hope

“Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”

Virginia trial court judge Leon Bazile in 1958 after sending an interracial couple, Mildred Jeter and Richard Perry Loving, to jail for one year for violating Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924.

“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 the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law.”

Chief Justice Earl Warren in Loving v. Virginia (1967)