“Tell the Court I Love My [Indian] Wife”: Interrogating Race and Self-Identity in Loving V. Virginia

Abstract

The 1967 case of Loving v. Virginia, in which the Supreme Court declared antimis-cegenation laws unconstitutional, has garnered far less scholarly attention than its 1954 predecessor, Brown v. the Board of Education, which overturned legalized segre-gation. What little has appeared in the way of scholarship has focused on analyzing the history of antimiscegenation legislation, the events that led up to the case presentation before the nine justices, the legal precedents regarding the arguments presented before the court, and the unanimous decision delivered by Chief Justice Earl Warren. Until recently, with the exception of an article that appeared in Ebony magazine several months after the Supreme Court decision, writers have given little attention to the personal lives of the actual plaintiffs now enshrined in American history as “the couple that rocked the courts.”¹ In particular, the racial designation of the couple has been merely taken for granted. Famed African American journalist Simeon Booker’s assertion in an article for Life magazine that, “She is Negro, he is white, and they are married,” reflects this assumption.² In addition, although Peter Wallenstein states that the nine justices overcame their reluctance to rule on the question of miscegenation because interest in the question went beyond black-white marriage, Lawyers Bernard Cohen and Philip J. Hirshkop’s conceptualization of the case as overturning the last of the odious laws of slavery and segregation once again reified the racial dichotomy of white and black within American racial discourse.³ As a consequence, the arguments presented before the court and later the majority opinion obscured racial issues beyond the boundaries of black and white, namely black-Indian relations in the south and the mixed-race identity of Mildred Loving. As Wallenstein, asserts “There was no doubt in anybody’s mind as to the racial identifies, white and black, of the people who claimed to be Mr. and Mrs. Loving.”⁴

This chapter reexamines the Italic Loving v. Virginia case by focusing on the triracial community of Central Point, Virginia, and Mildred Loving’s self identity as an Indian woman. Loving’s self identity was informed by the twentieth-century politics of racial purity, which resulted in a community-wide denial of African ancestry. I argue that Mildred Loving’s marriage to a white man was not an affirmation of black/white intermarriage but, rather, adhered to the code of racial purity as defined by the state of Virginia, a legacy that continues in the post-Civil Rights era.

[Winters are always finding blacks, and they are always losing Indians.

—Jack D. Forbes, The Manipulation of Race