Read a statement made by Mildred Loving on Loving Day in 2007

Born in rural Virginia in 1939, Mildred Jeter married her teenage sweetheart, Richard Loving, in 1958. The pretty, confident Mildred had almost finished high school. The rather rugged, shy Richard was a bricklayer. Mildred was pregnant, so it was a somewhat hasty marriage. The young couple drove 80 miles to Washington, returned home with a marriage licence and settled down in their small house a few miles north of Richmond.

Five weeks later, soon after midnight, three men broke into their bedroom. It turned out to be the sheriff and his deputies. According to the Lovings, the sheriff shone a torch on Richard’s face and asked, “Who is this woman you’re sleeping with?” Afraid to speak, Richard did not reply. Mildred answered for him. “I’m his wife.” Richard showed the Sheriff their marriage certificate. The Sheriff was unimpressed. “That’s no good here,” he said.

The sheriff was right. Richard was white. According to Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924, Mildred was not. She was of Native American and African-American descent. The Act only recognised people as “pure white” if they could prove an exclusively white lineage back to 1684. (For a short time, advocates of the Act had flirted with the idea of pushing the date back to 1620, but they realised this would have classified as non-white thousands of prominent Virginians, including two Presidents of the United States and three Governors of Virginia). Thus Mildred and Richard broke the Act’s prohibition on mixed-race marriage — at the time, Virginia was one of 16 states that banned interracial marriage.

The Lovings’ out-of-state marriage license was invalid in Virginia. They were charged with “cohabiting as man and wife, against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth”. Mildred spent several nights in jail (and Richard spent one night in jail).

Parroting the racial rhetoric of the day, the judge in the case reminded the court that if God had wanted people to marry across the colour line, He would not have created the races on separate continents. In return for the suspension of their one-year sentence, the Lovings pled guilty and agreed to leave Virginia and not to return for 25 years. They paid their court fees, moved to Washington and had three children. When they returned to Virginia to visit their families, they did so separately.

The Lovings’ case coincided with the high point of the civil rights movement. In 1960 student-led protests gripped the nation, leading to a massive upsurge in protest across the Southern states of America. In 1963 Martin Luther King launched a massive protest campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, which led to the local police chief turning police dogs on young black marchers, which in turn led President Kennedy to introduce civil rights legislation. That same year Martin Luther King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington DC, in front of quarter of a million people, black and white.

The Lovings had their own dream — to return to their rural home in Virginia. The success of the civil rights movement inspired them to act. Mildred wrote to Robert Kennedy, the Attorney-General and the President’s brother. He referred them to the American Civil Liberties Union, one of the foremost civil rights legal groups of the day.

Previously, civil rights groups had been reluctant to take on the issue of mixed marriage, judging (rightly) that segregationists would resist this issue above all others. But by this time civil rights lawyers had won a string of victories against segregation in education and transport. ACLU lawyers took the case, and took it all the way to the Supreme Court.

Richard Loving’s advice to his lawyer was simple: “tell the court I love my wife, and it is just unfair that I can’t live with her in Virginia”. The court agreed. It was not the emotional pull that won the day, but because racial discrimination had now lost credibility in American jurisprudence. The Lovings’ lawyers argued that “when a law is based on race, it is immediately suspect and the burden is shifted to the state to show there is a compelling interest to have that sort of racial differentiation”.

Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren did not find the interest compelling. In his ruling, he wrote that anti-mixed race marriage laws violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause for all citizens. Warren argued that marriage is “one of the basic civil rights of man . . . To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as racial classification embodied in these statutes . . . is surely to deprive all the state’s citizens of liberty.” In Loving v Virginia (1967), the court ruled 9-0 against restrictions on interracial marriage. Richard Loving said: “I feel free now.”

Soon after the Lovings returned to Virginia. Richard was killed in a car crash in 1975. A Showtime film was made of their life, entitled Mr. And Mrs. Loving. For many years, many mixed-race couples celebrated “Loving Day” on June 12. There were more than a quarter of a million mixed-race couples by 2000. (That same year Alabama became the last state to remove a prohibition on mixed marriage from its constitution).

Later in life Mildred Loving was reluctant to give interviews. But on the 40th anniversary of the case, she issued a statement calling on lesbians and gays to be granted the right to marry.

Mildred Loving, civil rights campaigner, was born on July 22 1939. She died of pneumonia on May 2, 2008, aged 68