The Loving Story

Nancy Buirski's first documentary concerns itself with the case of Loving v. Virginia.

Perhaps it might more accurately be called the story of how Richard and Mildred Loving wanted to live out their married life in Virginia. Ms. Buirski begins her discussion with consideration of the society and laws of the time as if she were talking about a place and time the audience has never heard of. To people my age it may seem ridiculous; barely more than 40 years had elapsed between the Supreme Court decision and the release of this film. Yet my nieces, on discovering their maternal grandmother had left Virginia in the 1950s to pass as White don't understand why she never told them.

Such is the lack of historical context people live in, a sort of moment which people imagine always existed. That's the reason and need for movies like this.

The love these two people had for one another was genuinely real, and watching them and their beautiful children in the archival footage tugged at your heartstrings. I watched this documentary when it was first shown on HBO, and thought it was engrossing. I was 20 yrs. old when this case was finally decided, and I remember it vaguely. I lived in the North and had known that interracial marriage was illegal in the South, but never realized that couples were actually persecuted and jailed as the Loving couple were. The young ACLU lawyers who took the case are shown interacting with the couple in the l960's, and they also add present day commentary.

This is not meant to be a documentary about the legal machinations of the case (altho some of that is explained); but It's a compelling story about the human aspects of the case.

This documentary is about the 1967 landmark U.S. Supreme Court case striking down anti-miscegenation statutes as unenforceable under the Fourteenth Amendment.

I read about Loving v. Virginia in law school and marveled at the bravery of the couple in question (a white man and black woman) who were prosecuted for leaving their home state of Virginia to marry in D.C. and then returning to Virginia where they were harassed by law enforcement and ultimately prosecuted as felons for miscegenation.

The documentary (which consists almost entirely of contemporaneous black and white footage) offers (and needs) little narration as the Lovings and their attorneys describe the events that led to the historical legal ruling.

While interracial marriage attracts little notice in most populous areas of America today, at the time the Lovings were prosecuted (1958) 21 states had anti-miscegenation statutes on their books. (Indeed, notwithstanding the 1967 decision, the last state to repeal its anti-miscegenation law was Alabama in 2000.) I saw the film at the Tribeca Film Festival tonight and as a wonderful bonus, the Lovings' youngest child, Peggy Loving Fortune, appeared and shared her personal feelings and recollections. (Her parents are deceased; Mrs. Mildred Jeter Loving died of pneumonia in 2008, and Mr. Richard Loving died in a automobile accident in 1975.) The film was made in part by HBO, so perhaps HBO will air it at some point.

The racism and the Jim Crow laws that existed were so encompassing that they applied to things you may have never thought about. It makes me wonder how many laws were removed from the books with the Civil Rights movement. And they talk about government needing to be smaller.

"The Loving Story" is about Richard Perry Loving, a white man, and Mildred Jeter Loving, a Black woman, who violated Virginia's miscegenation laws when they married. On June 2, 1958 the two got married in Washington D. C. and went back home to Virginia. On July 14th a sheriff entered their home at 4 a.m. And arrested them. They were sentenced to a year in prison, but the judge suspended the sentence with the condition that they leave Virginia. They were banished for nine years before the U. S. Supreme Court overturned the conviction which allowed them to legally return home as a couple.

"The Loving Story" is mostly footage from the 1960's while the case was actively being argued. There are a few present day interviews, but most of the interviews were from about 60 years ago. If I thought about it, then it would make sense to me that the South would have anti-miscegenation laws, but when you don't operate with that mindset, you wouldn't fathom it. "The Loving Story" is just one more important battle waged and won during the fight for civil rights back in the 60's.

The lengths to which some people will go to avoid living in DC, huh? All joking aside, though, this is a great documentary. I like how director Nancy Buirski is able to strike a balance between giving a legal treatise and telling a personal story, without one overpowering the other. Through her fine work various heroes emerge, both legal...the two dogged ACLU attorneys and Earl Warren being the biggest examples...and personal...the title characters, of course, two ordinary folks with an extraordinary amount of determination not to let the state of Virginia push them around because of their race. And there are villains, like the racist sheriff who rousts the Lovings at four in the morning and arrests them for the heinous crime of marriage and the even more racist local judge who invokes scripture in his legal opinion to invalidate their union. However, this is a tale of justice prevailing, albeit slowly (sound familiar to all you Trump Delay fans out there?), and Buirski wisely and properly, in my opinion, does not let the bad guys upstage the Lovings or their advocates. Give it an A.