Loving v. Virginiacase, died on October 12 at the age of eighty-six.
Brooklyn-born Cohen was practicing law in Alexandria in 1963 when he was asked to take the case of Richard and Mildred Loving, a mixed-race couple from Caroline County, by the American Civil Liberties Union. The Lovings had married in Washington, D.C., where interracial marriage was legal, in 1958. But when they returned to their home in Virginia, they were arrested by local authorities for violating the state’s 1924 Racial Integrity Act—which prohibited “any white person…to marry any save a white person, or a person with no other admixture of blood than white and American Indian.” Richard Loving was white and Mildred Loving was Black and American Indian.