Mildred Loving and the Last Ashes of Fear

Mildred Jeter Loving and Richard Loving, 1965.


The article was on the front page of today's edition of The Washington Post, and I read it with great sadness.

Mildred Jeter Loving, 68, a black woman whose refusal to accept Virginia's ban on interracial marriage led to a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1967 that struck down similar laws across the country, died of pneumonia Friday at her home in Milford, Va.

The great sadness is that Mildred Loving was only 68 years old, and yet this country is full of young people who refuse to even give a moment's credence to how hot the fires of hate once burned in this country.

And yet that fire is not yet completely out, is it?

Apparently it is still burning as smoldering ash among many older, poorer, Democratic voters who loathe Hillary Clinton, but fear a smart, even-keeled black man even more.

Hillary and Bill Clinton seek to stir up those ashes. They did it in South Carolina, where the first shot was fired in the Civil War, and they did it in Indiana again, in a state that once elected a Ku Klux Klansman Governor.

The next stop is West Virginia, whose current Senator was once a Ku Klux Klansman himself.

And yet, young white people not much older than my children have the temerity to tell me -- a Virginian -- that racism is an old thing. It is historical they say. It is not alive today. It is dead.

Right.

You will pardon me if those of who were not born yesterday beg to differ.

We know a little more.

We know who Mildred Loving is, and how young she was when she died last week.

Oddly, I happened to have written about Mildred Loving on this blog, just a few months ago, in response to a comment about how our Founding Fathers should have ditched the "pursuit of happiness" clause in the U.S. Consitution and replaced it with a clause about the "pursuit of property."

As I noted, we in Virginia, beg to differ.

Virginia knows something about the Constitution. Thomas Jefferson was one of our own, as was James Madison and George Washington. This state was not only the cradle of American Liberty, it was also the central cauldron of the Civil War. And it was not entirely an accident, I think, that it was here that one of the last, and ugliest, parts of American racism finally washed up to die.

And what killed it was a simple thing: Loving. Mildred and Richard Loving.

The pursuit of happiness.

Mrs. Loving, may you rest in peace, and may Virginia -- and the nation -- never forget.
..