Loving v. Virginia
Does a state law that criminalizes interracial marriage violate the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment, even if the law punishes both white and non-white participants equally?
The Decision
9-0 decision · Opinion by Earl Warren · 1967
Majority Opinion— Earl Warrenconcurring ↓
In a unanimous 9–0 decision issued on June 12, 1967, the Supreme Court struck down Virginia's anti-miscegenation laws. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote the opinion for the Court. The decision invalidated not only Virginia's Racial Integrity Act and its companion statute punishing interracial marriage, but effectively voided similar laws in the fifteen other states that still had them on the books.
The Court first addressed Virginia's 'equal application' argument — the claim that because both the white spouse and the non-white spouse were equally subject to criminal punishment, the law treated the races equally and therefore did not violate the Equal Protection Clause. The Court flatly rejected this reasoning. Chief Justice Warren wrote that the mere 'equal application' of a statute containing racial classifications does not remove it from the Fourteenth Amendment's prohibition on racial discrimination. The Court noted that it had repudiated this exact line of reasoning in prior cases. The fact that the law drew distinctions based on race was, by itself, enough to trigger the most rigorous form of constitutional review — what lawyers call 'strict scrutiny.' Under this demanding standard, a racial classification can survive only if it is shown to be necessary to accomplish some permissible state objective independent of the racial discrimination the law embodies.
Applying that standard, the Court found that Virginia utterly failed to justify its law. The Court examined the historical origins of Virginia's anti-miscegenation statutes and concluded that they were clearly designed as 'measures designed to maintain White Supremacy.' There was no legitimate, independent state purpose being served — the entire point of the law was to enforce racial hierarchy. The Court therefore held that the statutes violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
The Court did not stop there. It also held that the laws violated the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Chief Justice Warren declared that the freedom to marry is 'one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men' and that marriage is 'one of the basic civil rights of man, fundamental to our very existence and survival.' To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as racial classification, the Court concluded, was to deprive citizens of liberty without due process of law. By grounding its decision in both equal protection and due process, the Court made its ruling doubly strong, recognizing both the equality dimension and the fundamental liberty dimension of the right to marry.
Concurring Opinions
Justice Potter Stewart wrote a brief concurring opinion stating simply that he could not conceive of a valid state law that makes the criminality of an act depend upon the race of the actor — emphasizing the pure equal protection rationale without addressing the broader due process and fundamental rights reasoning of the majority.
Background & Facts
In June 1958, Richard Loving, a white man, and Mildred Jeter, a woman of Black and Native American descent, traveled from their home in Caroline County, Virginia, to Washington, D.C., to get married. They did this because Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924 made it a felony for a white person to marry a non-white person. After they returned to Virginia as a married couple, a county grand jury indicted them in October 1958 on charges of violating the state's ban on interracial marriage. In January 1959, they each pleaded guilty. The trial judge, Leon M. Bazile, sentenced them to one year in prison but suspended the sentence for 25 years — on the condition that they leave Virginia and not return together for that entire period. The Lovings moved to Washington, D.C., effectively exiled from the state where their families lived.
In 1963, frustrated by their separation from family and home, Mildred Loving wrote a letter to U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy seeking help. Kennedy referred her to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which assigned two young volunteer attorneys, Bernard S. Cohen and Philip J. Hirschkop, to represent the couple. The lawyers filed a motion in the Caroline County Circuit Court to vacate the Lovings' conviction on the grounds that Virginia's anti-miscegenation statutes violated the Fourteenth Amendment. When the trial court took no action for months, the attorneys also initiated a federal lawsuit. The state court eventually responded: Judge Bazile denied the motion in January 1965, writing in his opinion that 'Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents' and that the separation of the races showed God did not intend for the races to mix.
The Lovings appealed to the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia, which in March 1966 upheld the constitutionality of the anti-miscegenation statutes. The state court reasoned that the laws served legitimate state purposes of preserving 'racial integrity' and that because both the white and non-white spouse were punished equally, the law did not discriminate. However, the state court did modify the original sentence, ruling that the banishment from Virginia as a condition of the suspended sentence was an unreasonable restriction.
The Lovings then appealed to the United States Supreme Court, which agreed to hear the case. The stakes were enormous: at the time, Virginia was one of sixteen states that still had laws prohibiting interracial marriage. The case squarely presented the question of whether a state could use the institution of marriage to enforce racial separation, and it forced the Court to confront the meaning of equality under the Constitution in one of the most personal areas of human life.
The Arguments
The Lovings argued that Virginia's anti-miscegenation laws violated both the Equal Protection Clause and the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. They contended that any law built on racial classifications must be subjected to the most rigorous constitutional scrutiny and that Virginia had no legitimate purpose for its marriage ban other than perpetuating white supremacy.
- Virginia's law was a racial classification on its face — it determined who could marry whom based solely on race, which triggers the highest level of constitutional scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause.
- The 'equal application' argument (that both the white and non-white spouse are punished) does not save the law, because the restriction itself is based on race and designed to maintain a system of racial hierarchy.
- Marriage is one of the most basic civil rights of every person, and the freedom to marry the person of one's choice cannot be restricted by the state on the basis of race without violating the Due Process Clause's protection of fundamental liberties.
Virginia argued that its anti-miscegenation statutes did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment because the law applied equally to both races — white and non-white persons were equally punished for entering into an interracial marriage. Virginia further argued that the regulation of marriage had always been left to the states and that the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment did not intend to bar anti-miscegenation laws.
- The laws applied equal punishment to both races involved in an interracial marriage, so there was no unequal treatment — this 'equal application' theory meant the law did not violate equal protection.
- The regulation of marriage is a traditional and exclusive power of the states, and the Fourteenth Amendment was never understood to take that power away or to specifically forbid laws against interracial marriage.
- The state had a legitimate interest in preserving 'racial integrity' and preventing the supposed social and biological harms of interracial unions, providing a rational basis for the law.