Love in the Age of [Overt] Racism

Imagine you were in love with someone from another race. Now imagine that you were not permitted to marry that person because the laws of your land, the United States in this case, did not allow it. Mildred Jeter and Thomas Loving lived in Virginia and in 1958 when they wanted to marry, there was a state law on the books prohibiting miscegenation:

“If any white person intermarry with a colored person, or any colored person intermarry with a white person, he shall be guilty of a felony.”

Mildred and Thomas went to Washington D.C. to get married and returned home. In the middle of the night they were arrested and their one-year sentence was suspended pending their agreeing to leave Virginia and not return for 25 years. In his decision, the judge wrote:

“Almighty God … did not intend for the races to mix”

The aptly-named Lovings appealed the decision and the case eventually reached the US Supreme Court where all miscegenation state laws were declared null and void. Thomas died in a car crash in the late-seventies and Mildred died this past Sunday but their legacy lives on.

I’m reminded of the the story of Louis Gregory, a prominent African-American Baha’i who married Louisa Mathew, a British-born, Cambridge-educated Bahá’í in 1912. Louis spent his life lecturing on the Bahá’í principle of the equality of the races. He gave up his law and real estate practice in the pursuit of racial unity. When he was allowed to he would travel with his wife but in those days it was often illegal for Louis and Louisa to travel together so he often went alone.

Today the idea of racial equality is not a generally argued against-not publicly anyway. But to claim that racism does not still infect American society, and many others around the world, is to accept a failure which over time threatens the very values this country was founded upon:

“It is evident that both Black and White Americans in large numbers are feeling deeply disappointed and frustrated by what each group perceives to be a failure of the efforts in recent decades at effecting progress in the relations between the races. To rationalize this failure, both have been reacting by retreating to the more familiar ground of racial separation. As the problems with crime and drug addiction mount, the tendency is to use the seeming intractability of these problems as a measure of the failure of years of struggle on the part of both to overcome the barriers of centuries. Formidable as is the challenge yet to be met, can it fairly said that no significant progress has taken place since the days of the sit-ins at lunch counters across the South?”

- The Vision of Race Unity: America’s Most Challenging Issue

I am moved by the courage of both the Loving’s and the Gregory’s. May we draw inspiration from their example and work together towards the day when “[t]he diversity in the human family [will be] the cause of love and harmony, as it is in music where many different notes blend together in the making of a perfect chord.”

The Wizard from the album “Fur And Gold” by Bat For Lashes