If you weren't white, you were black...
In modern "post-racial" America, it is often overlooked that earlier racist laws were not aimed only at African Americans. Anti-miscegeny laws covered marriage between all races, a fact which the NYTimes did not overlook in their obituary of Mildred Loving, whose landmark case, Loving v. Virginia, overturned the laws against racial intermarriage in 17 states in 1967:
Mr. Loving pointed to the couple's marriage certificate hung on the bedroom wall. The sheriff responded, "That's no good here."The certificate was from Washington, D.C., and under Virginia law, a marriage between people of different races performed outside Virginia was as invalid as one done in Virginia. At the time, it was one of 16 states that barred marriages between races.
Why is this important to remember? Because despite history remembering Mildred Jeter Loving as a black woman married to a white man, she herself had a different identity:
Mildred Delores 'family had lived in Caroline County, Va., for generations, as had the family of Richard Perry Loving. The area was known for friendly relations between races, even though marriages were forbidden. Many people were visibly of mixed race, with Ebony magazine reporting in 1967 that black "youngsters easily passed for white in neighboring towns."Mildred's mother was part Rappahannock Indian, and her father was part Cherokee. She preferred to think of herself as Indian rather than black.
My grandfather told me as a child that in Maine, he was often, to his face, referred to as a "wood nigger". Newpapers and court records asserted that the Indians, my own ancestors, who were removed from the coastal islands in the early 1900s, in order to offer the land to wealthy white vacationers, were "mixed-race negros". In the very first session of the Maine Legislature in 1821, an anti-miscegenation law was passed aimed primarily at Indian-white marriages, annulling all current and prohibiting all future ones. It wiped out three generations of vital statistics records for non-reservation Indians, until it's revocation in the late 1880s.
Mildred Loving's brave battle was not aimed at providing justice for only one group, but for all Americans. But as an Indian, I'm especially proud, despite her personal identity having been appropriated for the larger civil rights battle in America.
