Breaking a Taboo

True Love

Breaking a Taboo

Changing Hearts

Barriers fall

Ongoing Struggle

Tackling a Destructive Taboo

The Lovings’ willingness to fight Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law showed more bravery than Hollywood’s moguls did in those years.

The arrest of Richard and Mildred Loving, who’d violated Virginia’s Act to Preserve Racial Integrity, was recreated by “Loving” director Jeff Nichols in and around the actual locations.

In the 1950s, popular culture was beginning to confront the barriers to interracial love and marriage. For the Lovings to court and marry in Virginia in those years took courage, as they would soon discover, but Hollywood remained cowardly about the topic.

The industry prided itself on having removed “miscegenation” as a Production Code taboo in 1954, after a year of timidity and haggling. The next May Daily Variety announced that 20th Century Fox had paid “well over $100,000” for Alec Waugh’s forthcoming bestseller “Island in the Sun,” which featured several interracial couplings. It promised to open the floodgates for depictions of interracial romance.

As noted in Variety by George Morris, Hollywood turned to white actresses to play victimized light-skinned black women. Case in point: Yvonne de Carlo, in Raoul Walsh’s 1957 “Band of Angels,” seen above in a Warner ad. She played a Southern belle sold into slavery when it’s revealed her mother was a slave. She’s then bought by Clark Gable.

The film didn’t appear until the start of summer 1957, when the Lovings’ romance was heating up. “Island in the Sun” didn’t exactly sizzle, though. Variety’s critic he called it “flat and even tedious, [a film] that hints at raw sex but stops short even of a kiss for fear it might offend.” “Island” boasts Hollywood’s first passionate embrace between a white man, John Justin, and a black woman, Dorothy Dandridge. But any lip-locking was left on the cutting room floor.

Variety’s critic also noted, “It is just candid enough to offend the South and disappoint those in the North who pay expecting to see the Alec Waugh novel come to life.” Sure enough, on July 8, Variety reported Memphis’s censorship board had banned the film. Chairwoman Mrs. B.F. Edwards, called it “inflammatory, too frank a depiction of miscegenation, offensive to moral standards and no good for either White or Negro.” There was a happy ending for Fox, though. On July 31, Daily Variety reported “more smoke than fire” in Dixie threats against the picture, cited as “a sock grosser for 20th in most situations.”

Almost a year later, on June 2, 1958, Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter undertook the long journey, from Caroline County, Va., to the District of Columbia, to be wed. Years later Mildred told interviewers she saw no ulterior motive in the trip. As played by Ruth Negga in the film “Loving,” she explains to her sister, “Richard said there’d be less red tape in Washington, that’s all.”

Variety Archives

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Daily Variety readers found this item on the front page on Jan. 7, 1939: “Socialites Snub Negro Canary,” snarking at a “hoity-toity” women’s group that broke tradition by disinviting the Philadelphia Orchestra’s soloist, the great singer Marian Anderson, from their party at the Ritz-Carlton. The Daily Variety editors seem to have been fans of Anderson and followed the controversies around her for months to come.

In Feb. 1939, Daily Variety made sure its readers knew First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was leaving the Daughter of the American Revolution because the group would not let Anderson perform in their theater. In June of the same year, they played up Anderson’s “Triumph” as she sang before the premiere of “Young Mr. Lincoln” at the Fox Wilshire theater in Los Angeles.

The civil rights movement, in the form of the NAACP, was also raising its voice against some racist language in old-timey music. The word “darky,” once used so casually in and out of entertainment, was becoming unacceptable. But as late as 1958 CBS refused to change the language in old standards.

In 1952, the Daughters of the American Revolution finally permitted a black performer on its stage — a full 13 years after Mrs. Roosevelt resigned in protest.

In the segregated era the Lovings knew as children, there were blacks-only theaters, and blacks-only films to play in them. Here’s a review of one such film, “Reform School,” from Daily Variety in 1939.

While artists such as Eartha Kitt worked to put interracial marriage onscreen (in a picture to be filmed in London), the industry fretted about what to do with African-made films featuring black casts and subjects. The nationalist movement in Africa was especially uncomfortble for American censors.

In July 1939, a new survey covered in Daily Variety showed the number of blacks-only theaters declining.

In 1957, as the Lovings’s romance was beginnng, Fox premiered its much-ballyhooed tale of interracial canoodling, “Island in the Sun.” From the start, southern censors objected.

Variety’s longtime gossip columnist Army Archerd covered the premiere of “Island in the Sun” (3rd paragraph down) and observed that in real life, the film’s star Harry Belafonte was in fact married to a white woman, though he had declined to marry a white girl in the film, while the opposite was true for the film’s black female star Dorothy Dandridge — she married a white man in the film but had spurned white suitors offscreen.

Harry Belafonte didn’t think much of “Island in the Sun” and neither did the censors in Memphis, Tenn., who banned the film. It was a hit anyway. The protests by censors may have helped hype the film, which critics found disappointingly tame.

West Memphis, Ark. had long been the place for denizens of Memphis, Tenn., to go see banned films. But “Island in the Sun” marked the end of that practice.

Richard surely knew Virginia would not sanction their union, but he may have been unaware that Virginia’s 1924 Racial Integrity Act banned mixed couples in the state.

So their wedded bliss lasted exactly 42 days. In the wee hours of July 14 the newlyweds were carted off to dismal cells in the county seat. They were released — separately — but remained in the authorities cross-hairs.

By marrying, these ordinary people showed more courage than Hollywood’s leaders, as chronicled in Variety by guest columnist George Morris, president of Atlantis Films, on Jan. 4, 1961.

Morris’s article “Race & Romance” acknowledges increased Hollywood maturity in recognizing Asian females as fully dimensional beings by the end of the 1950s, but notes, “Much more grudgingly and gingerly this privilege was extended the heroine of Negro extraction.” (He dismisses “Island in the Sun” as “diffuse and vague.”) As for fully fleshed-out treatments of men and women of different races married or even just in love, Morris is silent, for there really were none to name.

FROM THE ARCHIVES

Fox’s hit “Island in the Sun” featured not one but four interracial romances [real or alleged; one woman suspected of being part black is proved otherwise], played by some of the screen’s most glamorous stars, including James Mason, Harry Belafonte, Joan Fontaine, Joan Collins, and the great Dorothy Dandridge.

On Jan. 6, 1959, while Hollywood still fumbled, Richard and Mildred Loving pleaded guilty in Virginia to “cohabiting as man and wife, against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth.” Their one-year prison sentence was suspended in return for their agreement to depart from the state, and not return together for 25 years.

They left their roots and settled, uncomfortably, in Washington. They tried to return to Virginia together for a visit in 1959, but were re-arrested. Years dragged by. But in the 1960s the civil rights movement gained force and support from new President Kennedy and his brother Robert, the attorney general.

“You need to write to Bobby Kennedy,” Mildred Loving’s cousin Laura insists in the motion picture “Loving.” “All this talk of civil rights. You need to get you some civil rights.”

That offhand suggestion, in late spring 1963, lit a slow-burning fuse destined to blow up the dam of America’s anti-miscegenation laws once and for all.

Ford or Chevy?

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