Thanks to your advocacy efforts on our behalf, we're happy to report that the recently passed Omnibus Spending Bill includes a very small increase in funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities! While our work is not over with regards to the upcoming 2018 budget to be passed in the fall, the Omnibus Spending Bill represents an endorsement of the important work that the humanities do for our communities. These funds will continue to support our work of providing free access to authoritative content about Virginia's history and culture.
In this written judgment, dated January 22, 1965, Leon M. Bazile, judge of the Caroline County
Circuit Court, refuses a motion on behalf of Richard and Mildred Loving to vacate
their 1959
conviction for violating the state law that forbids interracial marriage.
The Lovings eventually appealed their case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in their favor
in 1967.
The parties were guilty of a most serious crime. As said by the Court in Kinney's Case
30 Gratt 865: "It was a marriage prohibited and declared absolutely void. It was
contrary to the declared public law, founded upon motives of public policy—a public
policy affirmed for more than a Century, and one upon which social order, public
morality and the best interests of both races depend. This unmistakable policy of the
legislature founded, I think, on wisdom and the moral development of both races, has
been shown by not only declaring marriages between whites and negroes absolutely
void, but by prohibiting and punishing such unnatural alliances with severe
penalties. The laws enacted to further uphold this declared policy would be futile
and a dead letter if in fraud of these salutary enactments, both races might, by
stepping across any imaginary line bid defiance to the law by immediately returning
and insisting that the marriage celebrated in another state or county should be
recognized as lawful, though denounced by the public law of the domicile as unlawful
and absolutely void."
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 awfulness of the offense is shown by Section 20–57 which declares: "All
marriages between a white person and a colored person shall be absolutely void
without any decree of divorce or other legal process.["]
Then section 20–59 of the Code makes the contracting of a marriage between a white
person and any colored person a felony.
Conviction of a felony is a serious matter. You lose your political rights; and only
the government has the power to restore them (Constitution
— page 10 —
Sec. 73.) And as long as
you live you will be known as a felony
"The moving finger writes and moves on
and having writ
Nor all your piety nor all your wit
Can cange one line of it."
