The plaintiffs in Loving v. Virginia, Mildred Jeter Loving and Richard Perry Loving, were arrested in July 1958 for violating the terms of the Racial Integrity Act. By law, Jeter was classified as "colored" and Loving as "white." Knowing that they would not be able to marry legally in Virginia, the couple left the state in June 1958 to marry in Washington, D.C., where no such prohibition existed. Virginia's Racial Integrity Act, however, included a section that forbade interracial couples who married outside the state to live in Virginia as husband and wife. In October 1958 the Circuit Court of Caroline County issued an indictment stating that they were in violation of state law. On January 6, 1959, Judge Leon Bazile accepted their guilty pleas but suspended their one-year sentences on the condition that they leave Virginia and promise not to return as a couple for twenty-five years. The Lovings opted to leave and moved to Washington, D.C.

They were not content to accept the situation, however. In 1963 the Lovings engaged Bernard Cohen, an affiliated attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), to appeal their conviction. Soon Cohen was joined in his appeal by attorney Philip Hirschkopf, who had more experience in constitutional law. Judge Bazile denied the appeal, stating that Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.

The Lovings' appeal to the Supreme Court of Virginia was denied in 1966, setting the stage for an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. In that appeal, attorneys Hirshkopf and Cohen were assisted by numerous legal scholars, the national ACLU, and other organizations and law firms. Amicus briefs—statements and information presented on behalf of organizations not directly involved with the case—were filed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the Japanese-American Citizen's League, and a consortium of Catholic bishops and other sympathetic organizations. Although sixteen states still had laws banning interracial marriage (Maryland repealed its law in response to the Lovings' Supreme Court case), only North Carolina offered a brief on behalf of Virginia. The Lovings' brief, meanwhile, included legal arguments interspersed with references to sociology and anthropology. Perhaps the most dramatic moment in the courtroom came when Cohen quoted Richard Loving as saying, "Mr. Cohen, tell the Court I love my wife, and it is just unfair that I can't live with her in Virginia."

A unanimous ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Virginia's law, stating that to deny the "fundamental freedom" of marriage "on so unsupportable a basis" as race "is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law."

Loving v. Virginia established the legal basis for a cultural redefinition of marriage. Over time, marriages between whites and African Americans became both more numerous and more accepted. Same-sex marriages, meanwhile, became more disputed, with gay rights activists attempting to use Loving v. Virginia as a precedent in their favor. The courts have preferred reading the case strictly in terms of race, although in 2007 the group Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, or GLAD, released a statement that attributed to Mildred Loving support for same-sex marriage. After her death, the Loving family denied that she held these views. Richard Loving died in 1975, and Mildred Loving died in 2008.