Mildred Loving, matriarch of interracial marriage, dies

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Mildred Loving, a black woman whose challenge to Virginia's ban on interracial marriage led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling striking down such laws nationwide, has died, her daughter said Monday.

Peggy Fortune said Loving, 68, died Friday at her home in rural Milford. She did not disclose the cause of death.

"I want (people) to remember her as being strong and brave yet humble — and believed in love," Fortune told The Associated Press.

Loving and her white husband, Richard, changed history in 1967 when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld their right to marry. The ruling struck down laws banning racially mixed marriages in at least 17 states.

"There can be no doubt that restricting the freedom to marry solely because of racial classifications violates the central meaning of the equal protection clause," the court ruled in a unanimous decision.

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If anything, remembering the Loving v Virginia case reminds me of just how far we've come on race issues in my lifetime. The ruling was only a year before I was born, and I still recall from when I was a kid in Texas how it took social attitudes among whites a while to catch up. Hell, to this day there are still some people who haven't caught up. But whatever. They're dead-enders.

But it is amazing, isn't it?

Forty one years ago it was illegal in over a third of the country for Black and white people to love each other, which reflects just how uncomfortable, disgusted really, many many white people were with Black people as human beings, just because they were Black. You've just got to wonder how conventional wisdom could be so fucking stupid and so fucking widespread.

What pieces of conventional wisdom today, things that everybody "knows," will be derided as barbaric and idiotic in forty more years?

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