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Naperville
Thursday, March 28, 2024

Transitions – Loving in an age of change

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Recently I had a blast from the past when a woman I grew up with called. I have not seen or talked to her in years. An Afro-American, Erma is married to a white man. When she married Frank 52 years ago, they encountered racial prejudice.

I must admit I was surprised when they got married, but I was shocked to learn that their union in 1965 was illegal throughout the South. A recently released motion picture, LOVING, explores the travails suffered by an interracial couple in an era before Civil Rights.

Mildred and Richard Loving, a black woman and a white man, were married in Washington, D.C., in 1955. Back home in Virginia they were arrested in their own bedroom for breaking The Racial Integrity Law or miscegenation, which declared races could not intermarry. (I mentioned this in an earlier column about my neighbor’s father, a decorated WWII American veteran of Japanese descent, who could not marry his white fiancée in Missouri.)

The Lovings went to court for their right to marry, but a judge in the Virginia Supreme Court declared, “God in His wisdom put the races on different continents and but for the interference with His arrangement (slavery) there would be no mixing of the races.”

To avoid imprisonment, the Lovings had to agree to leave the state for 25 years. In Loving versus Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down miscegenation on June 12, 1967, a day now referred to as Loving Day.

Like Erma and her husband, Roger and I struggled with the implications of our friendship for our families and future, but somehow I suspected that if they could marry and thrive, so could we.

Now, we frequently see TV commercials with such couples — who says we can’t change?

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Barbara Blomquist
Barbara Blomquist
Barbara Blomquist is a Naperville resident, wife, mother, quilter, and screenwriter. Contact her at BWBLomquist@aol.com.

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