationliving together and having sexual relations without benefit of marriageand arrested them. As Mildred remembered, Sheriff Brooks and his deputies then carried us to Bowling Green and locked us up. Bowling Green is where Caroline Countys seat of government is located.

While separation of the races in Virginia was commonplace, in Central Point it was different. The rural world in which Mildred Delores Jeter and Richard Perry Loving grew up in the 1950s wasnt strictly divided racially into white and black. It was both segregated and interlaced. It never was like a lot of other places, Richard recalled later. It [race] doesnt matter to folks around here. They just want to live and be left alone. The couple had attended racially divided schools and churches, but in other ways, the races mixed. Richards mother, Lola Loving, was a midwife and delivered most of the babies in the area, black or white. Richard often stopped by the Jeter household to listen to Mildreds seven brothers play what Mildred called hillbilly music and to talk about race cars. He and two black friends owned a car together and raced it most weekends, often winning against local rivals. But eventually, Mildrednicknamed String Bean, for her tall, slender figure and which Richard shortened to Beanbecame his reason to visit. For Mildred, however, it wasnt love at first sight. When we first met, she recalled, I didnt like him.But I got to know him and he was a very nice person.

Mildred Dolores Jeter and Richard Perry Loving had known each other most of their lives and married in 1958 despite Virginias prohibition against mixed-race marriages. She was African American; he was Caucasian, or of white European ancestry. When they married, they did not know it would lead to their arrests and years of legal battles for the right to live in Virginia as husband and wife.

Richards arrest warrant states that he had broken the law because he, as a white person, left the state of Virginia to marry someone of a different race and then returned to it to live, an attempt to evade the statutes against mixed marriages. Note his initial plea of not guilty and the costs involved in the arrest.

Sheriff Garnett Brooks was doing his job when he arrested Richard and Mildred, but according to people who knew him, he did not like African Americans and was deeply offended by mixed-race marriages. When asked if Brooks was a racist, a member of Richards drag racing team responded, Hell, yes.