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Mildred Loving Who Won
Landmark Interracial Marriage Ruling Dies
by The Associated Press
Posted: May 5, 2008 - 10:30 am ET
(Richmond, Virginia) 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.
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.
They had married in Washington
in 1958, when she was 18. Returning to their Virginia
hometown, they were arrested within weeks and convicted on
charges of "cohabiting as man and wife, against the peace
and dignity of the Commonwealth," according to their
indictments.
The couple avoided a year in
jail by agreeing to a sentence mandating that they immediately
leave Virginia. They moved to Washington and launched a legal
challenge a few years later.
After the Supreme Court ruled,
the couple returned to Virginia, where they lived with their
children Donald, Peggy and Sidney.
Richard Loving died in 1975 in
a car accident that also injured his wife.
In a rare interview with The
Associated Press last June, Loving said she wasn't trying to
change history - she was just a girl who once fell in love
with a boy.
"It wasn't my doing,"
Loving said. "It was God's work."
The Loving case was cited in
the 2003 Massachusetts case that led to same-sex marriage in
that state.
©365Gay.com 2008
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