Mildred Loving was born Mildred Jeter and the daughter of Musial (Byrd) Jeter and Theoliver Jeter. Mildred became an activist in the civil rights movement of the 1960s when she and her white husband, Richard Loving, successfully challenged Virginia's ban on interracial marriage. She was born and raised in the town of Central Point in Caroline County, Virginia. She was known as a quiet and humble woman. Mildred identified herself as Indian-Rappahannock,but was also reported as being of Cherokee, Portuguese, and African American ancestry.Mildred's family had deep roots in the area around Central Point, Virginia, where blacks and whites mixed freely with little racial tension even at the height of the Jim Crow era. Mildred was attending an all-black school when she first met Richard, a white high school student whom she initially perceived as arrogant. Quietly, the two eventually fell in love and began dating. When Mildred became pregnant at the age of 18, the couple decided to get married. However Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924 (known as an anti-miscegenation law) barred the Lovings from marrying in their home state, so the couple drove north to Washington, D.C. to tie the knot and then returned to their home in Caroline County, Virginia. Mildred and Richard had been married just a few weeks when, in the early morning hours of July 11, 1958, Sheriff Garnett Brooks and two deputies, acting on an anonymous tip that the Lovings were in violation of Virginia law, stormed into the couple's bedroom. They were arrested and charged with "cohabiting as man and wife, against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth." They pled guilty and were convicted by the Caroline County Circuit Court on January 6, 1959. They were sentenced to one year in prison, suspended for 25 years on the condition that they leave the state. They moved to the District of Columbia. In 1964, frustrated by their inability to travel together to visit their families in Virginia, and by social isolation and financial difficulties in Washington, they filed suit to vacate the judgement against them and allow them to return home. Mildred wrote Attorney General Robert Kennedy to ask for his assistance. Kennedy wrote back and referred the Lovings to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which accepted the couple’s case. ACLU lawyers Bernard S. Cohen and Philip J. Hirschkop unsuccessfully aimed to have the case vacated and the original ruling reversed via the judge who oversaw the conviction. The ACLU filed a motion on the Lovings' behalf to vacate the judgment and set aside the sentence, on the grounds that the statutes violated the Fourteenth Amendment. This began a series of lawsuits which ultimately reached the United States Supreme Court. On October 28, 1964, when their motion still had not been decided, the Lovings began a class action suit in United States district court. On January 22, 1965, the district court allowed the Lovings to present their constitutional claims to the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals. Virginia Supreme Court Justice Harry L. Carrico (later Chief Justice) wrote the court's opinion upholding the constitutionality of the anti-miscegenation statutes and affirmed the criminal convictions. The Lovings and ACLU appealed the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Lovings did not attend the oral arguments in Washington, but their lawyer, Bernard S. Cohen, conveyed a message from Richard Loving to the court: "Tell the Court I love my wife, and it is just unfair that I can't live with her in Virginia." The case, Loving v. Virginia, was decided unanimously in the Lovings' favor on June 12, 1967. The Court overturned their convictions, dismissing Virginia's argument that the law was not discriminatory because it applied equally to and provided identical penalties for both white and black persons. The Supreme Court ruled that the anti-miscegenation statute violated both the due process and equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Lovings returned to Virginia after the Supreme Court decision. Mildred died of pneumonia on May 2, 2008, in Milford, Virginia, at age 68.

click here