50 Years After Loving v. Virginia, Colleges Embrace Segregation Students have demanded free tuition and housing for blacks as well as black-only dorms. By Jason Riley
https://www.wsj.com/articles/50-years-after-loving-v-virginia-colleges-embrace-segregation-1496792040
June 12 marks the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s 1967 ruling in Loving v. Virginia, which held that states could no longer prohibit marriages on racial grounds.
“Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State,” wrote Chief Justice Earl Warren. Like an earlier landmark decision on race, Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Loving opinion was unanimous and brief—just 10 pages long. It was also unsurprising.
For starters, nearly two decades earlier, in 1948, the California Supreme Court had already ruled that the state’s antimiscegenation law violated the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment. Court rulings aside, polling showed that racial attitudes among whites nationwide had shifted significantly in the postwar period. Between 1942 and 1963, white support for school integration grew to 62% from 30%, and white backing for neighborhood integration jumped to 64% from 35%. By the early 1960s, 79% of whites supported integrated public transportation, up from 44% in the early 1940s.
As Harvard Law Professor Randall Kennedy wrote in “Interracial Intimacies,” his book on the history of cross-racial romance, the high court’s Loving decision helped to further an existing (and welcome) trend. “Although a large majority of whites continued to disapprove of interracial marriage throughout the 1960s—in 1964, 60 percent of adult whites polled declared their support for antimiscegenation laws—the matrimonial color bar eventually suffered the same fate as all the other customs and laws of segregation.” Nor were white views the only ones evolving. In 1968 only 48% of blacks approved of mixed marriages.
The Loving decision was handed down amid a civil-rights movement in full swing. The 1963 March on Washington had already occurred. The 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act had already passed. In 1967 Hollywood released “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” about an interracial couple planning to marry, and it became a box-office hit. In 1967 Peggy Rusk, daughter of President Lyndon Johnson’s secretary of state, Dean Rusk, married Guy Smith, a black man. Time magazine called it “a marriage of enlightenment” and featured a wedding photo of the couple on its cover.
The irony is that we will mark the 50th anniversary of Loving at a time when race-consciousness is once again ascendant, not only among “alt-right” types, but more tellingly among self-styled progressives and left-wing institutions that once worked so hard to combat Jim Crow policies. The liberals who are cheering the recent removal of Confederate monuments to racial separatism also indulge the separatist rhetoric of groups like Black Lives Matter. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. ’s calls for colorblind policies seem as dated as concerns about interracial hookups. CONTINUE AT SITE
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