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
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.