The appellants in
Loving v. Virginia were Richard Perry Loving and his wife, Mildred Delores Jeter Loving. Born on October 29, 1933, in Central Point, Caroline County, Richard Loving was a white man who worked as a construction worker. Mildred Loving, born on July 22, 1939, also in Central Point, was part African American and part Indian. (Later in her life she identified only as Indian.) After traveling to Washington, D.C., to obtain a legal marriage on June 2, 1958, they returned to Virginia, where mixed-race unions were against the law. They lived downstairs in the Central Point home of Mildred Loving’s parents.
On July 11, the commonwealth’s attorney for Caroline County, Bernard Mahon, obtained warrants for the couple’s arrest. After attempting to apprehend them several times during the day, Sheriff Garnett Brooks found the Lovings at home in the early morning hours a few days later. After knocking on and then breaking through the door, Brooks and two deputies encounter