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v VIRGINIA SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES 388 US 1 June 12, 1967, Decided MR CHIEF JUSTICE WARREN delivered the opinion of the Court. This case presents a constitutional question never addressed by this Cour t: whether a statutory scheme adopted by the State of Virginia to preven t marriages between persons solely on the basis of racial classification s violates the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteent h Amendment. For reasons which seem to us to reflect the central meaning of those constitutional commands, we conclude that these statutes canno t stand consistently with the Fourteenth Amendment. In June 1958, two residents of Virginia, Mildred Jeter, a Negro woman, an d Richard Loving, a white man, were married in the District of Columbia pursuant to its laws. Shortly after their marriage, the Lovings returned to Virginia and established their marital abode in Caroline County. At the October Term, 1958, of the Circuit Court of Caroline County, a grand jury issued an indictment charging the Lovings with violating Virginia' s ban on interracial marriages. On January 6, 1959, the Lovings pleaded guilty to the charge and were sentenced to one year in jail; however, th e trial judge suspended the sentence for a period of 25 years on the con dition that the Lovings leave the State and not return to Virginia toget her for 25 years. He stated in an opinion that: "Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference wi th his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix." After their convictions, the Lovings took up residence in the District of Columbia. On November 6, 1963, they filed a motion in the state trial c ourt to vacate the judgment and set aside the sentence on the ground tha t the statutes which they had violated were repugnant to the Fourteenth Amendment.... The two statutes under which appellants were convicted and sentenced are part of a comprehensive statutory scheme aimed at prohibiting and punish ing interracial marriages. The Lovings were convicted of violating 20- 58 of the Virginia Code: "Leaving State to evade law. The fact of their cohabi tation here as man and wife shall be evidence of their marriage." Section 20-59, which defines the penalty for miscegenation, provides: "Punishment for marriage. Other central provisions in the Virginia statutory scheme are 20-57, wh ich automatically voids all marriages between "a white person and a colo red person" without any judicial proceeding, and 20-54 and 1-14 which , respectively, define "white persons" and "colored persons and Indians" for purposes of the statutory prohibitions. The Lovings have never disp uted in the course of this litigation that Mrs Loving is a "colored per son" or that Mr Loving is a "white person" within the meanings given th ose terms by the Virginia statutes. Virginia is now one of 16 States which prohibit and punish marriages on t he basis of racial classifications. The present statutory scheme dates f rom the adoption of the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, passed during the period of extreme nativism which followed the end of the First World War . The central features of this Act, and current Virginia law, are the ab solute prohibition of a "white person" marrying other than another "whit e person," a prohibition against issuing marriage licenses until the is suing official is satisfied that the applicants' statements as to their race are correct, certificates of "racial composition" to be kept by bot h local and state registrars, and the carrying forward of earlier prohib itions against racial intermarriage. I In upholding the constitutionality of these provisions in the decision be low, the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia referred to its 1955 decis ion in Naim v Naim as stating the reasons supporting the validity of th ese laws. In Naim, the state court concluded that the State's legitimate purposes were "to preserve the racial integrity of its citizens," and t o prevent "the corruption of blood," "a mongrel breed of citizens," and "the obliteration of racial pride," obviously an endorsement of the doct rine of White Supremacy. The court also reasoned that marriage has trad itionally been subject to state regulation without federal intervention, and, consequently, the regulation of marriage should be left to exclusi ve state control by the Tenth Amendment. The State does not contend in its argument before this Court that its pow ers to regulate marriage are unlimited notwithstanding the commands of t he Fourteenth Amendment. Instead, the State argues t hat the meaning of the Equal Protection Clause, as illuminated by the st atements of the Framers, is only that state penal laws containing an int erracial element as part of the definition of the offense must apply equ ally to whites and Negroes in the sense that members of each race are pu nished to the same degree. Thus, the State contends that, because its mi scegenation statutes punish equally both the white and the Negro partici pants in an interracial marriage, these statutes, despite their reliance on racial classifications, do not constitute an invidious discriminatio n based upon race. The second argument advanced by the State assumes the validity of its equal application theory. The argument is that, if the Equal Protection Clause does not outlaw miscegenation statutes because o f their reliance on racial classifications, the question of constitution ality would thus become whether there was any rational basis for a State to treat interracial marriages differently from other marriages. On thi s question, the State argues, the scientific evidence is substantially i n doubt and, consequently, this Court should defer to the wisdom of the state legislature in adopting its policy of discouraging interracial mar riages. Because we reject the notion that the mere "equal application" of a statu te containing racial classifications is enough to remove the classificat ions from the Fourteenth Amendment's proscription of all invidious racia l discriminations, we do not accept the State's contention that these st atutes should be upheld if there is any possible basis for concluding th at they serve a rational purpose. The mere fact of equal application doe s not mean that our analysis of these statutes should follow the approac h we have taken in cases involving no racial discrimination where the Eq ual Protection Clause has been arrayed against a statute discriminating between the kinds of advertising which may be displayed on trucks in New York City or an exemption in Ohio's ad valorem tax for merchandise owne d by a nonresident in a storage warehouse. In these cases, involving dis tinctions not drawn according to race, the Court has merely asked whethe r there is any rational foundation for the discriminations, and has defe rred to the wisdom of the state legislatures. In the case at bar, howeve r, we deal with statutes containing racial classifications, and the fact of equal application does not immunize the statute from the very heavy burden of justification which the Fourteenth Amendment has traditionally required of state statutes drawn according to race. The State argues that statements in the Thirty-ninth Congress about the t ime of the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment indicate that the Framers did not intend the Amendment to make unconstitutional state miscegenati on laws. Many of the statements alluded to by the State concern the deba tes over the Freedmen's Bureau Bill, which President Johnson vetoed, and the Civil Rights Act of 1866, enacted over his veto. While these statem ents have some relevance to the intention of Congress in submitting the Fourteenth Amendment, it must be understood that they pertained to the p assage of specific statutes and not to the broader, organic purpose of a constitutional amendment. As for the various statements directly concer ning the Fourteenth Amendment, we have said in connection with a related problem, that although these historical sources...
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