Loving v. Virginia

Facts

Virginia's statutory scheme against interracial marriage dated from the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which carried forward earlier prohibitions. Miscegenation statutes, the Court's term, are laws against marriage between races. Section 20-58 of the Virginia Code punished a white person and a colored person who left the State to marry, meaning to return, and then came back and lived together as man and wife. Section 20-59 made such a marriage a felony, punishable by one to five years in the penitentiary. Other provisions voided these marriages without any judicial proceeding and defined who counted as a white person and a colored person. In June 1958, two Virginia residents married in the District of Columbia under its laws. Richard Loving was a white man. Mildred Jeter was, in the Court's words, a Negro woman. The couple soon returned to Virginia and made their home in Caroline County. A grand jury there indicted them for violating Virginia's ban on interracial marriages. On January 6, 1959, they pleaded guilty and were sentenced to one year in jail. The trial judge suspended the sentence for 25 years on the condition that they leave the State and not return to Virginia together for 25 years. In an opinion, the judge said God had placed the races on separate continents and did not intend them to mix. Their convictions were under section 20-58. The Lovings never disputed that, under the statutes' definitions, Mrs. Loving was a colored person and Mr. Loving a white person.

Issues

1. Does Virginia's statutory scheme, which bars and punishes marriages between persons solely on the basis of racial classifications, violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment?
2. Do the same statutes deprive the Lovings of liberty without due process of law, in violation of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment?

Holding

Virginia's miscegenation statutes rest solely on distinctions drawn according to race and serve no legitimate overriding purpose independent of invidious racial discrimination, so they violate the Equal Protection Clause. Restricting the freedom to marry on that basis also deprives the Lovings of liberty without due process of law.