Mildred Jeter, a Black woman, and Richard Loving, a white man, were married in the District of Columbia and then returned to their home in Virginia. Virginia charged them under state laws banning interracial marriage and criminalizing leaving the state to evade those laws. They pleaded guilty and were sentenced to one year in jail, suspended on the condition that they leave Virginia and not return together for 25 years. After later challenging the convictions, they argued that Virginia's antimiscegenation statutes violated the Fourteenth Amendment.
Does Virginia's statutory scheme prohibiting and punishing interracial marriage violate the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment?
Classifications based solely on race are subject to the most rigid scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause. The freedom to marry is a fundamental right, and the state may not restrict that freedom on an invidious racial basis consistent with the Due Process Clause.
Yes. Virginia's antimiscegenation statutes violate both the Equal Protection Clause and the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The convictions were reversed.
The Court rejected Virginia's argument that the statutes were constitutional because they punished both races equally; equal application did not remove the racial character of the classification. The laws rested solely on distinctions drawn according to race and were designed to maintain White Supremacy, which is an illegitimate purpose under the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court further held that marriage is one of the basic civil rights of man, fundamental to existence and survival. Depriving people of that freedom on so unsupportable a racial basis violated due process as well as equal protection.
Loving is the leading decision invalidating bans on interracial marriage and establishing that marriage is a fundamental right protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. It is a cornerstone of modern equal protection and substantive due process doctrine, building on the anti-caste principle of cases such as Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), and later informing marriage-rights decisions including Zablocki v. Redhail, 434 U.S. 374 (1978), Turner v. Safley, 482 U.S. 78 (1987), and Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. 644 (2015).
Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) |
Abstain |
Zablocki v. Redhail, 434 U.S. 374 (1978) |
Abstain |
Turner v. Safley, 482 U.S. 78 (1987) |
Abstain |
Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. 644 (2015) |
Abstain |
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