“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.”

In 1958, Caroline County (Virginia) Judge Leon M. Bazile said these words as he sentenced Richard and Mildred Loving, a white man and black woman, to a year in prison for violating the state’s law against blacks and whites marrying. The judge suspended their sentence in exchange for them agreeing to leave the state for 25 years.

In 1967 the U.S. Supreme Court heard their case, ruling that such miscegenation laws are against the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment, that they are “measures designed to maintain White Supremacy…[and] there can be no doubt that restricting the freedom to marry solely because of racial classifications violates the central meaning of the Equal Protection Clause.”

Mildred Loving died on Monday. (Her husband had died in a car crash many years before.)

I’m old enough to understand that 1967 was not that long ago. That’s the thing about getting older — the span of time reveals itself as a continuum. What seemed a lifetime ago, you realize, is just part of a lifetime.
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Mildred Loving’s lifetime ended Monday. Tuesday evening, my wife and I — a couple of the same colors as Mildred and Richard Loving — watched one of our offspring, our 14-year-old daughter, win the county 800 meter championship (going away, if I might brag). I’d like to pretend I told her the story of the Lovings and she ran inspired. No. She just ran, faster (much!) than all of the other qualifiers. Just part of a lifetime.