Does a state statutory scheme prohibiting and punishing marriages between persons solely on the basis of racial classifications violate the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment?

In June 1958, Mildred Jeter, a Black woman, and Richard Loving, a white man, both Virginia residents, married in the District of Columbia. They returned to Virginia and established their home in Caroline County. A grand jury indicted them for violating Virginia's ban on interracial marriages, including Virginia Code § 20-58, which criminalized leaving the state to marry in order to evade the ban and then returning to cohabit. The Lovings pleaded guilty and were sentenced to one year in jail, but the trial judge suspended the sentence for 25 years on the condition that they leave Virginia and not return together during that period. The judge stated that God created the races separately and did not intend for them to mix. After their convictions, the Lovings moved to the District of Columbia. Virginia's statutory scheme, rooted in the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, voided marriages between a white person and a colored person, defined racial categories, barred marriage licenses absent verification of race, and punished interracial marriage as a felony carrying one to five years in prison. The Lovings did not dispute their racial classifications under the statutes.

On November 6, 1963, the Lovings filed a motion in the state trial court to vacate the judgment and set aside the sentence on the ground that the statutes violated the Fourteenth Amendment. When the motion remained undecided by October 28, 1964, they filed a class action in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia seeking a three-judge court to declare the statutes unconstitutional and enjoin enforcement of their convictions. On January 22, 1965, the state trial judge denied the motion to vacate, and the Lovings appealed to the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia. On February 11, 1965, the three-judge District Court continued the federal case to allow the Lovings to present their constitutional claims to the highest state court. The Supreme Court of Appeals upheld the constitutionality of the antimiscegenation statutes and, after modifying the sentence, affirmed the convictions. The Lovings appealed to the United States Supreme Court, which noted probable jurisdiction on December 12, 1966.

(Warren, J.)

Yes. Virginia's antimiscegenation statutes violate both the Equal Protection Clause and the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

The State's argument that the statutes apply equally because they punish white and Black participants alike is rejected. Mere equal application of a statute containing racial classifications does not remove it from the Fourteenth Amendment's prohibition of invidious racial discrimination. Pace v. Alabama, 106 U.S. 583 (1883), which accepted that theory, was repudiated in McLaughlin v. Florida, 379 U.S. 184 (1964). Because the statutes rest solely on racial distinctions, the deferential rational basis standard does not apply. Racial classifications, especially in criminal statutes, demand the most rigid scrutiny, Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944), and must be necessary to a permissible state objective independent of racial discrimination.

No such objective exists. The statutes forbid only marriages involving white persons, which shows they are measures designed to maintain White Supremacy. The historical record of the Thirty-ninth Congress and the ratification debates is inconclusive and cannot save them, as in Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954). The state's police power over marriage, recognized in Maynard v. Hill, 125 U.S. 190 (1888), is subject to the Fourteenth Amendment's limits.

The statutes also deprive the Lovings of liberty without due process. The freedom to marry is a vital personal right and one of the basic civil rights of man, Skinner v. Oklahoma, 316 U.S. 535 (1942). Denying it on the basis of racial classifications, which are directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is unsupportable. The freedom to marry a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State. The convictions are reversed.

Concurrence (Stewart, J.) A state law cannot be valid under the Constitution if it makes the criminality of an act depend upon the race of the actor. Adhering to this view, expressed in his concurrence in McLaughlin v. Florida, 379 U.S. 184 (1964), Stewart concurs in the judgment.