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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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.

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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