A Crusade Driven by True Love

Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter just wanted to marry. But it took a cultural earthquake led by artists and filmmakers to make that possible.

Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga as pioneering couple Richard Loving as Mildred Jeter in “Loving,”from Focus Features and director Jeff Nichols.

They were unlikely crusaders. They were part of no movement, tied to no group, just ordinary citizens of Caroline County, Va. He was a construction worker who entered weekend drag races. His date for those outings was a tall, skinny young woman everyone teased as “Stringbean,” which he shortened to an affectionate “Bean.” Their dreams were simple: to marry and start a family.

There was only one problem. She was a “negro,” in the parlance of the time, and he was white. So the hammer of state government smashed down on their marriage, labeling it with an ugly word hissed in hatred: “miscegenation.”

Mildred and Richard Loving’s nine-year struggle to have their marriage validated in law only became a public event in its final stages, but in time, their love made them heroes, the kind of people about whom movies are made. They grew up in an America that forbade that love, then married in a country that was torn over whether their marriage, and the marriages of any interracial couples, should have full recognition under the law.

“Imitation of Life,” made the year Mildred Jeter was born, was one of the few Hollywood films of its time to portray a black woman with dignity.

Those cultural tensions played out in popular entertainment. Filmmakers, writers and performers challenged the status quo, turning the ground so the Lovings’ romance could take root. Those pop culture strains were chronicled at every step by Variety, which delivered a day-by-day account of the struggle between individual love and organized hate.

Richard Loving was born in 1933, Mildred Jeter six years later. Segregation was firmly embedded in the America of their childhood. The era’s casual assumptions are shocking today. In movies, on stage and on radio, interracial love (let alone sex) was taboo. Many artists doubtless chafed at such prejudice, and a few were able to use the movies to fight back. In Universal’s 1934 release “Imitation of Life,” for instance, a maid (the great, unheralded Louise Beavers) becomes the business partner of a white tycoon. But normally Hollywood saw people of color as exotic or laughable, when it saw them at all, confining them to musical interludes — easily cut for local consumption, if required — or comic relief.

Variety Archives

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“Gone With the Wind,” released the year Mildred was born, fit in tidily with Hollywood’s treatment of black-white relations, with its black slaves devoted to pleasing “massa” and white men too gentlemanly to take black mistresses. But popular as it was, “Gone With the Wind’s” fantasia of the Old South was soon met by a counter-narrative. World War II’s bigotry- fueled horrors made a strong impression on those who returned from the fight, ushering in a serious attitude shift that took root just as Richard and Mildred were growing up.

In Hollywood that led to a brief but potent cycle of “Negro problem pictures” like 1949’s “Pinky,” commended by Variety’s critic, who said, “[It] meets the [discrimination] problem head-on and depicts forthrightly some of its ugliest aspects.” Stars Jeanne Crain and William Lundigan were both white, but Crain played a nurse who had been “passing” for white. That was enough to enrage the guardians of Jim Crow. On Oct. 25, 1950, Variety reported the arrest of a Marshall, Texas, exhibitor for screening “Pinky” “after a suddenly formed censor board had banned the picture,” earning a conviction on three counts of violating state law.

FROM THE ARCHIVES

On Oct. 25, 1950, Variety reported the arrest of a Marshall, Texas, exhibitor for screening “Pinky” “after a suddenly formed censor board had banned the picture,” earning a conviction on three counts.

On Oct. 25, 1950, Variety reported the arrest of a Marshall, Texas, exhibitor for screening “Pinky” “after a suddenly formed censor board had banned the picture,” earning a conviction on three counts.

Such forces of intolerance were beginning to lose power, though. The tragedy of Emmett Till and the heroism of Rosa Parks awakened millions. The federal government proved willing to step in where states lagged behind, in the Supreme Court’s rejection of school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education, and in President Eisenhower’s decision to send in federal troops to back up the decision. The pushback against American apartheid was ramping up.

By all accounts, Mildred and Richard were largely heedless of these larger societal pressures. As dramatized in the Focus Features motion picture “Loving,” their courtship was easy and unforced, befitting what their daughter Peggy would simply describe as “love at first sight.”

Many years later, Mildred told an interviewer, “I didn’t know anything about the civil- rights movement. The only thing I know is what everybody saw on the news.” She and her true love would themselves be on the news soon enough.

Will You Marry Me

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