June 12 marks the 57th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision Loving v. Virginia, deeming that state’s anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional and affording mixed-race marriages legal protection across the nation. It also marks Loving Day, officially recognized by various governmental, cultural, and educational institutions to celebrate the 1967 decision and honor Mildred and Richard Loving, the couple behind the case.
Mildred, of mixed Black and Native American heritage, and Richard, white, challenged the local judge’s ruling after their arrest for violating the Virginia Racial Integrity Act, instituted in 1924. Accused of “cohabitating” in a union “against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth,” the Lovings were given a choice: accept incarceration for a year or leave the state.
The Virginia Supreme Court upheld the local judge’s decision: The state must “preserve the racial integrity of its citizens,” and guard against “the corruption of blood” and “a mongrel breed of citizens.” Eugenics supporters cast mixed-race unions as a threat to white “blood,” its inherent "purity,” and the health of the polity as a whole. But after the Lovings took the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, Virginia’s anti-miscegenation act was struck down, along with similar laws that still existed in 16 other states (though neither South Carolina nor Alabama voted to remove statutes barring mixed marriage from their own constitutions until 1998 and 2000, respectively).
Today, recognizing Loving v. Virginia provides an opportunity to uncover a different, long-forgotten chapter in our nation’s long struggle with civil rights, interracial unions, and so-called racial "purity." Twenty-five years before the ACLU took up the Lovings’ case, hundreds of mixed families faced a choice between home and marriage, freedom and love, under the shadow of the nation’s Japanese American incarceration camps. The policies identifying and policing these families were based on similar fears of non-white “blood” and its destructive powers against white bodies, minds, and American society as a whole.
After the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japan in 1941 and the U.S. entry into WWII, almost 100,000 U.S. citizens were among the 120,000 people of Japanese descent who were ordered “excluded” and “evacuated” from the West Coast. All were forcibly concentrated at inland camps. Not a single case of sabotage by an American citizen of Japanese descent was ever found. But the justification for this mass incarceration, as described by Colonel John Dewitt, head of the Western Defense Command (WDC), was that the “Japanese race is an enemy race and while many second and third generation Japanese born on American soil…have become ‘Americanized,’ the racial strains are undiluted.”